magamo Wrote:In a strict sense, you don't know the sounds of the two words in the dialect you're learning or only partially know them. Whether it counts as knowing the words is a matter of semantics. That's why I said "in a strict sense" in the previous post. If you're ok with not being able to distinguish them and think it does count as knowing them, then you know them.
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Since you mentioned pitch accent, I think it should be taught from day one. I often hear people say something along the line of "You don't need it because different dialects use different pitch patters" or "Native speakers understand you from context if you don't learn pitch accent in most cases so it's not necessary for basic communications."

I actually agree. IMHO, one of the biggest problems with pitch accent for learners isn't that we can't hear the difference (pitch isn't exactly an alien concept if you've ever played an instrument) but simply that it's not taught. Few resources do more than briefly mention the existence of it. Seems kinda like what kanji used to be: you'll never understand it, don't bother trying.

The justification that "native speakers will understand you" is pretty weak in my experience. Yeah, if you bork just one aspect of what you're saying, they can compensate, but there's a threshold where you're just getting so many things wrong that they have no idea what you're trying to say. This goes for English native speakers trying to understand thick japanese accents as much as the reverse.

Different regions having different pitch accents is also not really relevant. I can understand Australians, Texans, Californians, Brits, etc... That doesn't mean i can necessarily understand someone with a random non-native accent. The fact that there isn't one true pronunciation for things doesn't mean you can say anything and still be intelligible. I imagine the same goes for Japanese. Just pick one and try to be consistent.

Having said that, i suck at singing and pitch accent gives me similar problems when speaking lol.

nadiatims Wrote:@magamo
what do you think is the best way to get a good pitch accent?

Probably the best way is to work on it before you learn kana or romaji so you learn the sounds of basic words by listening only and don't give room to develop your own accented pronunciation. I guess learning grammar and the writing system can wait until you can hear pitch patters at a decent level. You might want to avoid text-based learning materials until your pitch accent becomes really good too. Since finishing RtK requires at least a few months, I think you can take advantage of this period.

A suboptimal method might be learning kana and basic words while honing your listening skill by immersing yourself into the target language. I don't know if there is any merit to this over the sound-only-at-first method though.

If you already know a decent amount of vocabulary and grammar with the wrong pitch patters, maybe you have to to hire a pronunciation coach or rely on specific accent reduction courses/videos/CDs, though I don't know if there are decent ones out there. I guess it's still an option to forget everything you learned and do it all over again from scratch by a listening only kind of study method.

If you've learned a large number of words and grammar rules but ignored pitch accent all the way, it'll be tough. I guess the only way is: take advantage of whatever you can get, avoid written Japanese like the plague because it'll reinforce the wrong pitch patters you learned, listen to native materials as much as possible, do an insane amount of pronunciation practice, and hope it'll work.

Some people claim adult learners can't get a perfect native accent. And I know this isn't always true because one of my friends learned Japanese as an adult to native fluency with native accent; she can easily pass for a local person born and grown up in Ibaraki. Looking at people who say you can't learn a foreign language to native proficiency, I kind of feel like they're usually from the "you don't need pitch accent" camp (Maybe I'm biased.). But it seems like people with very good pitch accent such as the friend of mine, Steve Kaufmann, Kaztumoto, and other random people on youtube usually take much more balanced approaches. I know some people think of "kanji before kana," "listen as much as possible even if you can't understand" etc. as unbalanced or even extreme. "Balanced" means "learn every important aspect equally from early on" here.

Because pitch is only one aspect of the whole spectrum of accent in Japanese, I guess it's possible to get a decent pitch accent even if you fall into the last category as long as you're willing to put a huge amount of time and effort. If you only need to hear the pitch patters, I think it's rather easy. Unless you already ingrained the wrong pitch patters too deeply for too many words, phrases, and sentence structures, listening to native material should take care of pitch accent for your passive understanding department, I think. As zigmonty said, pitch isn't the most exotic concept anyway.

Having a native speaker correct your pitch accent is pretty useful too.

I'm awful at pitch accent but I always get corrected by the other TAs because we correct students' pitch accent in class from day 1. I still suck even with all the corrections, though.

dusmar84 Wrote:I have never really looked into RTK 2, so out of curiosity when you are reviewing are you trying to recall the kanji and the ONyomi from the keyword?

No, the book pretty much supplies you with the information and you can review it the way you want. But it goes like this:

It gives word examples for kanji that share a phonetic group, and you learn to associate the phonetic marker (in this example, 中) with the on-yomi (in this example, チュウ)
中国
忠告
沖天
仲介
So that when you see, say 忠実, the 中 reminds you that 忠 is read チュウ.
When I used RTK2, I just made vocab cards with the word on the front, and the reading and meaning on the back for review.