@Javizy
I looked at your posts again, and I was wondering: are you studying core 6000 and a vocabulary deck you've made at the same time? Sorry, if this seems like a stupid question, but I can be a bit dense sometimes.

Thank you guys so much for your comments =)

For the last three days I've been adding accent codes to my vocab cards (+ audio), and I gotta say - it's awesome!
It only takes a second or two to add, and it's really not that hard to remember accent + reading and meaning, instead of just reading and meaning.
And it really makes me more aware of pitch accent in general, which is really cool!
The only bad thing is that I have around 10k cards without accent codes on them, but oh well. I'll add it to my cards from now on and add codes to old cards if I obviously mess up the accent while reviewing.

I'll start some serious shadowing soon as well...
Will keep you posted on that thing as well

kusterdu Wrote:@Javizy
I looked at your posts again, and I was wondering: are you studying core 6000 and a vocabulary deck you've made at the same time? Sorry, if this seems like a stupid question, but I can be a bit dense sometimes.

Yeah. I have the Core 6000 deck on my iPod and just casually open it and do 20-30 sentences. I don't worry about quotas or whatever. It's a well-produced resource and I never got to use it as a beginner, so I thought I'd take advantage of it to work on my accent a bit. Shadowing has a bunch of other advantages too.

First of all, some of the corrections you present are slightly off – when you have a syllable like じゅう, the sound can only go down between じゅ andう, during the long vowel. You might also have noticed that in compounds, the pitch often moves to the first syllable of the second word, although it’s not always obvious which word that will be if the compound is made up of several words...

Secondly, learning the right pitch is obviously important, but there are several rules that make pitch change, so it’s important that you become familiar with the most important ones, especially for verbs, and then for adjectives and adverbs. Without this knowledge, you won't be able to produce correct sentences even if you know the pitch of individual words.

And I agree with you -- immersion alone is not enough to fix pitch.

As for shadowing, I personally put close to zero faith in it. It’s a waste of time, imho, especially for someone like you (it might be a different issue for someone whose pronunciation is way off). The key is production and correction in a controlled environment. What you need is a native speaker to give you some kind of indication every time you get it wrong, a tap and nudge, etc., so you can start over and attempt to fix it yourself. Correcting yourself is a very powerful tool. This is how you notice where you're off and develop correct habits.

AlexandreC Wrote:The key is production and correction in a controlled environment. What you need is a native speaker to give you some kind of indication every time you get it wrong, a tap and nudge, etc., so you can start over and attempt to fix it yourself. Correcting yourself is a very powerful tool. This is how you notice where you're off and develop correct habits.

Definitely agree with AlexandreC in this regard. It can make a LOT of difference.

Zorlee, I didn't listen through your whole reading... it sounded rather "tense" or "somewhat nervous" and lacks a nice flow or rhythm. Generally, I think it's alright for reading-aloud and for speech practices. However, if you plan to participate in a competition such as International Speech Contest in Japanese, the benchmark is higher.

You can listen to past competitions here 「外国人による日本語弁論大会」 PDF files are available.

I don't think it's possible to "shake-off" your natural native accent when speaking in Japanese of which I find that you have a "natural nasal sound" when reading. Faking an accent may seem likely possible, then again, it will SOUND pretentious and unnatural to the Japanese native speakers.

Having said that, it's good that you want to get better at speaking Japanese. And I think it is about having better enunciation and speech training to convey your thoughts and feelings in the correct representation to the other person/judges.

Bear in mind, the judging criteria is not on language alone and other criteria such as: subject choice, supporting materials, organization and presentation are also taken into consideration during the contest.

Javizy Wrote:Last time this topic came up, I started adding the 大辞林 codes to my flashcards like you intend to do. Since I have audio too, it really helps reinforce the accent, and acts as a test too. If I thought the audio of 島流し was accentless, I'll know I was wrong when I see the ③. It also helped me quickly recognise patterns. For example, most repetitive (畳語?)擬態語 like さくさく, ぎらぎら, ふわふわ etc tend to be code ①, and compound words like 島流し, 手放し, 物笑い etc tend to have the pitch at the beginning of the second word. I didn't seem to get any of these benefits from the audio alone, at least not as effectively.

Zorlee Wrote:For the last three days I've been adding accent codes to my vocab cards (+ audio), and I gotta say - it's awesome!
It only takes a second or two to add, and it's really not that hard to remember accent + reading and meaning, instead of just reading and meaning.
And it really makes me more aware of pitch accent in general, which is really cool!
The only bad thing is that I have around 10k cards without accent codes on them, but oh well. I'll add it to my cards from now on and add codes to old cards if I obviously mess up the accent while reviewing.

