nadiatims Wrote:. It is enough, to simply do your best to speak japanese as you hear it.

If this is true for you, great. For the rest of us, let's keep discussing ways to improve our accent.

I know my pitch accent is not good because multiple native speakers have told me so. I've been studying the language for close to 13 years now, and lived around 2.5 years total in Japan. It's certainly possible that I'm simply worse than most people at picking up accent, but I know there are others like me.

If you are even able to judge the pitch accent of a foreigner you're in a better position than me.

nadiatims Wrote:

Javizy Wrote:Memorise what? All you need to know is where the accent is, and some dictionaries have a handy little number that tells you. Can you make an argument for not learning such a simple pattern that provides immediate benefits? Why do people make such a big deal out of learning pronunciation?

A pretty huge chunk of my vocabulary was learned via reading, and I never bothered memorising where the pitch falls for each word. As these words entered my passive listening vocabulary, and my listening comprehension improved, my accent has improved accordingly. That includes getting intonation right, and yet I have never attempted to memorise it on a per word basis, or even seen it in a dictionary. It is enough, to simply do your best to speak japanese as you hear it. First you ditch the anglophone stress, and then adopt Japanese intonation easily once you can hear the difference. Once you can kind of switch intonation modes so to speak and can tune in to the pitch accent you start adopting it quite unconsciously. Among everyone I've ever met (and this goes for japanese and english natives) quality of accent has been pretty much proportional to their degree of fluency in the language and becomes near native with immersion. I've never met someone with great accent, but who has trouble making sentences (ie. beginner with near native accent). It just doesn't happen. People who are fluent and immersed in a native environment for the most part develop great accents. Those who aren't immersed tend to retain their foreign accents despite otherwise having good language ability, including academic knowledge of pronunciation and grammar and so on. I've seen quite a few Japanese English teachers pass on incorrect information about pronunciation that they have gleaned from books.

I don't doubt what you're saying, and I'm relying on a similar approach to learn Japanese. But I still rely on a ˈ to know where the stress is in words I haven't encountered in my 25 years as a native speaker of English, and I don't think you're making a valid argument for preserving ignorance of what the 9 means after しんけいでんたつぶっしつ. I use it to check the accent of words in my deck that don't have audio, and although it doesn't always guarantee I'll memorise it, there have been times when the 3-second process of switching to 大辞林 has allowed me to produce the correct accent with confidence during conversation.

This argument comes up repeatedly. People start going into the details of a long-term approach to perfecting accent, as if it somehow invalidates the idea of spending 15-minutes learning about how pitch works and how to recognise/produce the different patterns. It turns out that, despite my concerns when creating this thread, I did pick up an accurate accent for a lot of words through exposure, but there were also plenty of cases where I got into a habit of pronouncing certain words my own way and struggling to distinguish between pairs like 花が and 鼻が. Becoming conscious of how pitch actually works and being able to check words when I'm not sure has been invaluable, And given the minimal time commitment, I can't disagree with the idea of overlooking it enough.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I know my pitch accent is not good because multiple native speakers have told me so. I've been studying the language for close to 13 years now, and lived around 2.5 years total in Japan. It's certainly possible that I'm simply worse than most people at picking up accent, but I know there are others like me.

Do you think you were pretty much fluent when you arrived? Did you spend a lot of time hanging around with natives during that time? Did they use the real japanese with you? Do you watch a lot of Japanese TV? etc etc The number 13 years alone doesn't really mean that much. I'm guessing a couple of years of high school with a lot of learner material, followed by uni taking you to a 2kyuu-ish level. Then a year or two teaching English. You mentioned in another thread that you taught Japanese for 6 years in the US. I don't think that really counts as immersion unless you consumed a lot of media or hung around with Japanese people a lot during that time. I'm not trying to put you down. I certainly doubt that you're worse than average at picking up accents, just that 2.5 years isn't actually all that long especially if it's not particularly full-time or if you weren't pretty much fluent already. What counts is how long you have spent as a fluent user of the Japanese language, not as a learner.

