furrykef Wrote:

Quote:The only way to sound like a native speaker is to imitate a native speaker. A book won't help much.

...
Of course, a book can't tell you everything, and there comes a point where you have no choice but to "wing it" the same way native speakers do. But I think to do it properly you need to have a solid foundation.

So why not start practicing 'winging it' right now? Until you start talking without thinking about it, you'll never sound like a native, even if your pitch is perfect. All this time you're going to spend on pitch rules would've been better spent listening to someone talking.

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Quote:I've also heard many times that you should pick up pitch accent by ear.

You should.

Allow me to clarify: I've heard that I should do it solely by ear. I think that's a silly proposition.

Because there aren't millions of Japanese speakers who do this year after year after year?

I have a terrible Japanese accent. Part of my problem is I am very poor at hearing and reproducing pitches. (not just in Japanese...but also in music for example).

I can play guitar...but I have a lot of trouble figuring how to play even simple melodies by ear...and what I do figure out is mostly by extensive trial and error. And as anyone who has been with me to karaoke can attest...I am a terrible singer,

So yes, I should listen to a lot of authentic Japanese, but I think it would've been helpful for me if my beginning textbooks had paid more attention to it.

Quote:Because there aren't millions of Japanese speakers who do this year after year after year?

I think you can't really directly compare native learners and second language learners

They spend the first year or two of their life getting bombarded by native sounds while their brain is hardwired to acquire language like a sponge.

Older learners typically will want to learn many more words than "mama" after that period of time. Also, while our brains are still functional, they are definitely not in the same "language sponge" mode.

So while listening to a lot of Japanese will be helpful, I think many people (like me) probably need a little something extra.

I have to say I'm amazed by the amount of response that this thread has generated. Keep it up, guys.

alyks Wrote:It's the same as learning Chinese, which Farber's book has an excellent description on.

Eh? Chinese has well-known rules for its tone production. No serious book on Chinese will avoid discussing things like tone sandhi because you can't avoid it. You can't even say hello without running into tone sandhi (ni3 hao3 becomes ni2 hao3).

mystes Wrote:I just can't look at the accent for a word and make it stick. On the other hand, it is actually pretty easy to pick up by ear; if you keep hearing a word you will naturally learn the accent.

You probably won't memorize the accent just by seeing it in a dictionary, no. But if you use an SRS, as many of us here do, you can mark your sentences for accent and read them aloud. Of course you have to be very careful not to read the sentences unnaturally, so you will definitely want audio to supplement your reading. This is what I plan to do.

uberstuber Wrote:So why not start practicing 'winging it' right now? Until you start talking without thinking about it, you'll never sound like a native, even if your pitch is perfect. All this time you're going to spend on pitch rules would've been better spent listening to someone talking.

Because, as I said, I think you need a solid foundation first. If you build a house on a shaky foundation, it will collapse. Moreover, understanding the rules will help you hear things correctly in the first place.

I do have to wonder how many non-natives who suggest an "only by ear" approach have actually mastered pitch accent in Japanese. I'm not saying that nobody has done it that way, but I'm not convinced that it's the best way to do it.

Also, one thing that especially hurts the "only by ear" approach is you can get really messed up by listening to people who aren't speaking Tokyo-ben, especially if you don't even realize they're not speaking Tokyo-ben.

- Kef

FSI materials are those used by the US Foreign Service Institute to teach its diplomats when they go abroad. I like them because the speed is quite natural, and they give you a good grounding, though it can seem dry. It's best to use them in combination with something else. Most of them are free, since they are public domain, but the Japanese isn't for some reason. Like anything else, try it for free before forking out. They can be expensive.

For my own Japanese accent, apart from the markings in FSI, what works best is copying. I like the way Kimura Takuya talks, so I try to imitate him. Of the ESL students I've met, those with the most natural accents found characters they liked on TV or in movies and tried to imitate them as closely as possible. No matter what the markings in a book, nothing can replace developing a sense for the natural flow of a language, and that can only be gained through lots of exposure to that language - and imitate, imitate, imitate.

Waste of time learning it(off a book anyway).

Learn the language properly first, and work on your accent while you're practicing vocals. I've come across so many books that teach it, (we were taught it in uni), teachers seem to emphasise it in lectures but they care more about obvious things such as aizuchi.

