Another note about pitch -- Sometimes a tiny mistake in pronunciation or in grammar doesn't make a sentence too hard to understand, but cumulatively, mistakes add up and make a sentence difficult to understand. If your pitch is wrong and you add to that another pronunciation error or a grammatical error of some kind, and it may just be the difference between being understood or not.

AlexandreC Wrote:

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!

I agree with nadiatims that this stuff can only be absorbed by osmosis, rather than something one can effectively study. From my perspective however I could even generalize this further and say the same thing about the language in general, because it is a skill and not a body of knowledge to learn. Acquisition of skills is experiential.

Memorizing verb tables won't help you pull them from your head in the 1/2 second you need them, and similarly [çi]/[ʃi] distinctions will only create bad patterns for a learner. I would say that this entire discussion is to acquisition of correct pitch accent what art history or art criticism is to the ability to effectively paint or sculpt well.

if you're comfortably fluent then I'll give you a pass, or more likely you inherently understand this stuff already... but if not then there are more important fish to fry right now.

dtcamero Wrote:Memorizing verb tables won't help you pull them from your head in the 1/2 second you need them, and similarly [çi]/[ʃi] distinctions will only create bad patterns for a learner. I would say that this entire discussion is to acquisition of correct pitch accent what art history or art criticism is to the ability to effectively paint or sculpt well.

Memorizing a verb table or knowing pronunciation distinctions help you build the ability to pull the verbs from your head, and I don't see how they "create bad patterns for a learner", whatever that means.

Speaking a language is not analogous to art. Reading explanations and studying will help you. Of course you need experience and "osmosis" but most people just aren't going to absorb this from zero without any explanations whatsoever. Once you've spent 30 minutes learning about pitch accent you'll be in a much better position to understand what you're hearing.

I always bring up my own experiences here. I did not know until I had been studying the language for 6 years that the consonants in ひ and は/へ/ほ were different. These 6 years included 2.5 in Japan. Now, nadiatims has suggested that 2.5 years isn't very much, which it may not be, but why should you wait a decade to absorb something basic like the pronunciation of consonants? If someone had told me in Japanese 101 that the kana didn't match up perfectly with pronunciation and that the "hi" sound was different, I probably would have been able to fix that problem with my speech much sooner than I did. Are you honestly saying that it would have harmed my Japanese to be told that in 101? How could it have harmed my Japanese any more than it already was by me mispronouncing ひ for 6 years? What "bad pattern" would it have created?

Look at my last post on page 3, and the three things I listed there. I'm talking about spending a total of 1-2 hours practicing those three things. Are you honestly saying that would harm someone's Japanese, or be such an extreme waste of time that it wouldn't even be worth that small amount of studying it?

If it was customary to teach students pitch right from the start, no one would question it. Alas, there is yet no tradition of teaching pitch and current students have spent a significant amount of time studying without caring about pitch at all, so their instinctive response is that it doesn't matter. But what if we did have an established way to teach it? Wouldn't we all benefit from having a better pronunciation?

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.

AlexandreC Wrote: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.

I've always tried to mimic what I hear. I speak Thai and Mandarin, so I don't ignore tonal variations like many people do when they mimic. I like to think I don't ignore anything at all, but I'm sure I make mistakes. What you're describing sounds like tones to me. If there are set rules, can you provide a link to an explanation? No offense, but what you've written is confusing to me.

leosmith, Buonaparte posted a link on page 4 which has a lot of recordings demonstrating pitch accent.

@yudan and AlexandreC,

I don't think anyone was suggesting people deliberately remain willfully ignorant of pitch or other aspects of pronunciation, just that it's not necessary to attempt to memorize this stuff on a per word basis or have a visual system to represent it. Just be aware that Japanese modulate their pitch when they speak, and try to imitate it. The more time you've spent listening to native speech, and the higher your level of comprehension, the better your ear becomes.

re: 'ひ'. You don't even have to be conscious that it is a different sound than the rest of は行, the sound will just come out that way if you're otherwise articulating the other aspects of Japanese pronunciation correctly, in particular getting the vowels right. The 'h' consonant modifies when you make the i vowel, because the jaw is only very narrowly open. You make that sound anyway when you say words like hue (hyoo) and huge (hyooj), or at least Australians do. Maybe americans pronounce those words differently...

yudantaiteki Wrote:Look at my last post on page 3, and the three things I listed there. I'm talking about spending a total of 1-2 hours practicing those three things. Are you honestly saying that would harm someone's Japanese, or be such an extreme waste of time that it wouldn't even be worth that small amount of studying it?