I've been thinking about that for a while. But even on new cards, I don't really want to be adding the accent codes by hand, and I'm wondering if it could be automated. Currently, how are you two looking them up?

(I guess if you're using the 大辞林 definition on the card, it won't be much trouble to take the pitch code too.)

I did 10500 cards by hand.
If it's possible to get automated, then that's great. If not, then you know what to do!

I use http://www.weblio.jp/ for look-ups!

Zorlee Wrote:I did 10500 cards by hand.
If it's possible to get automated, then that's great. If not, then you know what to do!

I use http://www.weblio.jp/ for look-ups!

Hey, thanks for that link!

I review on my iPod, and I have my cards set up so tapping the kana looks the word up in 大辞林. From there I copy the examples and then paste them into Anki along with the accent. I automate the rest of the card-making process up until that point, so spending a few seconds for the examples, which really make the difference to me, isn't a big deal. The pitch is just a bonus really.

I do actually have automated examples from the Tanaka corpus, but they tend to be too long and messy for the kind of conciseness I'm after in understanding the word. I did have pitch automated at one point, but g00 completely changed its site and I couldn't be bothered to revise the code since it was so different. If you could write a program that directly accesses a dictionary like 大辞林, it wouldn't be very hard (and it would be faster and more reliable...).

Zorlee, are you saying you did 10500 cards by hand, using web look-ups?

Javizy, your method sounds more efficient.

I read that 大辞林 is available as EPWING, and there exist some open-source readers and other software for handling that format. I expect there are many possibilities for doing useful automated things with it.

Hmm, so how can I get that file? So far, I've only found electronic dictionary devices that have it inside. (My Japanese is really not very good yet.)

Another possible problem would be whether there is open-source software that can read the current version. Looks like KEBook was last updated in 2000, and EBView in 2004.

HelenF Wrote:Zorlee, are you saying you did 10500 cards by hand, using web look-ups?

Javizy, your method sounds more efficient.

I read that 大辞林 is available as EPWING, and there exist some open-source readers and other software for handling that format. I expect there are many possibilities for doing useful automated things with it.

Hmm, so how can I get that file? So far, I've only found electronic dictionary devices that have it inside. (My Japanese is really not very good yet.)

Another possible problem would be whether there is open-source software that can read the current version. Looks like KEBook was last updated in 2000, and EBView in 2004.

My programming skills are pretty rusty, so I haven't tried investigating any further. I think someone with a bit more experience could easily write a more sophisticated card generator than mine using something like an EPWING J-J dictionary and have it be compatible with various vocab list formats (I use the iPhone dictionary 'Japanese' to make mine). Maybe people already have, but distributing them would obviously be a problem.

HelenF Wrote:Zorlee, are you saying you did 10500 cards by hand, using web look-ups?

Yes

It would be fine to distribute a card generator where people add their own copy of the dictionary file.

For the moment, I should probably focus on getting to a high enough Japanese level to read software documentation

In my opinion, even if you had the pitch of every word down pat, there'd still be a fair amount of work left to do because there is so much variation brought on by surrounding words. For instance, I've just been pulling my hair out trying to figure out the effect of の. And then there's the issue of compound words which are not typically in accent dictionaries, and the fact that the most common pitch sometimes differs from what the dictionaries say, etc. It's just an awful mess.

A friend of mine took a short story and marked all the downfalls for me. It's extremely useful, but we had to go over it together because even she got a number of them wrong. And of course, the more questions I ask, the more I find words that have a given pitch in the story, but a different pitch in isolation, so I'm trying to figure out and predict where the pitch would fall in other contexts.

At this point, a text with marked pitch is the best tool I can imagine for learning pitch. Of course, that doesn't exist as such. It'd be even more awesome if the text were annotated and indicated, for instance, what the pitch is in isolation and why it's different in the story.

I would very much like to start actively improving my pitch accent, but I'm afraid about what messing around too much without a consistent audio reference frame could do to the way I sound. How do you go about starting to study these kind of things? I feel that I've picked up the correct accent on many words just by talking to and listening to my Japanese friends, but the ability to learn the proper accent of new words as I find them in books I read would be a very powerful asset.

Luckily, I've dabbled into phonetics before so I'm not completely lost in these quarters but there are a few things I would want to check before I go through my proverbial pile of flash cards and add pitch accent to all of them. Is it safe to study the pitch accent of individual words and stick to it or could the accent of those individual words change considerably depending on the context (inflection, particles etc)?

Has anyone found any useful generalizations? For instance, I would think that most, if not all, 形容詞 with the ~しい ending have their accent on the "しい" part (nothing more than a quick observation that could potentially be wrong).

Fleskmos Wrote:Is it safe to study the pitch accent of individual words and stick to it or could the accent of those individual words change considerably depending on the context (inflection, particles etc)?

