How does the stress go for the words 橋 and 箸
I'm guessing one is rising and one is falling, but which is which?

I'm also curious about 酒 and 鮭. I remember learning that one is pronounced with a rising intonation and the other with a falling intonation, but I can't remember which was which.

Also, any other homonyms I 'ought to know?

Do you guys actively study pitch? Or do you just try to absorb it and hope it turns out all right. It just seems learning the pitch for every word would be really time consuming...

In standard dialect:
橋 HAsi
箸 haSI

These two are reversed in Kyoto dialect I think. It gets more interesting when you add particles too.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

uberstuber Wrote:In standard dialect:
橋 HAsi
箸 haSI

These two are reversed in Kyoto dialect I think. It gets more interesting when you add particles too.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

I'm pretty sure standard is the opposite of what you posted.

I think it's best to avoid notation and suchlike and simply focus on listening and repeating. Also, certain words you can't really get the pitch accents correct unless you hear them in context, because with 花 and 鼻, for example, the pitch accents are the same till you get to the particles after them.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hasegawa/A...ccent.html

Japanese the Manga Way on the topic here.

Just listening doesn't work for me, I don't notice it. The only I can finally remember is 一杯 as in "one cup/glass" vs "lots of, full".

I don't know, I was able to start hearing pitch accents immediately when listening. I'm still only at the point where I can get them correct from memory when speaking sentences that contain multiple familiar words, however, to establish an internalized rhythm of relative sounds.

I know this is a good question and that pitch accent is important to sound natural, but if we aren't always using the right pitch accent, or forget it, I don't think it is a major major thing.

When speaking Japanese, people are going to know we mean chopsticks or bridge just from the context.

OsakaDan Wrote:I know this is a good question and that pitch accent is important to sound natural, but if we aren't always using the right pitch accent, or forget it, I don't think it is a major major thing.

When speaking Japanese, people are going to know we mean chopsticks or bridge just from the context.

ピンポン. I've never even thought about pitch accent once during my Japanese study. The majority of Japanese words are neutral, the remaining words' pitch differs depending on the dialect (Osaka and Tokyo are pretty much opposite).

Just try to make your pronunciation good without actively thinking about pitch. Everyone I know who does try to remember pitch just ends up horribly overpronouncing it.

One thing to watch out for though is stress accent. English has stress accent, Japanese doesn't. Adding in stress to Japanese is the most obvious marker of a (English-native) gaijin accent.

[Katsuo]

I get misunderstood several times a day due to incorrect pitch accent.

It's always with words I learnt via reading rather than listening. When reading a new word, I tend to assign it an accent of my own making.

The problem is that once my mind has assigned a certain pitch accent to a word it's difficult to shake off, even though I later hear the "correct" accent many times.

The best solution, I suppose, is to always learn the correct accent immediately. Now that WWWJDIC has added pronunciations this has become feasible (~ish). Saiga can be useful too.

I agree with Katsuo. Pitch is important (not because you want to get across, according to all Japanese people I've spoken to, I get across perfectly even though my accent is quite horrible when it comes to pitch) if you want to sound native, but it's also WAY too time consuming to try to memorize every words pitch-pattern. I, like Katsuo, often assign my own accent to words I read. If that accent is incorrect, using the correct one sounds odd to me, so I actively have to work on it. If I learn the correct pitch from the start, that helps (but doesn't mean I will use the correct one in fluent conversation).

Of course it is important if you are aiming to get a perfect native accent, but I think there are much more important things to worry about. It's a lot better to have bad pitch than bad grammar and a small lexicon. I think in this case it's a lot better to just pick it up passively. Active study of it hurts more than it helps in my experience.

I'd like to point out that while the Japanese prosody such as pitch accent, intonation, and rhythm is not the most important thing to make yourself understood, these aspects of language are extremely important to understand what others are saying.

I think it's native speakers' responsibility to try to understand non-native speakers' idiosyncratic language with the wrong intonation, pitch and so on, so probably you don't need to master pitch and stuff unless you want to sound like a native Japanese speaker. But I don't think it means you can forget about it. No one can help you when you're having trouble understanding native speech because you don't know the proper prosody.

Prosody and pronunciation mark grammatical sentence structure and give a nuance to a sentence. Sometimes they can change the meaning of a sentence. It's like native speakers are throwing emoticons into every grammatical chunk in a sentence marking grammar points and showing emotions. You may forget everything about prosody and pronunciation when you speak because native speakers will try to guess what you mean, but ignoring these important portions of language will definitely cripple your listening.