So your argument is "well, it couldn't hurt..." so therefore people should devote a lot of time to it? It seems like you're taking your own pet issue here, and blowing it out of proportion. The truth is that most people don't specifically need to drill or pay explicit attention to these kinds of pronunciation and pitch variations.

Most people are flexible enough to pick these kinds of things up through immersion and shadowing. Nobody here is saying we should all bury our heads in the sand with regard to pitch or pronunciation. My beef is that a lot of the approaches that have been suggested here, such as Chinese-style pitch guides, are the wrong tool for the job since pitch accent is not as much of a cornerstone of Japanese as it is Chinese. It just isn't.

There's also the point here that a lot of the pronunciation stuff people are discussing in this thread has nothing to do with pitch accent, and more to do with people not learning the Japanese sound system to begin with. Most beginner textbooks come with a recording of the hiragana on a CD. So this stuff is already being drilled pretty well in the beginning as long as people are bothering to pay attention to it.

For me all of this falls under the category of pronunciation gotchas that most people eventually learn. Barely anyone past super-beginner level pronounces す as "soo" in words like ございます. Most people say ばわい instead of ばあい for 場合. For me the pitch accent stuff just gets lumped in with these other pronunciation things, and it seems like most people pick them up fine. There are probably hundreds of more examples like this too, and so the idea that a little drilling in the beginning could vanquish all these pronunciation problems is naive.

I can understand if your Japanese is already very functional, and you want to put a polish on it then paying attention to this sort of stuff could be useful. For beginners who can barely construct coherent sentences, though? If they're using the wrong words to begin with then it won't matter how those words are pronounced.

erlog Wrote:Most people say ばわい instead of ばあい for 場合.

By "most people" do you mean natives or learners? Rikaichan recognises ばわい as a "slangy version" of ばあい, but I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced that way.

nadiatims Wrote:leosmith, Buonaparte posted a link on page 4 which has a lot of recordings demonstrating pitch accent.

Thanks. Can someone post a link the the rules, if there are any?

For what it's worth, when I was studying Mandarin, buonaparte's Granny told me to study pronunciation in the very beginning, but not to worry about everything sinking in. She said to come back 6 months later and review again, because that's much more effective than trying to perfect everything in one shot. Then she put out her cigar, pulled up her garters and left.

leosmith, I gave this link to my own rules on page 2.

Japanese pitch is not like tone for a few reason. First, not all words have an assigned pitch and height is often derived by basic rules. Second, pitch doesn't change during vowels, but before and after them. To be fair, pitch can go up or down during a long vowel, but it's a sharp raise or drop from one height to the other, between the first and the second half.

erlog Wrote:Most people are flexible enough to pick these kinds of things up through immersion and shadowing.

Let's be clear on one thing though -- most people are not.

I don't live in Japan, but virtually all the non-Japanese I know who speak Japanese lived in Japan and not a single one of them has picked up pitch. None have perfect pronunciation either. The average learner doesn't have the necessary knowledge to pick these things up, as you suggest. It needs to be taught.

vonPeterhof Wrote:

erlog Wrote:Most people say ばわい instead of ばあい for 場合.

By "most people" do you mean natives or learners? Rikaichan recognises ばわい as a "slangy version" of ばあい, but I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced that way.

It's very common. I don't think it's really a slangy version either, it's just easier to say that way, because when you're speaking quickly your lips are still partially closed after making the 'b' sound, so the a is easier to resolve as wa.

AlexandreC Wrote:

erlog Wrote:wrote:
Most people are flexible enough to pick these kinds of things up through immersion and shadowing.

Let's be clear on one thing though -- most people are not.

I don't live in Japan, but virtually all the non-Japanese I know who speak Japanese lived in Japan and not a single one of them has picked up pitch. None have perfect pronunciation either. The average learner doesn't have the necessary knowledge to pick these things up, as you suggest. It needs to be taught.

Most non-japanese (westerners at least) come to Japan knowing zero or beginner Japanese, spend a few years working as an English teacher or student, reach an intermediate or low advanced level and then go home. How many people do you know who have lived in Japan for a decent chunk of time as a fluent speaker of the language working in japanese, or enrolled in a normal University course with other Japanese students?

nadiatims Wrote:Most non-japanese (westerners at least) come to Japan knowing zero or beginner Japanese, spend a few years working as an English teacher or student, reach an intermediate or low advanced level and then go home. How many people do you know who have lived in Japan for a decent chunk of time as a fluent speaker of the language working in japanese, or enrolled in a normal University course with other Japanese students?

This.