Javizy Wrote:This argument comes up repeatedly. People start going into the details of a long-term approach to perfecting accent, as if it somehow invalidates the idea of spending 15-minutes learning about how pitch works and how to recognise/produce the different patterns

I'm really talking about the idea of trying to memorise it for every word you learn. Actually reading through the whole thread I pretty much agree with everything Tobberoth wrote. Particularly:

Tobberoth Wrote:I seriously doubt anyone is going to get "perfect" pitch accent by SRSing it. Just because you know the pitch in a word doesn't mean you're pronouncing it right, and Anki sure as hell can't detect it.

nadiatims Wrote:I'm really talking about the idea of trying to memorise it for every word you learn. Actually reading through the whole thread I pretty much agree with everything Tobberoth wrote. Particularly:

Tobberoth Wrote:I seriously doubt anyone is going to get "perfect" pitch accent by SRSing it. Just because you know the pitch in a word doesn't mean you're pronouncing it right, and Anki sure as hell can't detect it.

How does someone manage to learn about pitch, begin memorising every word with its accent and not be able to produce a few simple patterns reliably? It's an extremely unrealistic, quite baffling scenario. I'm struggling to understand how you could even think about pitch like this if you have confidence in your ability to judge your own accent and those of proficient learners. If you saw 電気 in Anki, you'd try to remember it's HLL. You don't need Anki to "detect" anything, you just need a 1 to confirm you were right.

I don't think it would be worth SRSing, because it would double your vocab review time, and wouldn't be necessary for many words. I'm still failing to see how this makes any argument for not learning the basics and giving yourself confidence in your ability to recognise and produce accent, even without audio, from the very start within an insignificant amount of time. You give no timeframe for your immersion-reliant approach, and if I could get 先生 wrong after 2-years then I have little confidence in it as somebody who has made use of listening/shadowing all along and would like a consistent accent ASAP.

@ Javizy, @Omoishinji: Thanks for your dictionary references; I checked them but compared to the Pocket Kenkyusha that I have here, they don't add up. Kenkyusha is J-E and is ideal for a newbie like me, as it includes example phrases for almost every word and each headword is accented. I guess I will resign myself to manually input the accents into Anki.

Concerning learning the accents: my opinion is that if I am learning a word, I might as well learn it with the **correct** accent to begin with, instead of postponing the process into the distant future. As someone mentioned, not doing so would be reinforcing bad habits. A good strategy would be to put accents in Anki cards, but not fail cards when one does not get the accent right, just pronounce the word with the correct accent as you pass the card. That would not increase the time required for reviews and eventually after enough reviews, you would get the accent right automatically.

If a reliable source of accent information for standard Japanese were readily available for the materials we are commonly using, that would simplify the process immensely: the problem is that it is not easy to come by this information. I've spoken to several Japanese people who told me their language was not accented. They were of course wrong: they were doing it naturally, without being aware of it. See the intro of JSL (Harz-Jorden) for pointers as of why this situation exists.

If for instance the common Anki decks for Core 6K (or KO 2001) had the accents, or resources such as jisho.org, that would be great. But they do not, and that's a shame. And my beloved Pocket Kenkyusha is only available in print version.

I personally plan to input manually the Pocket Kenkyusha Japanese dictionary in an Anki production deck, including the example phrases. I will make the deck available to the community when I finish it, perhaps in 50 years ;-)

Would anyone here advise a student learning English to study English vocabulary WITHOUT any consideration for stress? The reality of most students, even those who take classes in English speaking countries, is that most of their learning time is spent with non-natives, excepting perhaps the teacher. I can't imagine the same wouldn't be true of learners of Japanese.

Copying natives is a great way to acquire a great accent... in theory. Language is made up of variable and invariable parts, and copying only works when you know exactly which parts need to be copied perfectly and which vary. If someone doesn't know that pitch accent exist or how it works, they won't be able to copy it naturally. Everyone tries to copy to a degree, but those who do it best know what they are copying.

Personally, I do most of my oral practice on my own, through self-talk. As I practice building sentences with the new words I've acquired, I need to be able to rely on my knowledge of pitch in order to pronounce them accurately. If I only spoke or learned pitch when in the presence of Japanese speakers, I wouldn't be half way where I am now. I don't devote time to learning pitch, but pitch is one of the things I look out for when I try to produce correct sentences and when I copy native speakers.

Javizy Wrote:You can see it in 大辞林 on Yahoo辞書 after the hiragana here. Just make sure you select 大辞林, since it defaults to 大辞泉, which doesn't contain them (why I'm not particularly excited about the iOS5 built-in dictionary). 三省堂 also seems to have it. I use 大辞林 on my iPod.

