nadiatims wrote:

yudantaiteki wrote:

Nobody says that you should ignore tones in Chinese or pick them up automatically rather than studying them -- because you really do need the tones to make your Chinese comprehensible.

Zorlee, how well are you able to apply deliberately learned pitch when speaking fluently?
I remember a while ago you posted a recording, and I commented that your accent wasn't as good as a previous one you had posted perhaps because you weren't speaking spontaneously. You agreed that your pronunciation was worse for a lot of words you weren't accustomed to hearing all the time. Does that not point somewhat to the conclusion that a major part of getting pronunciation right is just being very very used to hearing how things are said? Was that recording made before you started working on your pitch?

This was the first recording of the speech I was talking about earlier in this thread so yes, this was before I started learning about pitch. I was also reading a script out loud, which is much more difficult than speaking freely in a foreign language IMHO.
I do think listening to a lot of Japanese will help, I really do. But I'm convinced, based on my own experience, that learning the pitch of words and sentences will do wonders as well.

EDIT: I forgot to answer this question:
Zorlee, how well are you able to apply deliberately learned pitch when speaking fluently?
I'm able to pull it off pretty well after practicing it for a while. It's not automatic, but since I know the pitch, I know how to say it. In order for things to get automatic, you need to talk a lot. I use self-talk for this. Remember, this is for isolated words only. I'm still trying to figure out how to learn the pitch of entire sentences etc. It's a very tricky thing..

Last edited by Zorlee (2012 August 30, 6:36 am)

dizmox wrote:

Hmm, I couldn't get the plugin to work for me either, replied to the thread and asked for help  http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?p … 4#p185164.

And sorry, I edited my post after you quoted it..

Someone who knew Python could also use my library to download pitch accent for big batch of words.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=10013

dtcamero wrote:

you can totally get by without any pitch accent. flat japanese is perfectly acceptable. you dont NEED it. you do need grammar and vocabulary. these are things much more valuable to study through intermediate levels.

You can communicate with far less words and far less grammar than people on here aim for. Forgoing some amount of accuracy is likely to improve fluency in a lot of cases. You'll sound very foreign and occasionally have to repeat something, but that doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to accent. Dropping all those 私は's makes you sound too Japanese.

Inny Jan wrote:

Again, calling on my past experience, during my English studies I didn't try to remember the accent/stress but I did take notice of it. These days I'm doing the same with Japanese and my cards do have accent annotations. I don't fail them if I get the accent wrong though.

This is all I've been trying to get across. I take the exact same approach with flashcards. People keep creating false dichotomies using words like 'perfect' and 'every word in the language'. Being able to take notice of something is obviously going to improve your acquisition of it. For English speakers at least, taking notice of pitch requires some familiarisation with it. I couldn't hear it after 18-months. It took days to change that. I've seen introductions to stress in EFL classes too, and teachers would definitely correct errors when practising vocab. I guess the OP wonders why this doesn't happen at all with Japanese.

warakawa wrote:

Agree, but if you re-read first page of this thread, someone said that most Japanese vocab does not have pitch accent. My comment was targeted at those people.

Pitch 0, LHHHHH.. is a pitch accent itself but to most ear it sounds as if it's flat.

I'm that someone, but I just assumed you were already aware of this. It is what I call a word with "no" pitch. There is a difference between a "flat" LH and a high 2nd mora LH. Also this "flat" LHHH is for a phrase, not for every word (see video link below!).  The program/book I talked about was 発音アクセント辞典. This is for the standard Tokyo dialect. It's available on uz-translations and I use it for every word I add to my flashcards. I simply highlight in red the one mora that triggers the higher pitch, when there's one. When there's none, I don't highlight anything and it follows the basic LHHH pattern. A great video about pitch accent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeaLEC6KO20

Last edited by comeauch (2012 August 30, 8:14 am)

AlexandreC, it's your video isn't it? Do you still intend to continue the series?

vonPeterhof wrote:

AlexandreC, it's your video isn't it? Do you still intend to continue the series?

Yes, it is. The second video is technically ready to be recorded, but I've been busy working on another project.

qwarten wrote:

We don't have pitch accents in Turkish and I'm quite bad at music. So, trying to learn pitch accent, deliberately, might be too bothersome for me. One thing I wonder is, while it probably is glaringly bad to those who are well versed with pitch accent, how poorly I fare without no study.

This is an excerpt from marimite novels with a recording of me reading it attached:

[...]

Recording: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0neAs2TiutK

It's of poor quality and I don't really read out loud that frequently. I'm aware that I've mispronounced several words. But I would like your comments, is this really cringe worthy from a pitch-accent-aware-person's POV?

