My Japanese is still really bad, but maybe I could still add two things from my holiday to Japan.

First, if there's one thing about which I got corrected often when trying to speak Japanese, it was the pitch accent.

Second, it looked like (some) people would pronounce ひとり almost like 'shtory'. I asked someone about that, who told me that it is something for old people and not to be imitated.

(And finally, in informal situations, everyone would speak to me in plain form. I asked about this too, and apparently foreigners use the '私-ます-mode' way too often. But that is really off-topic.)

yudantaiteki Wrote: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.

This is the sort of approach I've been talking about. It really doesn't take very much effort, and it can be extremely effective for setting you on a course to develop a native-like accent over the long-term. It wouldn't surprise me if it actually benefited the comprehension skills of a beginner either, since it familiarises your ear with the full range of sounds you'll be exposed to.

The awareness gained from such simple exercises can be worth more than 1万 lookups in a pitch accent dictionary. The same goes for phonetics, which is another thing people make the "leave it to immersion" argument for. The short course (five 20-minute lessons) I was lucky enough to receive from my linguist friend gave me the awareness to avoid everything on your list above, something the hundreds of hours of exposure I'd had up until that point didn't allow me to do.

daaan Wrote:Second, it looked like (some) people would pronounce ひとり almost like 'shtory'. I asked someone about that, who told me that it is something for old people and not to be imitated.

As far as I'm aware, this is some sort of Tokyo dialect thing. I've only ever heard it from old people, and it's certainly not something you want to imitate, like your friends said.

daaan Wrote:(And finally, in informal situations, everyone would speak to me in plain form. I asked about this too, and apparently foreigners use the '私-ます-mode' way too often. But that is really off-topic.)

A lot of foreigners just have a habit of sounding extremely unnatural, and that includes not being able to adopt the right politeness level for a given situation, and including topics when they can be inferred. If you're still a beginner, you'll probably find the book Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin very informative. I avoided a lot of common pitfalls thanks to that book, but I've still been surprised at how readily people switch to タメ語, given all the hype I heard about politeness as a beginner.

For those of you who think learning pitch would require herculean efforts for lilliputian results, why not concentrate on or begin with those words and morphemes that would give you the best return on your investment?

In my opinion, that would be verbs and verb endings. There are just a few endings, such as -masu, mashita, ta, te, eba, tai, nai, ku, katta, etc, and apart from the dictionary form, you only need to remember whether the verb has pitch or not, and the vast majority of 3-mora verbs are LHL.

What do you have in mind? Just read through a description? Memorize pitch of plain forms? Memorize rules of accent change? Try to apply rules when speaking? Memorize exceptions? Practise reciting tables of verb conjugations with pitch marks? I'm also curious why you consider this necessary.

AlexandreC Wrote:Would anyone here advise a student learning English to study English vocabulary WITHOUT any consideration for stress?

I don't think anyone's saying that pitch accent isn't important at all, just that studying it on an individual word basis might not be the best approach. Some word pitch can vary in context (noun accent can change btw) and sounding natural involves much more than pitch, so studying word pitch in isolation has limited value, imo.

At one extreme, we have "immersion is all that's needed for accent". At the other, we have "every word must be SRSed with pitch markings". Javizy and ydtt seem to describe something closer to the middle. :-)

When you say pitch isn't taught in classes or textbooks, I guess you mean not covered in sufficient detail? Programs I'm familiar with introduced the basics of pitch and marked sentences at the start. (I thought that was fairly common.) I don't think learners need a detailed knowledge of how pitch works or why. I actually think it'd be counterproductive.

The theory and descriptive rules aren't really meant for teaching. As you say, the automaticity must come from practice. It's just not realistic to be thinking about rules. Also, unlike grammar, I can't see knowledge of pitch rules helping anyone refine their skills as they advance.

I think your idea of summarizing pitch accent for any self-studiers who aren't aware pitch exists is great. I just don't think the "how it works" needs to be very detailed. :-)

Just wanted to say a word to word basis can work when studying pitch accent when you start hearing it in your head when reading (and learning) the word (which is what intermediate/advanced learners do automatically). Sa>to, sa<to.

In my vocab deck, I don't include pitch accent notations, because like you guys I believe in contextualization, but it could be simply done by highlighting the high kana or putting them in bold. Learning a pattern like "LHHLL" in addition to the word and its (neutral) pronounciation definitely sounds counter-productive.

The thing is, unless you're at the point where you can hear it easily anyway, just knowing where the accent is doesn't mean you'll be able to pronounce the word correctly. You might think you can, but unless you're confident of your level or you have a native sitting next to you while you review your words there's no way of really knowing. Just as spelling in hiragana is just an approximation of how words really sound, so is any written representation of pitch accent. There is so much subtlety to spoken language that you're really kidding yourself if you think you can rely on anything other than an experienced ear to get it right.