You can't learn these things theoretically from a book they have to be picked up by ear and a general feel to the word. The reason they brief it in books[yes brief, literally no more than 4 pages on it] is to just give you an idea that pronouncing Japanese isn't as simple as spelling out hiragana.
There are some things that a book will never teach you, i.e try saying daigaku like a native japanaese, they pronounce it more like a 'dai-ing-aku'. high pitch low pitch doesn't even come into that at all. You're stressing too much

liosama Wrote:Waste of time learning it(off a book anyway).

Learn the language properly first, and work on your accent while you're practicing vocals. I've come across so many books that teach it, (we were taught it in uni), teachers seem to emphasise it in lectures but they care more about obvious things such as aizuchi.

You can't learn these things theoretically from a book they have to be picked up by ear and a general feel to the word.

Why can't you? Again, I must stress the difference between learning how pitch accent sounds and where the accents go. Making it sound natural can only be done through practice by listening. Knowing where they go, I don't see why that has to be done by listening. It's a problem of memorization, not unlike memorizing whether we say AP-ple or ap-PLE.

Quote:There are some things that a book will never teach you, i.e try saying daigaku like a native japanaese, they pronounce it more like a 'dai-ing-aku'. high pitch low pitch doesn't even come into that at all. You're stressing too much

Actually, only some speakers pronounce "g" with the "ng" sound. Most of them do, but you won't sound non-native if you don't.

- Kef

Hey you are from OKC! Cool so am I!

I can't say much for japanese. But for english accent, that is much more complex, "just by ear" worked very well for me. That's why I was bombarded by american culture from birth.

I learned english from video games and movies, without ever doing any class. And later by reading Bernard Cornwell books.

My sister is learning english by the "traditional" method. With a teacher, in a classroom. Her english is understadable, but she sounds horrible. She sounds like Shakira. And I can't convince her otherwise.

I'm very disapointed with her. For instance, she read all 7 harry potter in the brazilian portuguese translation (wich btw is translated from the french translation. ouch), but never ever tried to read it in the original.
I believe this would help her much more than any laguage class.

About picking pronuntiation from dictionaries: Hey if you were studing ancient greek, or sanscrit, it would be great! But hey, japanese is a living language. You can learn it from real, alive japanese instead!

While learning rules can be interesting and can help a little bit, I think the best thing to do is to practice. I took a pronunciation class at my Japanese school a few years ago and I'll try and find out the text book that we used. Listening to lots of examples that test you on the differences in pitch is a really good exercise. Also, in the class, everyone would take it in turns to pronounce certain phrases and the teacher would correct us when our pitch was off.

I think there are two parts to improving your pronunciation. The first is the skill of carefully listening and identifying differences of pitch. The second is the skill of being able to produce the sounds. The best way to improve both is to practice and I think if you're really keen on improving, you need to get help from a Japanese person who can give you feedback. Alternatively, you can record your own voice.

Well, it's like this. A lot of us here use the sentence method or a variation on it to learn Japanese. So if we're reading a manga or whatever in Japanese and we find an interesting sentence, we write it down and make a flash card out of it. Obviously, we're not going to have a speech sample to go with that flash card, because the sentence was never spoken aloud. So if you don't know the pitches for all the words or all the grammar in that sentence, you have two options: find out and get it right from the beginning, or just fudge it and possibly end up pronouncing it wrong when you read it aloud and develop bad habits that are hard to undo. The second option does not sound very good to me.

- Kef

If you are watching anime or doramas, you'll probably know how to pronounce the words without even knowing their meanings.

That's not the case for me, though... I don't watch Japanese TV much. Yet.

furrykef Wrote:Well, it's like this. A lot of us here use the sentence method or a variation on it to learn Japanese. So if we're reading a manga or whatever in Japanese and we find an interesting sentence, we write it down and make a flash card out of it.

Yeah but you're doing other things in addition to the sentence method, right? The sentence method helps you with vocab, kanji, grammar, reading skills and no doubt other things but if you want to improve your pronunciation it would seem like you'd be better off doing something else.

Yeah, "all japanese all the time" is not "30 sentences by day". It is all japanese, all the time. For me, all the time I can spare. And TV only in japanese.

I didn't say I was doing AJATT, did I? From my experience with Spanish, the sentence method -- or at least the variation I'm using -- works just fine for studying a language even without an "all X all the time" approach. Of course, you do still need practice beyond merely using an SRS, but that's obviously true of (and indeed the whole point of) an All X All The Time approach as well.

