SammyB wrote:

Dude, you are so annoying. Perhaps because English is not your native language you don't realise how obnoxious you sound when you write. Or perhaps you are rude in your native language too...

I'd prefer to be able to express myself clearly and naturally in Japanese (without offending people) than have perfect pitch accent.

Everybody have their own preferences. I respect yours, and you should respect mine. No need to call me rude and obnoxious which ironically would make you rude and obnoxious.

This thread is about Pitch accent and it's importance in learning Japanese. I would appreciate if you keep it on topic.

Last edited by warakawa (2012 August 28, 10:07 am)

kitakitsune wrote:

Blows my mind how you can get perfectly fluent in Japanese and still sound like that.

Good lord, how can he have an accent like that and be an expert?  Does he even care?

Last edited by legendmaxx (2012 August 28, 10:40 am)

The average Japanese teacher won't teach pitch because they can't. They don't know how it works and they never paid attention to it. Those with proper training will tell you it was brought up in their training, but they probably don't remember anymore. And then there's the fact that teachers come from different regions and aren't actually confident enough about their accent to teach it as being the proper pronunciation.

Zorlee wrote:

. However, after 2,5 years of intense study (and JLPT N1 under my belt) I still didn't pronounce basic verbs like "aru" "naru" "dekiru" with the correct pitch.

And that's why I think that if a person is going to bother learning pitch, at least in the beginning, adding pitch notation to their cards is a bit of an overkill: instead, they need to go back to the basic words they use all the time and make sure they got those down pat first. Then you can start worrying about less common words.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Probably not.  He's 90 years old and an internationally known and respected authority on Japan, with tons of books to his credit.  I doubt his pronunciation gives him too much worry.

Well you see, had he mastered Japanese pronunciation and pitch accent from the inception, it would make him even more convincing, and all these criticism about his speech would not occur.

In all honesty, I don't really care how much of an expert he is on Japanese literature, he still sound no better than your average gaijin.

warakawa wrote:

Everybody have their own preferences. I respect yours, and you should respect mine. No need to call me rude and obnoxious which ironically would make you rude and obnoxious.

This is a message board where people exchange ideas and people (including you) ask questions.  There's no need to "respect" rude people, especially rude people who want others to answer questions for them.

You'd have to be Japanese to sound naturally Japanese, the best one can do is sound as natural as possible, of course you'll sound different anyway. You can sound as Japanese as possible but you still stick out like a sore thumb

kitakitsune wrote:

Something tells me you don't have that much experience with interacting with foreigners in Japan. What does the average gaijin sound like?

Honestly it sounds like he doesn't have much experience with foreigners period.  Most of the foreigners I've met (I live in a tourist destination and I travel on business) have strong accents.  I'm not sure why people with strong accents, be it Indian, French, Spanish etc.  would be made fun of behind their back. 

I also don't understand the obsession some people have with sounding Japanese.  I understand people wanting to sound that way, what I don't understand is why they project their goals on to everyone else.  Some people are really quite happy sounding foreign.  You don't go to England and feel bad you sound American do you (or whatever country you're from)?  Once you're easily understandable it's all good in my books.

For pitch accent, I think it's just a case of one thing too many.  While some people are saying it's not that much more work, it's another seemingly alien task that you have to learn along with everything else.  I think a lot of people would get discouraged from having to "deal with" pitch accent on top of everything else.  That is me projecting my feelings on to other people

That's not to say it should never be taught, the option to have a textbook or class to learn it would be awesome.

ojousan wrote:

I definitely want to practice my pitch accent, but I think there might be a danger of English speakers trying to get the pitch right and ending up adding stress where they shouldn't be. Or that's what I do no matter how hard I try. Does that make sense?

Yes, this is a problem.  In fact, it's a problem I had (have).  The easiest solution is obviously to get a native speaker to correct you when you're accidentally adding stress to words.  From my limited experiences with doing this, adding stress to words really jumps out at a native speaker, so they should be able to correct you if you do it wrong.

However, if you're trying to learn pitch without the help of a native speaker, maybe you could just do recognition instead of production.  At least it would be a first step.

Use Core2k, add pitch markings to all the words, and then make a card where you get a recording of the word on the front of the card, and on the back you have the pitch.  All you have to do is listen to the word and figure out what the pitch is. 

