Well many, if not most words don't have pitch accents and the meaning can normally be inferred from the context. I would suppose the reason why they don't teach it is that it's not essential to comprehension and most people are already having enough trouble with the writing system. Btw, in case you didn't know, it's possible to find the 発音アクセント辞典 on the Internet!

Some areas of Japan have no pitch accent, so it can't be entirely essential.

I think mostly it's just considered too hard to teach, and since nobody teaches it, everyone just mimics everyone else who doesn't teach it.  It should be emphasized more; the program I taught in did pitch accent correction a lot.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 August 27, 7:52 pm)

Well, I am talking about Standard Tokyo Japanese, you know the Japanese everyone's learning and teaching, which does have pitch accent on most words and even particles.

BTW, what program was that?

Last edited by warakawa (2012 August 27, 7:56 pm)

This is only the second time I've heard a student of Japanese raise the topic of pitch accent, the only other time was a local hyperpolyglot who was raising concern along the same lines.

The answer we all arrived at, (though not really satisfying to him, nor probably to you) was that a decent and appropriate pitch accent can generally be learned passively by listening practice with native speakers, where consideration to their background is noted.

Some linguistic texts exist that contain written marks to denote pitch accent but these are usually to show emphasis on regional differences ( I can't seem to find the book I'm thinking of right now). But I've yet to see a regular text that actively included the marks throughout the entire book. My only guess is if you were really looking, perhaps older linguistic audience based textbooks - as opposed to more modern general audience texts- might have included such marks.

Isn't it because pitch accent is generally not taught regardless of how important it is? Maybe a random lesson about homophones pointing it out in a gazillion textbook lesson will talk about it, but even then they'll only focus on a few well-known examples, which Japanese also randomly gets (橋ｖｓ箸). You just have to pick it up, and if you say it incorrectly then maybe a teacher/native/someone who knows better will correct you if you're lucky.

The fact that most classes and textbooks focus on beginner/lower intermediate lessons where pitch is the least of your problems doesn't help.

Also, since the JLPT doesn't focus on speaking then there's no official reason for any classes to teach it.

kitakitsune wrote:

And you have to remember that a good 50% of Japan doesn't speak Japanese with the Tokyo accent taught in textbooks.

And you have to remember that a good 100% of Japan doesn't speak Japanese with American or whatever gaijin accent.

i think all you can really do is point out that it exists and just emulate it as best you can. I don't think there are drills you can do to nail it until you recognize it so well that it becomes easy (this comes with a lot of listening practice). Maybe bucket loads of shadowing could help...

I think it helps if you learn entirely from audio at the start. When students see something written down on paper even if it's not romaji, they kind of turn of stop listening as precisely to the sounds they hear.
japanese person:*says something*
learner: huh? what's that? can you write it down.
japanese person:*writes it down*
learner: Oh now i hear what you're saying...*proceeds to pronounce it wrongly*

I think trying to capturing the pitch system in writing would just be frustrating, especially for beginners. Even systems like IPA cannot capture all the subtleties of spoken pronunciation. You've just got to listen and imitate and accept that you'll suck badly at first.

warakawa wrote:

kitakitsune wrote:

And you have to remember that a good 50% of Japan doesn't speak Japanese with the Tokyo accent taught in textbooks.

yep, excellent logic. Maybe I shouldn't have learnt proper English since there are so many Indian on this planet.

If you were equally likely to go to India vs. the US, or equally likely to meet Indian English speakers vs. Americans, then perhaps it could make sense not to put too much priority on learning where all the stress accents go.

I agree with Nadiatims and some of the others here that it's nice to point out that pitch accent exists and give a few examples of how it sounds, but dwelling on it probably isn't that helpful.  The only way to learn to produce it correctly is to listen to and mimic lots of actual speech.

warakawa wrote:

JimmySeal wrote:

I agree with Nadiatims and some of the others here that it's nice to point out that pitch accent exists and give a few examples of how it sounds, but dwelling on it probably isn't that helpful.  The only way to learn to produce it correctly is to listen to and mimic lots of actual speech.

And how's that turning out for most Japanese learners? I know many JLPT N1 candidates who still pronounce が as ga as in lady Gaga regardless of it's positioning.

What's wrong with that? (If you're talking about the nasalized が, that's not a requirement and even in Kanto there's not complete uniformity in when people use it.)

I've said before that for me, exposure wasn't enough for pitch accent and I'm still not great at it.  But it does take a lot of work to improve if you're not one of those lucky people who do just pick it up automatically.

To quote myself from a previous discussion of pitch accent:

I would say that any learner, no matter what their level, should do three basic things:
1. Understand the concept of pitch accent and the basic way it works in Japanese.
2. Train your ear to be able to hear the difference in pitches (not necessarily being able to detect all the pitch changes in a long sentence, but at least if a native speaker says はし HL and はし LH in isolation you should be able to tell which is which.)
3. Practice being able to use pitch accent in your own speech -- even just to the level of being able to correctly read a sentence out loud from a text that has the pitch marked for you.  This has to be done with a native speaker; you cannot trust that you will be able to do this on your own with no correction.  But I think that even just practicing for 30 minutes with a native speaker reading some of the dialogues in JSL (for instance) would be a vast improvement over just pretending it doesn't exist or that it's some advanced level thing that you don't need to bother with at all.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 August 28, 3:10 am)

warakawa wrote:

And how's that turning out for most Japanese learners? I know many JLPT N1 candidates who still pronounce が as ga as in lady Gaga regardless of it's positioning.

So in other words, like half the people in Japan?  Also, we're talking about intonation here, not pronunciation.

I don't think it matters so much... learn to pronounce each syllable correctly - tons of resources for this online (just imitate the way it's meant to sound). Other than that there's no stress or pitch on most syllables really so complaining about this is a waste of time.

another thing...when imitating, commit to it. Don't kind of hold back from fully imitating the entirety of how things are said out of sense of embarrassment or assuming you can't do it or anything else.

I think a lot of the time learners will ask a native for some word. The native will say it. And then the learner will ask them to repeat it a few times to establish what the kana are. Then they'll feel confident saying it. But the kana do not  represent the entirety of a words pronunciation.