It seems to be common to make a point against immersion and input based learning with "so-and-so lived in Japan for X amount of time and didn't learn Y". The fact that you are in Japan doesn't mean much unless you have the right attitude to being there.

nadiatims Wrote:

vonPeterhof Wrote:

erlog Wrote:Most people say ばわい instead of ばあい for 場合.

By "most people" do you mean natives or learners? Rikaichan recognises ばわい as a "slangy version" of ばあい, but I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced that way.

It's very common. I don't think it's really a slangy version either, it's just easier to say that way, because when you're speaking quickly your lips are still partially closed after making the 'b' sound, so the a is easier to resolve as wa.

Now that you mention it, I may have heard it pronounced that way, but I probably mistook the [w] for a glottal stop, or just didn't notice it. [w] doesn't occur in my native language, so I don't always hear it that clearly. I heard that many people pronounce the を as an actual [wo] when singing, but I can't really hear much of a difference between [o] and [wo], so I can't tell when they do it and when they don't.

nadiatims Wrote:... who have lived in Japan for a decent chunk of time as a fluent speaker of the language working in japanese, or enrolled in a normal University course with other Japanese students?

I don't know any. Do they just pick up pitch? Are you saying that such people are the only ones who should learn pitch?

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:Most non-japanese (westerners at least) come to Japan knowing zero or beginner Japanese, spend a few years working as an English teacher or student, reach an intermediate or low advanced level and then go home. How many people do you know who have lived in Japan for a decent chunk of time as a fluent speaker of the language working in japanese, or enrolled in a normal University course with other Japanese students?

This.

It seems to be common to make a point against immersion and input based learning with "so-and-so lived in Japan for X amount of time and didn't learn Y". The fact that you are in Japan doesn't mean much unless you have the right attitude to being there.

OK, but even if we accept that, it's not very helpful or useful to learners to tell them not to study something because they'll learn it if they live in Japan under the right conditions for many years. 99% of people reading this post are never going to live in Japan for more than a short time, and I would bet that 85-90% are never going to go to Japan at all.

I use my own experience because obviously that's what I'm most familiar with, and all I can say is that I did not learn pitch or correct pronunciation through immersion. I wish that I had done more pronunciation practice early in my studies.

Quote:So your argument is "well, it couldn't hurt..." so therefore people should devote a lot of time to it?

No, my argument is that it will greatly *help*, therefore people should devote a modest amount of time to it. I'm not advocating marking pitch for every single word you learn. This is not because I don't think it's important, but I think it's basically impossible to get good pitch accent without a lot of dedicated practice and correction (or if you're one of the lucky people who can just automatically pick it up somehow).

I listed the 3 things I think every learner should do on page 3. That is my personal recommendation.

Quote:re: 'ひ'. You don't even have to be conscious that it is a different sound than the rest of は行, the sound will just come out that way if you're otherwise articulating the other aspects of Japanese pronunciation correctly, in particular getting the vowels right.

Is it bad to be conscious of the fact?

Let me ask you a pointed question -- what is your explanation for my inability to pronounce ひ correctly after 2 years of living in Japan (after 3 years or so of study before that)? I was teaching English, but none of the people I worked with spoke much English so I spoke Japanese with them every day. It's not like I was living in a foreigner bubble. I can't imagine you're honestly saying that it should normally take more than 2 years of immersion to be able to pronounce ひ correctly.

Re: ばわい, it's not slang, just an alternate pronunciation. In my experience it's common, but ばあい is common as well. If you are an NHK newscaster then ばあい is correct but there's nothing at all wrong with saying ばわい. ばやい is a possibility as well.

vonPeterhof Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:

vonPeterhof Wrote:By "most people" do you mean natives or learners? Rikaichan recognises ばわい as a "slangy version" of ばあい, but I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced that way.

It's very common. I don't think it's really a slangy version either, it's just easier to say that way, because when you're speaking quickly your lips are still partially closed after making the 'b' sound, so the a is easier to resolve as wa.

Now that you mention it, I may have heard it pronounced that way, but I probably mistook the [w] for a glottal stop, or just didn't notice it. [w] doesn't occur in my native language, so I don't always hear it that clearly. I heard that many people pronounce the を as an actual [wo] when singing, but I can't really hear much of a difference between [o] and [wo], so I can't tell when they do it and when they don't.

Here, I always believed that the only difference between を and お in modern Japanese was only a grammar distinction. Just like は in 私は is pronounced わ, and へ in 東京へ is え. Maybe I am missing something.

