My friend, who is a Japanese teacher, says that one big difference between Chinese students of Japanese and "western" students of Japanese (being those who speak a European language as their first language), is the understanding of the concept of pitch in the syllables of each word. the way a word goes _ _ _-__, or _-__ etc. This being a change in the pitch of the syllable but never a volume change or stress etc. Textbooks completely fail to point this out and incorrectly call it syllable stress when it's not that at all, it's something quite different.

Chinese students can pick this up immediately and can notice the Kanto/Kansai differences in where the pitch cahnge comes. "Western" students often place emphasis/stress/increased volume on the syllable in question and therefore end up sounding unnatural in their speech.

I'm from England and I just can see that myself. To my ear, it sounds like a change in volume, not just a change in pitch. I can pnly tell if someone is from kansai when they use different vocabulary. Hearing my girlfriend's mum and sister ( from Tokyo) speak together and hearing my girlfriend and her friends ( from kyoto) speak speak, I can't sense this tone differnt in every word they speak.

So many non-native japanese speakers in osaka and Kyoto claim they can speak kansai-ben. When they are speaking the Tokyo arrangement of pitches mixed with local vocab. This is like someone speaking English with a British accent and using American vocab every now and then and claiming to speak American English.

Has the attention to these pitches every come up in your study of Japanese? My friend said it is so vital and is always overlooked by textbooks and teachers. A vital key to correct prounciation.

I've heard of this but haven't seen it mentioned in any of my books. Does anyone know of audio clips which illustrate the differences is pitch between the regional Japanese dialects?

However, most Chinese can't tell the difference between ka ke ku ke ko and ga ge gu ge go etc, in pronounciation and listening. So that brings them a big disadvantage. I think that this is a huge disadvantage but my friend says the pitch thing is more noticeable to a native speaker. Can't see that myself though. Not being able to recognise the difference between koko-here and gogo-afternoon is pretty important to me.

I took a course for 8 weeks that specifically addressed these issues. It was purely on pronunciation. I'll try and find out the name of the text book we used. There were lots of exercises requiring you to distinguish between pitch patterns. For many words and phrases, the meaning changes utterly when a different pitch is used.

Since English is a stress based language, it's not easy for us to avoid doing the same in Japanese. Chinese people may be better at identifying pitch but they're sometimes not that great at mimicing the consonant sounds. Koreans also have good pronunciation but are terrible at distinguishing between た and だ,　し and じ etc. Try asking a Korean person which is correct - ともだち or ともたち. In my experience, the best first language to have from the point of view of having good Japanese pronunciation is Spanish. Spanish, like Japanese, is also a rhythm based rather than stress based language. I don't know if the terminology I'm using here is correct or not.

I'm not sure how far you can take analogies of the differences between Japanese accents and English accents. One thing that's interesting is the attitude Japanese people have towards different regional accents. In Japan, people from the countryside or from outside Tokyo are occassionally embarassed about their accent. The Tokyo one is seen as sophisticated. This doesn't happen in the UK, and quite to the contrary, people with different accents are often seen to be more attractive. Also, someone that talks in an old fashioned, posh English accent would be seen as stuck up and it's frequently not a positive thing at all.

kyotokanji Wrote:However, most Chinese can't tell the difference between ka ke ku ke ko and ga ge gu ge go etc, in pronounciation and listening. So that brings them a big disadvantage. I think that this is a huge disadvantage but my friend says the pitch thing is more noticeable to a native speaker. Can't see that myself though. Not being able to recognise the difference between koko-here and gogo-afternoon is pretty important to me.

I'm not sure about this, but I think it's Korean people who have more of a problem with this than the Chinese. Well, I can tell you that Korean people definitely have a huge problem with it but I'm not sure about how easy or difficult it is for Chinese people.

I follow the japanesepod101.com lessons and as from newbie lesson 31 a new teacher, Naomi sensei, focuses explicitly on pitch accent, which is quite interesting.
I have a phonological/phonetic background, so i have a special interest in this kind of topics.

Stress (as in English, German, Dutch) is synonymous with the effort by which breath is expelled from the lungs; the acoustical effect is loudness.
Other correlates of stress are higher pitch and extra duration.
In other words: In English, stressed syllables in a word are pronounced louder, longer, and with higher pitch. In Japanese, however, all syllables are pronounced with equal length and loudness, so it is just the pitch that makes the difference.

1/3 of all languages do not have stress. Those languages (e.g. Chinese) often have lexical tone: every syllable in such a language is pronounced with either a H(igh) or a L(ow) tone. Recent research shows that languages either have stress or tone, with one exception found so far: Samate Ma'ya (New Guinea) has both stress and tone.

So the trick for speakers of English (or languages with similar stress systems) is to learn to stress syllables using only pitch, not loudness and longer duration.

The chapter "Japanese pitch accent" in Wikipedia gives a nice but somewhat technical overview.