I agree that the average learner will benefit more from learning grammar and vocabulary than reducing his or her foreign accent. But I also think that part of things that most learners regard as accents is actually grammar in disguise. I don't think written language contains all the grammar you need to understand spoken language. At least, written Japanese doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't be typical misunderstanding/miscommunication that occurs because of lack of intonation and whatnot in written language.

I can tell you this: You can't hear intonation correctly if you can't hear word pitch. It does seem that the Japanese pitch accent put on words is closely related to sentence-wise pitch, i.e., intonation, and hence if you can't hear the rise and fall in pitch in a word, you never understand the nuance of a sentence. What you may think is subtle may not be subtle at all to native Japanese speakers.

The Japanese people can't hear the difference between "l" and "r" without training, so a lot of teachers in Japan say that students don't need to learn them because native English speakers can understand what they're trying to say anyway. Yes. The teachers have a point there. But if you hear "l" and "r" as the same sound, it severely hurts your listening skills. It doesn't matter if context can help you. You're missing something important if you don't hear the difference between "l" or "r", and it damages your overall listening ability for obvious reasons.

Fortunately written English differentiates "l" from "r", and serious learners don't buy that crap. We at least try to learn the difference. But the Japanese pitch accent, intonation, and whatnot don't appear in Japanese text, so it seems a lot of Japanese learners dismiss their importance. I think just because an aspect of language doesn't appear in written text doesn't means it's less important than other features.

As I said earlier, I don't think everyone needs to learn to speak Japanese with proper pitch and intonation. But I do think it's important to be able to hear them if you want to improve your listening skills.

I don't know which parts of that were directed at my posts, but..

What I mean to say, in short, is that it is important to learn pitch accent, but you shouldn't study pitch accent. Just try to make your pronunciation match a native without consciously thinking about and memorizing LOW-HIGH-LOW-LOW-HIGH-LOW-MEDIUM-DIAGONAL-UTURN-5mhz.

I don't know what makes you think I replied to you, but my post wasn't directed at any part of any posts of yours, Jarvik. I thought the OP was trying to learn homonyms and ignoring all the other things about pitch, so I posted about its importance.

As for the "learn it, not study it" thing, I don't think there is the best method that works for everyone. You may find it easier to learn pitch by passive listening with a little active listening. But others may not. If I remember correctly, the OP was born in Korea and speaks at least a little Korean as her native langauge, so I wouldn't be surprised if she finds a different method works better for her.

Jarvik7 Wrote:One thing to watch out for though is stress accent. English has stress accent, Japanese doesn't. Adding in stress to Japanese is the most obvious marker of a (English-native) gaijin accent.

I've heard some native English speakers doing that and it sounds pretty bad. I don't have to worry about that since my native language is French and I've read that the accent is nearly the same as Japanese for unaccented words (I personally never realized it because to me that's just the natural way to speak).

I guess I just have to try to pay more attention to words with a pitch drop in them too.

This thread makes me wonder how many people besides me combine speaking/listening/reading/writing in equal amounts when doing vocabulary sentences in Anki.

mmh.. I have trouble hearing pitch accent.. Does anyone know of a way of "training" it?

I mean.. I think I can here it, but it's so fast, how am I supposed to pay attention to it?

I think I finally realized the difference between 花 and 鼻. It was hearing the word 鼻水 on smart.fm that did it! （笑）

花 always has a drop in pitch after it, while 鼻 is just pronounced normally (the rising intonation continues), right?

bombpersons Wrote:mmh.. I have trouble hearing pitch accent.. Does anyone know of a way of "training" it?

I mean.. I think I can here it, but it's so fast, how am I supposed to pay attention to it?

Pitch isn't recognized mora-by-mora when you hear words spoken at natural speed. Here's a direct quote from an article on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Wrote:* When a human hears a fast rhythm, typically faster than 330 milliseconds (ms) per beat, the series of beats is heard as one solid noise. For example, a human can imitate a machine gun sound, but hardly count its beats.
* Conversely, when a slow rhythm is heard, typically slower than 450 ms per beat, each beat is separately understood. The speed of a slow rhythm can be controlled beat by beat, such as hand clapping in music.

The Japanese "beat" is said to be at approximately 145 ms per mora, so you will hear a word as one solid sound. If someone plays the guitar at an amazingly fast speed, you hear the melody and recognize the music, but can't recognize each note as one musical note. The same goes for Japanese moras. You feel the pitch of a word as one solid sound like a chunk of notes forming a melody. (If you didn't know, "mora" roughly means one spoken kana, so the word 私 (わたし) has three moras: わ, た, and し.)

If you have never heard of isochrony of language, you might want to read a few articles about it such as this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony I think you can find more detailed information for learners if you google for "mora timing" and "Japanese." I don't know if understanding isochrony would be necessary to grasp the Japanese beat, but getting used to the Japanese beat of moras definitely helps you catch the pitch accent and stuff. If you already listened to tons of natural speech and still don't get the hang of it, learning about isochrony may help you pay attention to it.