EDIT: I would also like to respond to one of uberstuber's points at the top of this thread:

uberstuber Wrote:All this time you're going to spend on pitch rules would've been better spent listening to someone talking.

Actually, I wouldn't be wasting so much time on the rules if it were just easier to find out what the rules actually are. My belief is that the roadblock is not in understanding and memorizing the rules, but in getting access to them. I did spend a while trying to find out why 見せて is MI-se-te and not mi-SE-te. If I had that PDF from the beginning, all I'd have to do is consult it, say, "Oh! OK!", and from there on I probably wouldn't even forget the rule. I just consult the guide, boom, I know it. That doesn't mean that I'll always produce the correct accent from that point on, but my understanding of the rule will be reinforced whenever I hear the -te and -ta forms of verbs.

- Kef

I'm glad the pdf helped out. It's a really good reference I think. Now you just have to memorize the vocab that do and don't have accentation.

scout Wrote:PS: I knew other people from NCSU had to be around here! If you're around Raleigh, are you going to 夏祭り? It starts it under two hours. See http://trianglejapanclub.org/natsumatsuri_2008_jp.pdf or http://trianglejapanclub.org/natsumatsuri_2008_en.pdf for details.

Yeah, im sure there are a few more around. I've seen several NC tags at least.

Technically I still live in Raleigh.. I just graduated and before I start work i'm studying in Japan for a couple months. So, right now I cant go to the 夏祭り, but I think they have an 秋祭り or something too, right? Maybe I'll see you at that one.

walexander5 Wrote:I'm glad the pdf helped out. It's a really good reference I think. Now you just have to memorize the vocab that do and don't have accentation.

Not quite... the charts don't cover all the conjugations. What about the -eba conjugation, for example? But that's still OK; now that I see these rules, I can figure out the other rules better. I also might now be able to find and figure out a table in the NHK Akusento Jiten that has what I'm looking for, since I understand the accented/unaccented verb distinction.

BTW, I notice your two PDFs actually contradict each other when it comes to the -nai conjugation. The first one says that the mora before "na" gets the accent, while the second one says that "na" gets the accent. Not a big problem, really, but a bit curious, I think.

- Kef

Interesting discussion. It's true that pitch accents don't get explained a lot in study materials. But I don't think that's a problem.

furrykef Wrote:I've also heard many times that you should pick up pitch accent by ear. I think this is also bull. For one thing, pitch in vocabulary is lexical: it's part of the word. The only way to know the pitch of a word is to either look it up or wait for somebody to say it (and that somebody has to speak Standard Japanese and not, say, Kansai-ben). I don't know about you, but I'm not very patient about waiting around to hear a word half a dozen times before its pronunciation sticks. The correct pronunciation should be learned with the word, because it's a part of the word.

This is the wrong part, to my eyes. First of all, one shouldn't learn words, but sentences made of words. Memorizing single vocabulary like a set of information (writing="...", pronunciation="...", pitch="...", etc.) is something only a computer should do!
Second, since 99% of Japanese speakers (the Japanese themselves), who speak it to some level of perfection, learn it by ear, isn't it silly for us 1% foreigners to learn it via a different route? Doesn't that make it certain that we'll speak it differently then?
On a side note, I'm convinced that a comparison between Japanese kids and adult foreign learners should be done. There's no such thing as a "language sponge" imho. Let's face it, kids are more... stupid when they are little. They are disadvantaged, not the contrary.

For my part, I refuse to have to think of grammar or pitch accents when I speak. It may take longer to assimilate them, but when I do I will speak naturally, like a native does.
For example, I'd never worried about pitches, nor about consciously "learning" the words 漢字 and 常用漢字, but after reading furrykef's post I realized that I already pronounced them more or less correctly. This may be an isolated case now, but it's what I'm aiming at as I get better.

All that said, some information about pitches is welcome, just out of curiosity though.

Speaking as a native English speaker, all of the English learning I can remember has been learning words, not sentences made of words. Certainly it's been reinforced by hearing or reading the words in sentences, but, to take a word I learned in sixth grade, I didn't learn how to pronounce or write "wolframite" or "acidosis" by seeing them in sentences; I looked them up out of a dictionary. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever actually heard "wolframite" used in a spoken sentence that I didn't make, but I know the pronunciation instantly.

Is there some reason Japanese should be different in this respect?

~J

Are you saying that at some point you looked up on a dictionary every single English word that you now understand? Or even 10% of those words? It seems unlikely to me, but I wouldn't know. I haven't done that, and I'm far from native in English.