I'm not an expert, but my granny, who has just started to learn Japanese, says this website is very useful.
http://tisc.isc.u-toyama.ac.jp/pronuncia...tents.html
She says she gets a warm feeling when she hears the pitch rise and then fall. And then rise again. She says it is the Japanese way of expressing their ever-so-humble gratitude to Amaterasu, the Almighty.

What's pitch accent? Is it a strangely unique word to describe stress in Japanese words, or is there more to it than that?

There is no stress in Japanese. It's called pitch accent because the pitch of the person's speech varies depending on the word and place in the sentence.

leosmith Wrote:What's pitch accent? Is it a strangely unique word to describe stress in Japanese words, or is there more to it than that?

Stress uses the notion of intensity (adding force, energy), while pitch, well is pitch (like the musical scale). The wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent might be clearer than my explanations.

But things are a little more complicated in real life, since you might have noticed long vowels also imply a certain intensity of pronounciation. So technically Japanese stress does exist, but as a combinatory variant, it's not linguistically relevant.

Another example is the French é/è. The distinctive features are the openess and the use the anterior/posterior part of the mouth. But in real life you'll observe it is also redoubled by a pitch distinction (é high, è low). It exists, but it's not relevant.

nadiatims Wrote:The thing is, unless you're at the point where you can hear it easily anyway, just knowing where the accent is doesn't mean you'll be able to pronounce the word correctly. You might think you can, but unless you're confident of your level or you have a native sitting next to you while you review your words there's no way of really knowing. Just as spelling in hiragana is just an approximation of how words really sound, so is any written representation of pitch accent. There is so much subtlety to spoken language that you're really kidding yourself if you think you can rely on anything other than an experienced ear to get it right.

When you understand how pitch works, just knowing where the accent lies is indeed all you need to produce a perfect sentence. I'm not denying there are other subtle elements such as sentence intonation, etc., but with some practice, knowing the pitch of the words is enough to then be able to produce a pitch perfect, near-native sounding sentence.

It's probably difficult, as you say, to fully understand how pitch works without any feedback from natives. Just like it would be near impossible to get English stress without ever having a native tell you if you're doing ok or not. If you don't know what do to with pitch, then learning from SRS cards is certainly a waste of time. Otherwise, knowing that it's taBEru automatically gives you all the dirived forms such as TAbete, TAbeta, taBETAi, taBENAi, taBEMAsu, taBEMASHIta, etc. It's useful and efficient information.

I'm not saying that hearing pitch is easy or obvious. We are dealing with pronunciation, which implies that it must initially be learned by copying or producing and requesting feedback. I don't always get the pitch the first time I hear a word because it's only one aspect of all the phonological information contained in a word. Except that pitch is not completely random and there are limited possible patterns, so even if you were guessing, it wouldn't be a wild guess.

I'm not sure what the best way to learn pitch is, but if anyone studying Japanese has access to native speakers, I really encourage them to ask about pitch, to try to copy the new words they hear and request feedback on whether the pitch is correct. They will quickly start developing an ear for it and will also realize how it's a big part of Japanese pronunciation.

leosmith Wrote:What's pitch accent? Is it a strangely unique word to describe stress in Japanese words, or is there more to it than that?

All syllables in Japanese are expressed with a high or a low pitch relative to other syllables. The height of each syllable is predetermined.

In English, if a syllable has stress, other syllables will be shorter, often quieter and fewer vowel sounds are possible, whereas a stressed syllable is longer, often lounder, and carries more weight and intensity in the phrase it's in.

In Japanese, if a syllable has pitch, it's not louder, it's not longer, but it's pronounced with a higher pitch that will be followed by a sharp drop in height, making the next syllable low. The other syllable's height is predictable, namely high before the drop, low after. It's a system few foreigners bother to follow or learn and is usually a dead giveaway.

EratiK Wrote:In my vocab deck, I don't include pitch accent notations, because like you guys I believe in contextualization, but it could be simply done by highlighting the high kana or putting them in bold. Learning a pattern like "LHHLL" in addition to the word and its (neutral) pronounciation definitely sounds counter-productive.

This is the sort of notation that put me off pitch accent early on. I remember reading a post somewhere about arrows and god know's what denoting accent, and I was thinking "What's the point?" If you don't like the number codes, I really encourage you to give them a second look, since they're so much more convenient, and don't require a specialist dictionary to find. You're really just aiming to learn where the pitch drops, so a number is more than adequate, and you can't say it doesn't look presentable on a flashcard.

nadiatims Wrote:The thing is, unless you're at the point where you can hear it easily anyway, just knowing where the accent is doesn't mean you'll be able to pronounce the word correctly.

