Japanese Accent Study Website
http://accent.u-biq.org/english.html
Group
Japanese surnames
Japanese celebrities
Japanese place names
World place names
Counter -count-
Counter -unit-
Counter -turn-
Counter -time-
Conjugated Adjectives
Conjugated Verbs 1
Conjugated Verbs 2
Conjugated Verbs 3


http://www.mediafire.com/?ydk278470r9zzv7
!H accent.u-biq.org tpp.7z
Offline version of the site. It was downloaded in June, no idea if they have made any changes since then. I doubt it.

Numerals
NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 CD-ROM版

If you want the dictionary itself (with audio) - search rutracker.

AlexandreC Wrote:Some people contrast LH / LH or else LH / LH* with the same effect.

Ah, I expected something like that. I like that the 大辞林 notation is compact. Just a personal preference perhaps.

AlexandreC Wrote:[Verbs] are the most problematic.

I disagree. The set of Verbs that I actually want to use is very small compared to the number of Nouns I'd like to know. In practice I know most of the former, but never enough of the latter. I think this is because they are few, so you hear most of the common verbs frequently.

I feel the primary thing (what needs to come first) is just to develop a feel for pitch accent so you can imitate properly. I don't really see rules like have been listed in this thread as being very useful until after you have that. Then you can go back and notice patterns that you have observed but were not aware of.

Once you have a feel for pitch accent the only problem is the pronunciation of words that you have not heard (similar to English). If you cannot get audio for a word then looking it up in an accent dictionary (which I would count the 大辞林 as for this purpose) is good to have as a fallback.

Anyway, this is just based on the what worked for me. People's learning styles are different, so it may or may not apply to anyone else.

CJ

Thora Wrote:But according to Jordan, Shosuke Haraguchi and another I checked ikitai is unaccented. What source are you using?

AlexandreC Wrote:I have the Shinmeikai. The problem is that those sources are references for Standard Japanese, which is not the same as Tokyoben.

There seems to be some confusion here. Jordan and Haraguchi based their explanations on Tokyo dialect and note that that it's "virtually identical" to standard Japanese when it comes to accent. The Shinmeikai accent rule appendix is based on Tokyo dialect.

Haraguchi notes almost all linguistics accent research (unless it's examining specific dialects) uses Tokyo Japanese since the bulk of available data and dictionaries are based on it. Experiments using Tokyo Japanese use the NHK accent dictionary and Tokyo native speakers and a Tokyo spontaneous speech corpus.

While there's some variation among speakers and some minor differences in outlying Tokyo-type accent, I think it's fair to say that Tokyo Japanese = standard Japanese.

Thora Wrote:While there's some variation among speakers and some minor differences in outlying Tokyo-type accent, I think it's fair to say that Tokyo Japanese = standard Japanese.

I'd like to agree, but... The other day, I was going over the pitch for numbers and I was playing my electronic dictionary to my friend and she found many instances where her pronunciation differed. And this is just for numbers.

cjon256 Wrote:Once you have a feel for pitch accent the only problem is the pronunciation of words that you have not heard (similar to English).

This is specifically why I don't understand why some people study Japanese while putting so much emphasis on reading. Like English, it's a language that needs to be learned from a significant proportion of audio input. Reading alone might be much more efficient in languages like French, Spanish or Italian, but Japanese contains too much unwritten information to fall in that group of language that can be learned from reading without consequence.

You're suggesting word pitch accent carries a lot of meaning?

Re: dialect. Dictionaries and other texts make it clear that lexical accents change and vary between age groups, etc. The better resources note alternates and trends, but obviously don't try to cover every variation. No one should expect that a dictionary entry is how a word will always sound. Japanese pitch accent, in particular, changes in context (and accent rules are inadequate.)

I was just pointing out that the resources we are using for pitch accent explanations are in fact based on Tokyo dialect, not standard dialect, as you had indicated. And according to those experts, their tables, descriptions and rules apply to standard Japanese.

[edit: It's natural to rely on the intuition of our Japanese friends, but it's probably a good idea to avoid presenting their intuition or explanation as 100% fact on a learning site without some kind of qualification. Language is rarely accurately described in absolute terms.] (Surprisingly, in some of the experiments, native speakers don't fare much better on accent discrimination and identification.)

Since you are creating learning material for distribution, it might be an idea to indicate when content is based on your personal conclusions or the intuitions of native speakers you consult (especially if it contradicts the reference books).

If you haven't already, perhaps check out the approach of Pierrehumbert & Beckman. 1988. _Japanese Tone Structure_ . You can find basic descriptions of their more intonation based analysis in a number of papers. This approach seems to have superseded the old idea of assigning a H or L tone to each mora.

My granny made an experiment.
She transcribed a Japanese fairy tale and asked her granddaughter to read it to a Japanese person. The grandaugher has no idea about Japanese.
The Japanese person (Tokyo) said he understood everything, but it was pronounced in a typically Western way and that made the story sound funny.
He said it made him think of someone trying to play tennis with a cannonball.

NOUNS
Accent (Foreign Origin)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...06-01.html
Accents (Compound Nouns)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...07-01.html

buonaparte Wrote:NOUNS
Accent (Foreign Origin)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...06-01.html
Accents (Compound Nouns)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...07-01.html

GOLDEN!

Genki 1 and 2 - parallel texts, pitch, intonation, silent vowels marked, 3x pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/?viu7k399ay7caqj

http://japanese.human.metro-u.ac.jp/mic-...index.html
Tokyo accent - introduction.

Seems to be down just now, you might try again later.
If it does not return, I have an offline version somewhere.

Colloquial Japanese - accented morae marked.
Page 289 - Grammar summary tables, pitch marked.
http://www.mediafire.com/?nh2h5gn9olc9pnt

buonaparte Wrote:NOUNS
Accent (Foreign Origin)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...06-01.html
Accents (Compound Nouns)
http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/english/mo...07-01.html

That site looks pretty excellent! Will check it out more later.

Here's my opinion on the whole pitch accent thing...

If you want to sound like a native, or have a very near-native accent, you are at some point going to have to consciously learn pitch accent. I say this, because if you don't, you will not know that there are indeed certain rules which may or may not be broken.

If you don't drop the pitch where a downstep occurs, it is going to sound foreign to a Japanese person.

I believe you can just 'pick it up' to a point - that is on a general level such as sentence level intonation and perhaps some verb endings, but how many people know hashi LH from hashi HL intuitively? My guess is probably not many unless they have actually studied it.

Of course, achieving a near-native accent is probably going to be very time consuming and you'd be better off just trying you're best to imitate as much as you can.

Because I'm quite obsessive over small details (something which actually does get in the way) I do try and memorise the words with an accent - I do this via Cantonese since I have been around it since a young age, I just remember the word as having tones (equivalent to the Cantonese high-level and low-level respectively) and based on that I can usually get my sentence intonation alright.

I say this because before I put a conscious effort into studying the pitch, I would often say a sentence to a Japanese friend and s/he would repeat it back but with a different intonation. Now after consciously trying to correct my accent, when I say a sentence and it is repeated by a Japanese speaker, I usually more-or-less get the pitch right at least. (and that doesn't mean I sound native by far...)