If we're speaking of highly technical words like wolframite and acidosis, then the argument is different, but not a lot. For example, I'd never heard of wolframite, and I may actually look it up on a dictionary. That doesn't mean, however, that I'll try to memorize it. Next time I'll see it I'll probably remember the meaning, and if I don't at the beginning, seeing the context will likely help me.

furrykef Wrote:I also might now be able to find and figure out a table in the NHK Akusento Jiten that has what I'm looking for, since I understand the accented/unaccented verb distinction.

I don't have the NHK dictionary, but do own the 新明解/Shinmeikai one. At the back of it is a list of 99 rules governing the standard Tokyo accent (although I've never gotten around to getting through them yet). Does the NHK one have something similar?

I think learning rules (along side other means and not as the sole method) would help out, personally. It'd be easier to work out the accent of things you read without any audio if you have some guidelines in the back of your head. And with time you should get used to it, so you're not exactly sitting there for a couple of minutes every sentence trying to work out if you're supposed to use a high or low pitch.

Not just technical words. I'm giving obscure words because they're the ones I remember how I learned--buggered if I know how I learned "dog", say, or even words that I probably learned after my earliest memory. However, of the words I can remember learning, I don't remember hearing or reading the majority of them in more than a single sentence or two, which I didn't review in any way, before coming to a point where I could consider them "learned". More often it's a matter of "realize it's a word I don't know, look it up in the dictionary, go on to use it in the wide world".

Though actually, now that I'm thinking, at least with the parts of the upbringing of my cousins there's a lot of "learning a word" and not so much "learning a sentence that uses a word"--there's a lot of pointing at a picture in a picture book and saying "dog", and while I can't guarantee it, I'm pretty sure the kid is identifying dogs they've never seen before earlier than they're constructing sentences, certainly grammatically correct non-trivial sentences ("Dog!" is a grammatically correct sentence consisting of an exclamation).

Now, I'm not claiming that one will be able to learn to use a word appropriately and proficiently by simply studying that word itself, at least not for words with significant amounts of nuance (I will admit there isn't that much nuance to "wolframite"), but things like plain meaning and pronunciation, I assert, get learned in isolation all the time. It seems to me that this requires a "feel" for the language that comes with extensive proficiency, but it also seems to me that it happens.

~J

I saw two books on this subject at Yurindo bookstore at Yokohama station. They are for Japanese teachers and come with CDs and are completely in Japanese. They use the line method to show correct accent. You might want to give amazon a search - if nothing comes up message me and I'll see if I can't drop by next time I'm at the station. I don't know if they'd actually be helpful, but possibly for an advanced learner they could be. By the way, sanseido dictionary gives all the pitch accent information (j<->j) using numbers at the beginning of each entry (it took me a while to figure out what those numbers were for).

In conversation, pitch probably doesn't matter, but give a speech in Japanese, when people are listening to what you are saying and how you are saying it instead of shifting some of their resources to figuring out what they will say next, and people start to get really picky about your intonation. It is OK if you sound like a person from Tokyo, it is OK if you sound like a person from Osaka, bit it is apparently distracting when you sound haphazard. While people may say that intonation doesn't matter, it does. On the other hand, I know a woman of Russian descent who speaks English fluently with an accent so thick that that you can hardly understand her when you first meet her. She speaks a mile a minute, and her intonation is so off. But it is also endearing, and she can communicate without problem. In time, you come to understand her accent. I wouldn't try and correct her weird intonation, so maybe it isn't such a big deal after all.

furrykef Wrote:Actually, I wouldn't be wasting so much time on the rules if it were just easier to find out what the rules actually are. My belief is that the roadblock is not in understanding and memorizing the rules, but in getting access to them. I did spend a while trying to find out why 見せて is MI-se-te and not mi-SE-te.

Perfect example. When i saw misete i said in my head MI-se-te, why? because it made SENSE that way. I didn't need to check up a rule script in my memory anywhere. It just intuitively felt that that is the way one pronounces MI-se-te.


and to quote

nac_est Wrote:This is the wrong part, to my eyes. First of all, one shouldn't learn words, but sentences made of words. Memorizing single vocabulary like a set of information (writing="...", pronunciation="...", pitch="...", etc.) is something only a computer should do!

Another AJATT victim I see :|. Learn words, learn grammar structure, and then read books, let your brain put it together. That is how the brain functions. It cannot be more simple than that.