Has anyone found any useful generalizations?

They do change a fair bit. In particular, verb endings generally dictate where pitch falls, depending on whether the verb had pitch to begin with or not.

The worst case scenario would be that you would know pitch, but not know the rules. Then, you'd still know the pitch and would be able to apply the rules as you learn or notice them. I certainly wouldn't let that stop you for starting to study it.

AlexandreC Wrote:They do change a fair bit. In particular, verb endings generally dictate where pitch falls, depending on whether the verb had pitch to begin with or not.

The worst case scenario would be that you would know pitch, but not know the rules. Then, you'd still know the pitch and would be able to apply the rules as you learn or notice them. I certainly wouldn't let that stop you for starting to study it.

Fair enough : )

On a different note, I'm going to spend a year in Kyoto after this summer. Is it even worth trying to align my accent with standard Japanese or am I forever doomed to speak a non-standard dialect? I have been fluent for quite a short time so I'm pretty sure I'll absorb the Kyoto dialect wether I want it or not. I'm thinking that maybe it would be worth to start studying Kyoto speech pitch accent for the sake of consistency but is it even remotely possible to find a dictionary with dialectal pitch accent marked?

Fleskmos Wrote:I'm thinking that maybe it would be worth to start studying Kyoto speech pitch accent for the sake of consistency but is it even remotely possible to find a dictionary with dialectal pitch accent marked?

As far as I know... no.

AlexandreC Wrote:

Fleskmos Wrote:I'm thinking that maybe it would be worth to start studying Kyoto speech pitch accent for the sake of consistency but is it even remotely possible to find a dictionary with dialectal pitch accent marked?

As far as I know... no.

Too bad : (


Another thing I've been wondering about. Sometimes, when I repeat flash cards marked with pitch accent I find that I read the cards out loud in different ways to identify the correct pitch accent. Those of you who've been at this for a long time, what's your opinion on doing that? Do you think it's best to avoid it? I'm thinking that it might be best to stay away from it so I don't unintentionally introduce the incorrect accents into my memory along with the correct ones, but it would be great to hear the opinions of those of you who've studied pitch accent long enough to see the result of your methods.

When I first started studying japanese, I didn't know there is this thing called pitch accent. Then I read about it somewhere but couldn't really recognize it. People would pronounce the 3 different hashi for me and I would hear some difference, but didn't really 'get' how to emulate it. Any memory of the correct pitch would evaporate within minutes. I figured it's not that big a deal (and it's not. A much bigger deal is eliminating your english stress accent). Then after I was about 2-3 years into studying japanese, I just started noticing the manner in which people say basic words (especially verbs) all the time. I started noticing the intonation/pitch/stress (whatever you want to call it) all the time (kind of like constant eureka moments). Now I am actually able to hear the intonation I can emulate it pretty easily and am slowly absorbing it without conscious effort on my part. I can pronounce words fairly accurately, but if you asked me where the stress is, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I'd have to say the word to myself a few times to figure out where the stress is (and hopefully I'm correct more often than not). In the past, when I would see words listed with their pitch accent on this forum or elsewhere, I found it difficult to consciously try to put the accent on certain mora, because I wasn't even recognizing it consistently in speech. I think trying to learn correct pitch by memorizing it from accent markers without using audio is a huge waste of time. You need to get to the point that your ears can recognize it effortlessly. Otherwise it'd be like showing someone who can't hold a tune some sheet music and telling them to whistle the melody. I'd wager that even most people who aren't tone deaf can't do that.

nadiatims Wrote:I think trying to learn correct pitch by memorizing it from accent markers without using audio is a huge waste of time. You need to get to the point that your ears can recognize it effortlessly. Otherwise it'd be like showing someone who can't hold a tune some sheet music and telling them to whistle the melody. I'd wager that even most people who aren't tone deaf can't do that.

True! Luckily though, I found an audio option for my electronic dictionary yesterday and I could ask my friends to correct me if I say something in a strange way. My mother tongue, Swedish, frequently makes use of pitch accent to distinguish words so I think I might be able to relate to the concept enough to make it worthwhile!

I have a similar experience of starting to notice the way words are commonly pronounced and I find that being around native speakers and engaging in conversations really does help a lot, but I'm sure there will always be a few words that slip by and it would be great to be able to sort those flaws out. I'm always very impressed when I meet someone who speaks my mother tongue as a second language with a native-like accent and I would like to convey the same feeling of smoothness as an interlocutor when it comes to Japanese : )

There is obviously no point in learning pitch if you can’t produce it or if you don’t know what it is! But who are we to determine who can and who can’t. I assumed anyone going through the trouble of learning it or amending stacks of cards had passed the stage of recognition/production.