"o" after "n" is often pronounced with a "wo" sound. I think in songs it just happens sometimes for effect. It's been many centuries since お and を actually had different pronunciations in any standard dialect, although there are probably still some dialects out there that preserve the difference, at least for the particle (and maybe for other words too?)

AlexandreC Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:... who have lived in Japan for a decent chunk of time as a fluent speaker of the language working in japanese, or enrolled in a normal University course with other Japanese students?

I don't know any. Do they just pick up pitch? Are you saying that such people are the only ones who should learn pitch?

Yes, they pick up pitch and other aspects of native pronunciation. The quality tends to vary depending on length and quality of immersion. There are plenty of foreigners with very near-native pronunciation, the chinese girl working in your local konbini, the korean exchange students, african and south american assembly plant workers, indonesian nurses, people working for large multinational companies etc. I'm not saying they are the only people that should learn pitch, being aware of it is certainly helpful. Where we disagree is how to learn it. Trying to master pitch via memorisation of words and rules and/or drilling it in an srs is seems way less effective than just maximising your listening practice ie. experiencing how people say words. I also personally think that having a *perfect* accent is much less important they just having high comprehension and fluency and generally good pronunciation. Trying to have a perfect accent before you can even understand TV seems rather like putting the carriage before the horse to me.

nadiatims Wrote:Yes, they pick up pitch and other aspects of native pronunciation. The quality tends to vary depending on length and quality of immersion. There are plenty of foreigners with very near-native pronunciation, the chinese girl working in your local konbini, the korean exchange students, african and south american assembly plant workers, indonesian nurses, people working for large multinational companies etc. I'm not saying they are the only people that should learn pitch, being aware of it is certainly helpful. Where we disagree is how to learn it. Trying to master pitch via memorisation of words and rules and/or drilling it in an srs is seems way less effective than just maximising your listening practice ie. experiencing how people say words. I also personally think that having a *perfect* accent is much less important they just having high comprehension and fluency and generally good pronunciation. Trying to have a perfect accent before you can even understand TV seems rather like putting the carriage before the horse to me.

What's all this based on? Are you aware of how these people learn Japanese, or how pitch sounds to their ears compared to a Westerner who grew up with stress? How well are you able to judge their accents anyway? I've heard enough fluent Americans with all-round terrible pronunciation to be sceptical already. How do you get to such a level without immersion? You're welcome to rely on immersion only, but trying to talk people out of an insignificant time-commitment early on without any guarantees is a different thing entirely. Most people are studying as a hobby, so they might even find a crucial feature of pron interesting to learn about!

I'm confused as to what the difference is between 'being aware of pitch' and what you believe 'trying to master pitch via memorisation' to be. As long as you learn the basic information I posted earlier, you have everything you need to get started. Simply paying attention to the audio on your cards, or adding a pitch code will allow you to progress (native help may speed things up). I actually defy you to listen to a word like 野放し with that awareness and not remember the accent. The picture you're painting makes it sound like you're oblivious to the pitch, because I can't understand why you're making such a big deal out of something that quickly becomes intuitive. Then we have the fact that the majority of words are unaccented anyway, so this idea of how terrible it is to consciously remember pitch becomes even less convincing.

nadiatims Wrote:There are plenty of foreigners with very near-native pronunciation, the chinese girl working in your local konbini, the korean exchange students, african and south american assembly plant workers, indonesian nurses, people working for large multinational companies etc.

These people work in my neighbourhood too, but the vast majority of them don't have near-native English pronunciation at all. I doubt it's any different in Japan. Immersion alone absolutely does NOT lead to near-native pronunciation.

nadiatims Wrote:I'm not saying they are the only people that should learn pitch, being aware of it is certainly helpful. Where we disagree is how to learn it. Trying to master pitch via memorisation of words and rules and/or drilling it in an srs is seems way less effective than just maximising your listening practice ie. experiencing how people say words.

I'm quite interested in how to learn it too, and even more so in how to teach it, but I'm still not sure what the best way would be. I do think pitch should be taught right from the start. As students are made aware of pitch right from the onset, they will inevitably pick some of it over time, but we know that if you don't teach them pitch, they remain oblivious to it for months or even years. Then it becomes an awfullly huge task to relearn every word. Textbooks should have the accented mora marked in bold (kanji?) and teachers should be trained to explain how pitch works.

Some people advocate against marking pitch, claiming that it makes fluency harder to attain. But I've never heard of Chinese teachers complaining that marking tones on pinyin or bopomofo makes fluency harder to attain. (Though I'm not arguing tones and pitch have the same degree of importance.) And though these people are concerned about making Japanese easier, they will still insist on teaching kanji.