Another possible card type would be kanji and possibly kana on the front, and then accent markings on the back.  I guess this would be more of a production card so you should probably be more careful.


Also, keep in mind that the "don't learn output/production until you are able to get it right 100% of the time" is an idea that's strongly pushed by AJATT & antimoon.  A lot of people (even people on this forum) have gotten to a very high level by directly disregarding this advice.  From my experience, learning to correct bad habits (formed through studying incorrectly, etc) at a much later stage is not nearly as hard as AJATT and antimoon make it out to be.

It may be good and rewarding for you to study pitch even if you aren't getting it 100% correct.

It should be pointed out that Donald Keene is really really old, and might actually have trouble speaking English as well at his age. It's kind of unfair to pick on him for his accent in that video, and the entire thing is so dumb.

Donald Keene is well-respected because of what he says, not the inflections or tones with which he says it. I doubt he'd choose to trade an ounce of his expertise for minor cosmetic improvements in his pronunciation, and I'm not sure many of you would either in his same position.

partner55083777 wrote:

Yes, this is a problem.  In fact, it's a problem I had (have).  The easiest solution is obviously to get a native speaker to correct you when you're accidentally adding stress to words.  From my limited experiences with doing this, adding stress to words really jumps out at a native speaker, so they should be able to correct you if you do it wrong.

However, if you're trying to learn pitch without the help of a native speaker, maybe you could just do recognition instead of production.  At least it would be a first step.

Use Core2k, add pitch markings to all the words, and then make a card where you get a recording of the word on the front of the card, and on the back you have the pitch.  All you have to do is listen to the word and figure out what the pitch is.

I think I will likely work on recognition rather than production, using your suggested card method. I do want the benefits of improved listening skills through learning how to hear pitch, but I don't really care if my own pitch isn't perfect. I think people will be thrown off by my bad grammar more than my imperfect pitch.

I'm in an awkward situation for this kind of study, though, because I live in the semi-inaka in Kansai--and my co-workers definitely speak Kansai-ben a LOT. Therefore, even if I study Tokyo dialect through professionally-recorded audio clips, when I hear Japanese in my daily life it may clash with that, rather than reinforce what I've learned. Any suggestions, anyone? I don't really want to ask my coworkers to carefully monitor my Japanese, because 1) they're really busy, and 2) I find it awkward correcting people's English and they probably feel the same with Japanese.

Maybe if I just work on being able to HEAR pitch accent rather than memorize it, then I'll still get the benefit of improved hearing but won't experience any confusion for specific vocab. What do you think?

@ojousan
Find a person who would like to improve their English pronunciation in exchange for helping you to improve your Japanese one. If this is going to be 関西弁 so be it - there is nothing wrong with having an authentic Japanese accent, event if this is not a "standard" one.

(Re: my English accent. The only accent that I would not like to acquire in English is North American but all the shades of British would be fine with me. These days though, I probably sound more of an Ozie than a Brit...)

ojousan wrote:

I'm in an awkward situation for this kind of study, though, because I live in the semi-inaka in Kansai--and my co-workers definitely speak Kansai-ben a LOT. Therefore, even if I study Tokyo dialect through professionally-recorded audio clips, when I hear Japanese in my daily life it may clash with that, rather than reinforce what I've learned. Any suggestions, anyone? I don't really want to ask my coworkers to carefully monitor my Japanese, because 1) they're really busy, and 2) I find it awkward correcting people's English and they probably feel the same with Japanese.

Maybe if I just work on being able to HEAR pitch accent rather than memorize it, then I'll still get the benefit of improved hearing but won't experience any confusion for specific vocab. What do you think?

I understand your situation because I was in the same spot while learning Japanese in Ehime and eventually marrying a girl from Osaka.

There's no easy solution here. The Kansai and Tokyo accents are completely different and most people from Osaka cannot teach the correct Tokyo accent that appears in most learning materials. It's like if you were learning English in London and trying to get your British friends to help you sound like an American from Ohio. It just isn't going to work out so great.

Maybe you could ask your Kansai friends to help you recognize the difference between the accents and then you can concentrate on one or the other, depending on your goals.

Last edited by kitakitsune (2012 August 29, 7:16 pm)