You could say the same thing about ら行, but that doesn't mean there's no value in attempting to pronounce it correctly. Once your ears are trained to detect pitch, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to detect your own with a bit of practice. The important thing is just to be conscious of it and keep striving to improve, like any other area of the language. Perfection is overrated, but progress is something anyone can achieve. I don't think anybody's suggesting pitch should be singled out to be worked on an hour a day; it's simply another consideration to be made as part of a well-rounded study strategy.

AlexandreC Wrote:I'm not sure what the best way to learn pitch is

The best way is to let it remain pitch-dark. And then argue that it is obscure and not worth it.

AlexandreC Wrote:All syllables in Japanese are expressed with a high or a low pitch relative to other syllables. The height of each syllable is predetermined.

You mean a mora not a syllable.

@buonaparte:

Your grandma never ceases to amaze me! I'm not worried about her getting Alzheimer. You seem to see her quite often and she seems to read this forum a lot, huh?

@Javizy:

I now understand that code, and thanks for your patient explanations; however, I don't like having to mentally count the mora to determine where the accent falls: it would be better to actually print in bold the accentuated mora. For my deck, I simply use roomaji with capitals on accentuated mora, since it stands out more to the eye.

@AlexandreC:

Learning words with their proper accent is an habit that ought to be taken as soon as one starts learning words, but this thread illustrates the fact that it is useless to try to convince people who have not done so at the beginning of their studies.

-----

I am just a newbie at Japanese. However, I am a veteran at Chinese, and talking with many learners throughout the years has taught me that if one is not rigorous when getting a clear internalization of the sounds of the language at the early stages, you can "learn" a language and still sound totally unnatural 10, 15 years into the learning process. I even knew a Lao-zi specialist who could read all the Chinese canon in the text without a dictionary but who was still mixing up Chinese consonants. Chinese people could understand him, but it was simply because they knew him and the mistakes he was making and they were mentally "translating" his incorrect speech to Chinese. I simply don't want to be in that situation and be the gaijin that could never master the language and that natives look condescendingly upon. I personally prefer to take a little more time to learn Japanese, but to learn it in the way that the authors of the most authoritative Japanese text in the English language - Harz-Jorden and Noda - recommend it should be learned, that is with proper pitch accents.

For those who are not familiar with that text, it is "Japanese: The Spoken Language", Yale University Press, 1987. Ignore it at your own risk.

daaan Wrote:Second, it looked like (some) people would pronounce ひとり almost like 'shtory'. I asked someone about that, who told me that it is something for old people and not to be imitated.

Really? I used to hear it quite often on television, and still sometimes do. It's not pitch accent, but, I did make a point to practice into I could say that sort of 'hs(i)to' and 'hs(i)tori' smoothly. It taught me a lot about how to pronounce a japanese 'h' and 'i' because if you don't do it right you can't get that particular hiss (that isn't an 'sh' at all, but a hissing sound after starting with an 'h' sound, made between the tongue and the roof of the mouth... unless I accidentally came up with a new and unique way of imitating the sound.)
I wonder how 'old' this 'for old people' is... oh well, I'm not trying to pass for a 20something anyway.

On pitch accent... since at least the tokyo/nhk pitch accent seems to have a relatively simple pattern, I don't see any reason why it can't be noted as, well, an accent.

先生　せんせ’い
良い　い’い
大学　’だいがく

and so on. I suppose bolding or italicizing kana works too. In any case, thanks to this thread, the number notations aren't a mystery anymore but they do still require me to pause and think about it and count moras, so while I may add pitch accent information to my cards, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use number code for my own uses.

I also don't think I'm going to quiz on pitch accent , just have it there in the same way that I have rare kanji there in the 'answer' side of certain cards. I'm not quizzing on those, just... reminding myself they exist.

daaan Wrote:Second, it looked like (some) people would pronounce ひとり almost like 'shtory'. I asked someone about that, who told me that it is something for old people and not to be imitated.

Are you sure this isn't just you mishearing a devoiced 'hi' sound as an 'sh' sound?

Any time an 'i' or 'u' is between two consonants that you don't use your vocal chords for (k t p h s), you devoice that vowel. That's why you pronounce 'yoroshiku' closer to 'yoroshku,' or 'asuka' closer to 'aska.'

So, really, ひとり is pronounced 'h(i)tori.'

Then again, I've never lived near Tokyo, so there's a chance that I just never noticed whatever it is you're talking about.