@Javizy: I tried to look up "交通事故" which according to Kenkyusha is accented as koOTSUUJIko, but the sole pitch info Yahoo! gives is a "5", which I believe means that only the 5th mora is accented (but then it might be a code for LHHHHL, and that's not very convenient). And in any case, this numeric code is just a pain, since the accent can be noted more directly in the typography of the word itself as in Kenkyusha. Also, I find the reverting to default to 大辞泉 very annoying, since you constantly have to click on the button for each search. And lastly, this dictionary does not allow to generate lists of words automatically when typing in a single kanji like in jisho.org, which is just what I need now.

And for the skeptics out there concerning the necessity of learning accents, let me quote from Harz-Jorden and Noda, Japanese: The Spoken Language: "The accent of Tokyo is different from that of other parts of Japan (...) Doesn't that mean that the student of Japanese might just as well ignore accent? Not at all! The fact that two different accents are sometimes acceptable does not mean that any accent is permitted."

So learning accents should be undertaken as soon as one learn words, and for this community, that means after graduating from RTK.

Ignoring the problem, as some suggested here, does not make the problem go away.

I would say that learning the accent on each word is a complete waste of time and not practical at all. IMO, you'd be better off spending that time improving your comprehension of grammar.

Just recognize that Japanese has pitch accents and try to listen for them and take as much in as you can.



*** one more thing that I notice from other native English speaking foreigners who speak Japanese - we have a terrible time distinguishing between short and long vowels. Especially for the word ごみ, 9 times out of 10 I hear foreigners pronounce it as ごうみ.

louischa Wrote:@Javizy: I tried to look up "交通事故" which according to Kenkyusha is accented as koOTSUUJIko, but the sole pitch info Yahoo! gives is a "5", which I believe means that only the 5th mora is accented (but then it might be a code for LHHHHL, and that's not very convenient).

Go back and look at the guide Javizy posted on page 2, he explains what 5 means (hint: it means exactly what you said it means).

Accent on a mora means the pitch falls after that mora. There is always a rise between the 1st and 2nd mora, unless the accent is on the 1st mora, in which case it starts high and drops before the 2nd to satisfy the first rule (the first rule takes precedence over the second, it can't both rise and fall between those mora). The rise between 1st and 2nd exists even if the word is unaccented, marked as 0 (which means there is no accented mora, and hence no *drop* in pitch).

I think some people confuse pitch accent with the concept of tones in languages like mandarin. Pitch can't change arbitrarily on each mora inside a word like it can in chinese languages. Instead, japanese simply uses a sudden drop in pitch to mark a mora as accented. The fall can only happen once (well, i suppose heavily compounded words could have multiple accented mora, not sure, generally though compounds have a different pitch accent to the constituent words to ensure there's only one accented mora).

kitakitsune Wrote:I would say that learning the accent on each word is a complete waste of time and not practical at all. IMO, you'd be better off spending that time improving your comprehension of grammar.

That is not accurate: the accent **is** part of the word, not separate from the word as you imply. It does not take longer to learn the proper accent, provided that learning material is easily accessible, which is the main problem as I see it.

Thousands of foreigners speaking perfectly understandable Japanese without ever seeing a pitch accent in a dictionary or specifically trying to learn them say otherwise.

kitakitsune Wrote:Thousands of foreigners speaking perfectly understandable Japanese without ever seeing a pitch accent in a dictionary or specifically trying to learn them say otherwise.

With all due respect, I prefer to follow Harz-Jorden and Noda's opinion on the matter.

kitakitsune Wrote:Thousands of foreigners speaking perfectly understandable Japanese without ever seeing a pitch accent in a dictionary or specifically trying to learn them say otherwise.

It's understandable but sounds funny. I know I get it wrong when elementary school kids mock me for it :$ Of course adults are too polite to do this.

nadiatims Wrote:Do you think you were pretty much fluent when you arrived? Did you spend a lot of time hanging around with natives during that time? Did they use the real japanese with you? Do you watch a lot of Japanese TV? etc etc The number 13 years alone doesn't really mean that much. I'm guessing a couple of years of high school with a lot of learner material, followed by uni taking you to a 2kyuu-ish level. Then a year or two teaching English. You mentioned in another thread that you taught Japanese for 6 years in the US. I don't think that really counts as immersion unless you consumed a lot of media or hung around with Japanese people a lot during that time. I'm not trying to put you down. I certainly doubt that you're worse than average at picking up accents, just that 2.5 years isn't actually all that long especially if it's not particularly full-time or if you weren't pretty much fluent already. What counts is how long you have spent as a fluent user of the Japanese language, not as a learner.