I also heard there were several methods to improve your intonation and other pitch related aspects of your second language(s). If a learning method can improve your pitch accent, it probably improves your listening skills the same way. It seems shadowing is one of the most popular methods when it comes to the melody of language. I heard professional translators also used the technique to improve their skills, so it might be worth giving a try.

On a side note, I think why the AJATT guy recommends you learn kanji and listen to fun stuff regardless of whether you understand it before ever learning written language grammar is because that way you can improve your listening skills of intonation, pitch, and phonemes, and avoid developing a foreign accent. If you read text before you can hear pitch and stuff, you hear Japanese with your own thick gaijin accent in your head, which definitely internalize the foreign accent in your mind. So when you hear a simple sentence spoken by a native speaker, you may not be able to understand it because you expect a totally different sound you deeply ingrained in your mind by yourself by reading native materials in a gaijin accent.

I know how difficult to get rid of the weird accent in your mind developed by reading text in a foreign accent. We are FORCED to read and speak English in katakana at school by English teachers who can't speak English at all. The textbooks were written in the Latin alphabet, but we read it in katakana, i.e., we heard our own voice speaking English using Japanese sounds and intonation. It becomes almost impossible to lose your foreign accent in your head if you ingrain it too deeply...

If your listening is still very weak, I can't recommend you read anything in Japanese. If you think listening to butchered gaijin-ish Japanese by other foreigners hurts your listening skills and accent, you may not want to listen to your own bizarre Japanese spoken in your head while reading books for the very same reason.

Ha, "Butchered gaijin accent" =D For some reason I think the voice in my head sounds much better than my real voice. Maybe it's because of all the listening.

When I'm watching something, I'm gonna try and listen to the pitch carefully and see if I can notice it more.

Also, I think I might give shadowing a try.. Is there an easy way to do it? Do you just pick a random show and try and copy the speech? Or maybe using something like subs2srs might be useful?

bombpersons Wrote:Ha, "Butchered gaijin accent" =D For some reason I think the voice in my head sounds much better than my real voice. Maybe it's because of all the listening.

When I'm watching something, I'm gonna try and listen to the pitch carefully and see if I can notice it more.

Also, I think I might give shadowing a try.. Is there an easy way to do it? Do you just pick a random show and try and copy the speech? Or maybe using something like subs2srs might be useful?

We've been butchering English by japaneesu engrishu, so I don't know how well shadowing works to improve speaking skills, but it seems a lot of English learners find shadowing effective in improving listening skills. I guess it would work the same way for Japanese learners, too.

Anyway, these two methods worked well for me:

1. Use a PC and slow down the audio material to the extent that you can definitely hear every detail and perfectly follow it while shadowing.
2. Shadow the same material at natural speed plenty of times so that you half-remember every line and can "sync" with the speaker, i.e., try to speak a millisecond ahead of the speaker with the exact same intonation.

The first method helps you realize subtle pitch/tone/whatever of audio materials you missed when you heard them at natural speed. The second method gives you immediate feedback when you shadow a native speaker because you're 100% synchronizing with the audio; if you're following the speaker with a millisecond delay, it'll be harder to be corrected by the audio while shadowing. It seems to me that trying to speak a millisecond ahead of a native speaker while mimicking intonation is more effective than trying to catch up with the audio when it comes to listening skills. This is kind of a rougher shadowing than the typical immediate following method, so I think it'd be better to do it in conjunction with the slowing down method to polish your pitch and stuff and fix rougher points even if you think you can properly shadow an audio at natural speed. If you shadow to reduce your accent, the usual immediate following method might be better, but it seems letting the audio follow you is better to improve listening skills for some reason.

As for the materials to shadow, I think you should use natural native stuff with enough context such as dialogues in movies, anime, etc. The melody of language like pitch and intonation does have meanings like words and phrases, but you can't look in a dictionary because there is no such thing as an intonation dictionary.

I don't think it would work very well to shadow an isolated example sentence taken from a textbook if you don't understand its nuance given by prosody. It's like trying to understand a word taken in isolation by pronouncing it repeatedly without using a dictionary. I think it's kind of obvious you need context to understand the meaning of a pitch patter. So I don't think a phrase book listing isolated sentences will greatly improve learners' prosody if it has a CD. Native speakers' voices don't help much if it doesn't teach the meanings of the pitch patterns used in its example sentences. It's as if showing a word without giving its definition or any context. What you can learn is its spelling and nothing more, i.e., you may become able to mimic a pitch pattern but will never know its meaning and when to use it.