I don't know what exactly you mean by devoiced 'hi' sound, but 'hi' can definitely sound different than other は行. The reason lies in the fact that the mouth is opened very narrowly when doing the i vowel in japanese, causing a slight restriction of air between the middle of the tongue and the roof of the mouth. To my non-german ears, it sounds quite close to german 'ch' as in 'ich'. This is the same reason why the consonant sound of さ行 changes for し. And again it's not the same as english 'sh' despite that being the standard romanization. It's more like mandarin 'x'.

When you devoice, your mouth makes the shape of the vowel, but you don't actually use your vocal chords to produce any sound. For example, put your finger on your neck and try pronouncing sounds like 't' or 's', and you won't feel a vibrating movement. 'd' and 'z' are the equivalents of those two vowels, but while using your vocal chords. Try pronouncing 'd' and 'z' and you will feel a vibration when you touch your neck. You'll also notice that your mouth is actually in the same position for these pairs--the only difference is your vocal chords.

Anyway, as I said, if the vowel 'i' or 'u' are between consonants that you don't use your vocal chords for, you devoice them. That means that your mouth makes the shape as if you are pronouncing that vowel, but you don't actually use your vocal chords, so the vowel is not really fully pronounced. So, with ひとり, the 'h' and the 't' do not use your vocal chords, so you also do not use your vocal chords for the 'i' between the two. A devoiced ひ is a pretty weird sounding thing to an English speaker, and it kind of sounds like a hiss.

(Note that while I'm using romaji, I'm talking about the Japanese version of these sounds. It's easier to use romaji when talking about devoicing.)

maybe the more user-friendly, mistake-proof learning method would be simply to have cards with audio?? lots of decks do this already... and there is subs2srs, or even cutting audio up yourself.

i'm just imagining people really messing up their japanese by trying to focus on this waaay too early.

The sound in question is, I think, a sort of extreme example of the normal devoiced 'hi'. I don't believe it's a separate sound, just a particular pronunciation that seems - in dramas at least - to be masculine only. To western ears, it sounds nothing like the normal 'hi' at first, not even like the normal devoiced 'hi' (as spoken by women and newscasters).

It does have similarity to the 'ch' in 'machen', but it is fundamentally just a devoiced 'hi' with the mouth so narrow (or narrowing so quickly... ?) that the hiss predominates to the point where to western ears it has an 'sh' quality to it.

Of course it's a sound made further back in the mouth than either the English or the Japanese 'sh' sounds are.

At one point I spent some good hours of my life playing and repeating bits of a video to compare the man's 'hshhto' to the woman's 'hito', and then find places where the man says 'shikari' and 'shigoto' to hear the difference in 'hi' and 'shi' from the same person... but at least I learned how to shape my mouth for a Japanese 'hi' instead of just saying the english word 'he' and calling it close enough.

@dtcamero - if you're not using premade or automade decks, it already takes long enough to make a card without searching out matching audio for it. I also concur with the idea that it's never too early to try to pronounce things correctly. You can't do any more damage to your learning by getting pitch accent wrong here and there than you would by voicing every vowel and using western pitch patterns...

To put it all in proper phonetic terminology, the h in ひ is a voiceless palatal fricative (ç), like the German soft ch or the h in "hue" in at least some English accents, while the sh in し is a voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant (ɕ), like the Mandarin x or the Russian щ (normally transliterated as shch, but it hasn't been pronounced that way for about 200 years), and distinct from the English sh, which is a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant (ʃ).

Edit: Also, the Wikipedia article about the Tokyo dialect talks about the decreased distinction between [çi] and [ʃi]. I am not sure if [ʃi] was meant to be [ɕi], but it does seem to describe what daaan was talking about.

buonaparte Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:All syllables in Japanese are expressed with a high or a low pitch relative to other syllables. The height of each syllable is predetermined.

You mean a mora not a syllable.

Obviously. It wasn't a crucial distinction for a general explanation.

dtcamero Wrote:i'm just imagining people really messing up their japanese by trying to focus on this waaay too early.

Really? How would this be? On the contrary, I can just imagine how good students could sound if they were taught proper pitch from day one!

vonPeterhof Wrote:Edit: Also, the Wikipedia article about the Tokyo dialect talks about the decreased distinction between [çi] and [ʃi]. I am not sure if [ʃi] was meant to be [ɕi], but it does seem to describe what daaan was talking about.

And upon looking a little further:

"The lack of distinction between the two phonemes hi and shi (so that hitotsu ("one)" is pronounced shitotsu) is typical of the Shitamachi kotoba. Another characteristic trait is the pronouncing of the sound -ai as for example in wakaranai (I don't know or I don't understand) or -oi as in osoi (slow) as -ee (wakaranee or osee). The use of either is still considered very low-class and rough."

That sure does ring a bell! Now I only wonder how I could have picked up exactly these peculiarities, especially since I haven't been anywhere near Tokyo at all during my trip to Japan!