It sounds like there aren't many people who are going to fit the criteria, then. Saying that you don't have to study something because being immersed for more than 3 years will teach you it automatically isn't very helpful.

[nevermind - I misread something]

@nadiatims, Yes, quality immersion is a very important factor, but it's not sufficient. Many people in quality immersion environments for years don't lose their accents. There are a number of factors affecting likelihood of an adult achieving native-like FL accent. The consensus is that it's possible, but very rare. Accent does not fix itself. Folks vary in their ability to perceive, produce and correct accent. Production is necessary for accent. Age of exposure is more highly correlated with good accent than years of fluency. etc. etc.

Besides, full immersion is not an option for most people studying here and they want to think about ways to improve their accent. The researchers seem to agree that accent training helps. (I'm not referring to SRSing individual word pitch - which strikes me as a poor use of time as well.)

(I want to hire High Laurie's accent coach.)

IMO, the marginal benefits of spending time with dictionaries trying to nail NHK accents is too low to care about. Assuming that your accent is not terrible.

kitakitsune Wrote:*** one more thing that I notice from other native English speaking foreigners who speak Japanese - we have a terrible time distinguishing between short and long vowels. Especially for the word ごみ, 9 times out of 10 I hear foreigners pronounce it as ごうみ.

Certainly people get the length of vowels wrong, but I think sometimes the vowel itself is wrong. Like something close to an English GO for ご that stretches over more than one mora. Enunciation of vowels is another thing that often gets the same sort of treatment as pitch accent, even though you have to learn to position your tongue and lips in different places and even develop different muscles in your cheeks.

kitakitsune Wrote:IMO, the marginal benefits of spending time with dictionaries trying to nail NHK accents is too low to care about. Assuming that your accent is not terrible.

I would've liked to have the code on my cards, personally. Even though I have audio, it certainly doesn't hurt to make use of your other senses to reinforce your memory, especially with homonyms. Like you suggest though, if there's a significant time commitment involved, it's probably better spent learning something else like more vocab or practising listening/shadowing, as long as the awareness of pitch is already there. Awareness and the ability to be critical of your Japanese is ultimately what's most important in pretty much all areas. If you're already copying J-J definitions from somewhere, it surely couldn't hurt to put in a number as well, though.

As someone with 7 years of Japanese language study under their belt, and cumulatively a year spent in Japan I think worrying about pitch accent is a very high level thing that most likely isn't appropriate for this forum. Someone worrying about pitch accent is most likely already fluent, and if they're not then their time would be better spent learning the language better rather than trying to put a shiny polish on their mediocre skills.

Javizy Wrote:

kitakitsune Wrote:*** one more thing that I notice from other native English speaking foreigners who speak Japanese - we have a terrible time distinguishing between short and long vowels. Especially for the word ごみ, 9 times out of 10 I hear foreigners pronounce it as ごうみ.

Certainly people get the length of vowels wrong, but I think sometimes the vowel itself is wrong. Like something close to an English GO for ご that stretches over more than one mora. Enunciation of vowels is another thing that often gets the same sort of treatment as pitch accent, even though you have to learn to position your tongue and lips in different places and even develop different muscles in your cheeks.

In my experience, these are the most common fundamental pronunciation problems in foreigners, not counting accent (of any level, really -- I've heard people with literally decades of experience do some of this):
1. Long vs. short vowels
2. Failure to produce "whispered mora" (e.g. the "i" in きた or した, making them sound like きいた and しいた)
3. The ん mora before vowels and "s" sounds (e.g. saying 千年 instead of 千円, also not doing ん correctly before "s" can make it sound like "ts" or "ch" instead, i.e. 天使 sounds like 天地 or タンス like タンツ)
4. Pronouncing ふ with an English-like "f" sound
5. Pronouncing ひ like English "he"
6. Pronouncing "ao" like English "ow" (i.e. 顔 as "cow")
7. Pronouncing English loan words too much like English rather than Japanese

(I don't think accent should be considered an advanced level thing any more so than other pronunciation issues; the longer you wait, the harder it's going to be to change. And native speakers may not make any comment, but they notice. If nothing else you should make an attempt to get the accent of people's names correct. Using the wrong accent on names grates on the nerves of some native speakers more so than wrong accents elsewhere.)

yudantaiteki Wrote:Using the wrong accent on names grates on the nerves of some native speakers more so than wrong accents elsewhere.

