Hey everyone,
I have hosted in my house a Japanese girl this week.
She told me there is a difference between the pronouncation of the following words:
帰る
蛙
all sound like "kaeru"
And also:
箸
橋
端
all sound like "hashi"

Something with pitched sounds at the beginning of the words.
If you are 独学 in Japanese , how the hell can you know that?

And another question, since I don't want to open another thread about this topic.
I want to stop reviewing RTK. I've completed the book in July 2013 and I still have about 40 reviews a day.
I still Fail at time but it feels about daunting already. My aim is to read, listen to and speak Japanese, not Writing(on paper).

Thank you!

Most textbooks briefly mention it although it tends to be glossed over. If you read up on Japanese Phonology on Wikipedia it is also is mentioned. Some of the better dictionaries will have a number next to the word [0] or [1]. That tells you where the pitch falls.

Then stop RTK. I stopped reviewing shortly after I finished it.

You can use a pitch dictionnary like this one:
http://www.sanseido.net/
where you can see 箸 is 1, 橋 is 2, and 端 is without number (accentless). The system is explained on the Japanese pitch wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pi...y_in_pitch

Personnally I only review RTK once or twice a year, if you feel you want to move on then go ahead.

It's called pitch accent. There seems to be a poor awareness of it as a concept among Japanese people, but then I didn't know what stress (in English) was until I was an adult. Of course, everyone can hear and do it as well as you can distinguish 'courier' and 'Korea', and it sounds strange when you mix them up.

A lot of learners will tell you otherwise, but if you want to sound anything close to Japanese, you need to use a consistent pitch accent. Some of the patterns used in Osaka, for example, are impossible in standard Japanese.

If you can't hear it now, then you'll need to spend a bit of time learning to recognise and reproduce it. After it clicks, I think it's relatively natural to learn new words. I've always struggled with it myself, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I started focusing on it with a decent approach. If there's one aspect of learning Japanese where a teacher/friend helps, it's probably this though.

All that said, it's up to you if you bother with it. Sounding Japanese isn't necessarily an aim of all learners, and I think you'll be understood way more often screwing up pitch accent than you would be screwing up stress in English.

Rikaisama also includes a pitch accent number (I think you may have to turn it on in the prefs).

There's also this dictionary, which is the only one I've seen so far that displays how the accent shifts in conjugated verbs and adjectives.

CureDolly Wrote:Rikaisama also includes a pitch accent number (I think you may have to turn it on in the prefs).

I've tried to turn it on, but didn't find any option like this in the settings.

It is under the "Dictionaries" tab, the second check box (after frequency information).

They have quite a complex system that you can look up if you want, but most regular words (if it's a plain 0, 1, 2 or 3) are just marked the way EratiK-san says. The pitch number appears after the kana (before the frequency number if you have that turned on).

I don't think we're looking at the same Rikaisama here, because in mine the second check box under the "Dictionaries" tab says "Hide (X)-rated entries"

Edit: Oh, I see now, my Rikaisama is still Version 15.0, whereas the pitch accent info was added in 17.0.

There are some accent dictionaries online:
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/
http://accent.u-biq.org/

Though they don't have as many words as regular dictionaries, so you might want to use a regular J-J dictionary with pitch accents. I like the line diagrams on those though, so I got the EPWING version of the NHK accent dictionary (NHK発音アクセント辞典), which has been super helpful.

EDIT: I fogot, but the official WWWJDIC site has audio for a lot of the words:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?1C