There is no doubt that knowing rules alone cannot suffice to learn any aspect of pronunciation but it's an essential starting point; you need to know and apply the rules consciously at first, then it becomes more and more automatic. Copying people is not any different -- you copy consciously first, then you need to become independent and produce things the same way without the other person present.

It's false to think that copying alone works. I see English learners make mistakes all the time and when they try to copy native speakers, only some of them do it well. And then 2 minutes later, they make the same mistake again because they've failed to internalize the change. Copying doesn't mean you understand what's happening or what you're doing wrong.

What an interesting thread. At the risk of taking it off-topic, away from pitch accent to pronunciation in general, here are some of my musings on the latter

As this link points out (referring to ESL) pronunciation is the first thing a a native speaker will notice when a non native speaker converses with them and bad pronunciation carries a penalty, because of the bias, often unconscious, it produces in the listeners.

http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronuncwhy.htm

I have long wondered why pronunciation is such a neglected topic in the language teaching when it is of such importance. I have always assumed thar the reasons are historic; a combination of the primacy of text in an educational setting, and the fact that until recently the technology to work with sound was lacking.

Given that voice coaching, is an established discipline, is there anything that could be learnt from this field? Has anybody had Japanese elocution lessons and if so what did they consist of?

Why do some people pick up acceptable accents (ie are pleasant to listen to, even if recognizably foreign) while others, despite years of immersion, speak in heavily accented tones despite having perfect grammar and extensive vocabulary?

Could software be developed to help in this area? One type of software would work with improving targeted and specific listening comprehension. (If someone can't hear the difference in sounds, they are unlikely to be able to produce it). Another type might be able to evaluate speech, or aspects of it.

It seems that there is a whole PhD worth of research waiting here.

My own pronunciation is pretty hopeless. I do some listening and some shadowing, but I feel some targeted lessons in this area would help.

Harpagornes Wrote:I have long wondered why pronunciation is such a neglected topic in the language teaching when it is of such importance. I have always assumed thar the reasons are historic; a combination of the primacy of text in an educational setting, and the fact that until recently the technology to work with sound was lacking.

My answer? 99% of ESL teachers know nothing about phonetics and phonology and are therefore unable to teach pronunciation appropriately. They also no very little, if anything at all, about the phonology of their students' first language. Most teachers have either no experience or specific training, or else have a degree in literature, which doesn't prepare you at all for teaching a language as an L2, let alone pronunciation.

Harpagornes Wrote:Given that voice coaching, is an established discipline, is there anything that could be learnt from this field? Has anybody had Japanese elocution lessons and if so what did they consist of?

Is it really an established discipline? For foreigners?

I did some tutoring as a pronunciation coach myself and I've found that it's actually pretty easy to teach ESL students all they need to know about English (in this case) pronunciation and that it doesn't take all that long to cover all the major issues. The rest is all about prioritizing and fine-tuning. Obviously, as a coach, I needed knowledge in English phonology and some knowledge about their L1. After the rules have been covered, when I ask a student to stop and correct themselves, they are usually pretty good at finding out what went wrong, what the right sounds should be and they often correct themselves. The goal is to make them independent in correcting themselves and improving, and so far, my experience tells me that a motivated student can improve quite a bit. The student I have right now says she has even become able to spot mistakes in other speakers from her country.

AlexandreC Wrote:My answer? 99% of ESL teachers know nothing about phonetics and phonology and are therefore unable to teach pronunciation appropriately. They also no very little, if anything at all, about the phonology of their students' first language. Most teachers have either no experience or specific training, or else have a degree in literature, which doesn't prepare you at all for teaching a language as an L2, let alone pronunciation.

That sounds accurate. The other problem is that, given a teacher has knowledge in these subjects how does one integrate it into teaching a class. I think most teachers just hope that it is something that will work itself out with time, but while this sometimes happens, as you have stated, it is not always the case.

AlexandreC Wrote:Is... (voice coaching) ...really an established discipline? For foreigners?

It's not and that's what puzzles me. I was thinking of both speech therapy and voice coaching which are both established disciplines and wondering why so little of the hard won knowledge in these fields, has permeated language teaching. It has always puzzled me that pronunciation, which is so basic, is so underemphasized by teachers when there is a body of work that could be utilized. It sounds as though your students are quite fortunate in this regard.

Harpagornes Wrote:I think most teachers just hope that it is something that will work itself out with time, but while this sometimes happens, as you have stated, it is not always the case.

When people say "it will work itself out over time" or "it's best to copy natives", it actually means they have no idea how to teach it or don't understand how it works.