I was thinking that the other day. Imagine being repeatedly called StePHEN or CaROL by a foreigner. I have a hard time not correcting stress with foreigners, because it sounds so terrible. I remember somebody pronouncing important like imporTANT, so it sounded more like impotent. This is one of the things that made me think "is this what my crappy pitch sounds like in Japanese?"

erlog Wrote:As someone with 7 years of Japanese language study under their belt, and cumulatively a year spent in Japan I think worrying about pitch accent is a very high level thing that most likely isn't appropriate for this forum. Someone worrying about pitch accent is most likely already fluent, and if they're not then their time would be better spent learning the language better rather than trying to put a shiny polish on their mediocre skills.

Being guilty of many of the things on yudantaiteki's list wouldn't hinder your fluency, and would cause only occasional misunderstanding. How far you take your pronunciation is a personal choice, but I don't see why pitch would be singled out as something for higher-level study. If someone could become fluent and still have bad pitch, it would only show how important it is to focus on it early on. Correcting habits ingrained over a decade is the thing of nightmares.

It took me a long time to really begin hearing pitch, and longer to begin noticing my own accent. Lately, I feel like I can learn the accent of a word just by listening to it, and master corrections quite easily. I still have a long way to go to undo all the damage though, but there's no rush. I remember my girlfriend repeatedly correcting me when I was reading out my audio-less Anki cards before, and I just wasn't able to repeat the correct accent. It was actually quite embarrassing at times, and I lost a lot of confidence in my speaking. Even my Chinese friend would correct me!

nadiatims Wrote:Among everyone I've ever met (and this goes for japanese and english natives) quality of accent has been pretty much proportional to their degree of fluency in the language and becomes near native with immersion. I've never met someone with great accent, but who has trouble making sentences (ie. beginner with near native accent). It just doesn't happen.

go to the Living Japanese thread. My accent is pretty good, but i have trouble making sentences. Nuriko has been immersed for years and still gets some pitch wrong. PM is pretty much fluent but his accent isn't great. It doesn't really have much to do with fluency imo.

Yeah, i really agree with the names thing, some people (NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS) consistently get the stress wrong on my name, and it drives me up the wall when they keep doing it.

All the same, i can't really be bothered with the extra work of learning pitch, especially since i rarely SRS now. I'm not ever so bothered about sounding native, good enough is good enough. Being able to speak fluently is definately more of a priority.

yudantaiteki Wrote:5. Pronouncing ひ like English "he"

What's the proper pronunciation for this one? Is the problem stressing the 'e' part?

DevvaR Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:5. Pronouncing ひ like English "he"

What's the proper pronunciation for this one? Is the problem stressing the 'e' part?

That's part of it, but the "h" sound in ひ is not the same consonant as は, へ, and ほ. It's sort of between "sh" and "h". The problem is exacerbated in words like ひと because in standard dialect that has the "whispered mora" (or whatever you want to call it) that I mentioned above.

Actually, I should not be so strong on the accent thing, partly because I don't study it myself, but also because it's very difficult to work on pitch accent without a native speaker to correct you. I would say that any learner, no matter what their level, should do three basic things:
1. Understand the concept of pitch accent and the basic way it works in Japanese.
2. Train your ear to be able to hear the difference in pitches (not necessarily being able to detect all the pitch changes in a long sentence, but at least if a native speaker says はし HL and はし LH in isolation you should be able to tell which is which.)
3. Practice being able to use pitch accent in your own speech -- even just to the level of being able to correctly read a sentence out loud from a text that has the pitch marked for you. This has to be done with a native speaker; you cannot trust that you will be able to do this on your own with no correction. But I think that even just practicing for 30 minutes with a native speaker reading some of the dialogues in JSL (for instance) would be a vast improvement over just pretending it doesn't exist or that it's some advanced level thing that you don't need to bother with at all.

I think if you can do all three of these things, at least you will have some basis to build on and you won't sound as bad as the people who use English stress when speaking Japanese. Beyond this, it can be useful to slowly learn some accents of very common words you use a lot.

This is why I like that OSU's program stresses pitch accent so much, from day 1 -- not because I think the students are going to remember the pitch of every single word, but because it gives them a basis to build on for later.