Hmm... I'd say slow down and focus on having a more natural rhythm. That strikes me as the priority here. Hard to critique if you're going that fast..

Compare with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBTVHj0vdeg speed.

Last edited by dizmox (2012 August 30, 1:30 pm)

AlexandreC wrote:

I had my friend say some words to teach people how to discern where the accent is when hearing a word. He's from Kansai and I thought that'd be fine for just a few words, but I actually had to coach him on the pronunciation of niHONJIn. I guess it's niHONjin in Kansaiben.

Hi Alexandre

Do a average native Japanese actually know the subtle difference like niHONJIn and niHONjin?

For anyone curious about pitch accent in Japanese. You can listen to it here:
check Introduciton
http://tisc.isc.u-toyama.ac.jp/pronunci … tents.html
Quiz:
http://tisc.isc.u-toyama.ac.jp/pronunci … ro/01.html

Zorlee wrote:

I use Daijirin for pitch notation. I just copy-paste them into Anki. I think there was a thread on here on how to download pitch notation for all your cards using some sort of a script, but I couldn't figure it out, so I just do it manually for now. I hope there will be a plug-in for this in the future, just like the audio download plug-in.

I have the daijirin app on my iphone, and I don't recall seeing pitch notation anywhere... do I have to do something special to enable it? o_O

EDIT: Got 100% on the quiz too... it's really really easy, right? And I agree with Nadiatims.

Last edited by SammyB (2012 September 01, 8:53 am)

Zorlee wrote:

No, it's there, you just have to find it.
Look up the word たわいない. Right under the word (which is bolded), you'll see the number 4 inside a box. That's the pitch notation

Ok. I see! Just didn't know what I was looking for I guess. So what do the numbers mean? Does "4" mean the pitch accent falls on the 4th Mora?

EDIT:

So I am in the situation where I have finished core6k, know up to N2 grammar, and can easily hear/distinguish AND reproduce different pitch accents. HOWEVER I cannot conduct even relatively simple conversations in Japanese. I just can't produce stuff without thinking about it for ages and even then it comes out all wrong. Surely for someone like me it would be ridiculous to worry about nailing pitch accent until I can at least have regular conversations in Japanese fairly easily. Right?!

I've been told I have a great accent, but I would trade that ANY DAY for being able to express myself in Japanese... Especially since I just moved to Japan one month ago for the JET programme. That's why I'm a bit concerned about all this advice on focusing on pitch accent from the beginning...

Last edited by SammyB (2012 September 01, 9:07 am)

SammyB wrote:

Zorlee wrote:

No, it's there, you just have to find it.
Look up the word たわいない. Right under the word (which is bolded), you'll see the number 4 inside a box. That's the pitch notation

Ok. I see! Just didn't know what I was looking for I guess. So what do the numbers mean? Does "4" mean the pitch accent falls on the 4th Mora?

EDIT:

So I am in the situation where I have finished core6k, know up to N2 grammar, and can easily hear/distinguish AND reproduce different pitch accents. HOWEVER I cannot conduct even relatively simple conversations in Japanese. I just can't produce stuff without thinking about it for ages and even then it comes out all wrong. Surely for someone like me it would be ridiculous to worry about nailing pitch accent until I can at least have regular conversations in Japanese fairly easily. Right?!

I've been told I have a great accent, but I would trade that ANY DAY for being able to express myself in Japanese... Especially since I just moved to Japan one month ago for the JET programme. That's why I'm a bit concerned about all this advice on focusing on pitch accent from the beginning...

Don't worry too much about pitch for now. I would highly AlexandreC's self-talk exercise, if you can't express yourself well. http://tiny.cc/mac57
In order to talk well, you need to practice talking. As simple as that!
(I neglected production for 2,5 years, and even though I was able to communicate, I had big holes in my active vocabulary. Now I'm working a lot on production and I'm making great progress! It's tough, but if you keep at it, you'll get better before you know it!)

Last class I asked my Japanese Japanese teacher how to learn intonation and she told me to listen carefully to Anime, drama and music to pick up the correct intonation. She also told me to listen to Japanese audio even if I don't understand it in order to get used to how the language sounds. And honestly I was surprised because I thought she would recommend some traditional method or book.

Something interesting is that she studied Japanese literature and east Asian culture in university, which, at least to me, gives the expectation that she has a traditional way in dealing with language learning. But also note that she self-motivatedly (?) learned a bit of several languages, so this I guess solves that. (Just something I though to be interesting and wanted to share with you.)

Last edited by undead_saif (2012 September 22, 11:17 am)