Honestly, I'd have to disagree that learners can't distinguish pitch when listening to Japanese.  If you bothered with an audio course worth the (expletive) its printed on, the speakers will make the pitch very very clear to you.  And any audio series worth anything will get you to a point where you 'll get a good "feel" for what sounds right, and doesn't.  I think pitch is rather easy to listen out for, its just ppl don't actually *try* to listen for it.  To say they can't is making it out to be harder than it actually is imo.

I mean, you hear pitch every day in songs and stuff...its not like we are totally unfamiliar with changes in pitch.  Yes, Japanese is very fast, which is why they have things like audio courses that allow you to hear those subtle nuances of the language.  Even JPod does this, and its not even half of what you'd pay for something like Pimsleur.

Once people know they ought to listen to pitch, they'll be able to hear it just fine...unless they have internal hearing problems.  The issue is not that ppl can't do it, its that they dont know that they should listen out for it, and also never bother with getting lessons on speaking.

Listen to an audio clip with a transcript available (more or less any grammar book) and mark low/high pitches with a pencil. Do the same by listening to single words (JapanesePod101). It's what we do at class and it's not as easy as you make it out to be, amtrack.

toshiromiballza wrote:

Listen to an audio clip with a transcript available (more or less any grammar book) and mark low/high pitches with a pencil. Do the same by listening to single words (JapanesePod101). It's what we do at class and it's not as easy as you make it out to be, amtrack.

Well I'm fairly certain that if we chose a japanese word at random and broke it up into parts, most everyone could hear the change in pitch.  When I say "hear it just fine" thats exactly what I mean.  Almost all of us grew up around music on the radio, in the car, etc., so our ears are familiar with changes in pitch.  For god sakes, who didn't learn the "do re me fa so la ti do" scale in school...or at least heard it.  It can be "hard" to catch in *natural* japanese if your ears are not used to hearing japanese.  It's not difficult per se, its just that our ears aren't used to the sounds and the speed at which they come out.

TL;DR- Everything seems hard at first until it's not.  The thing itself isn't hard, its just that we aren't used to it yet.  Walking used to be the hardest thing evar, but guess what?  We got used to it.  Now we say its easy.  All a matter of perspective.

uisukii wrote:

Ears need training just like any other performance aspect of the body.

More or less this is what I was saying.  It doesn't make it "difficult", least not by my definition, it just means you'll have to get used to it and pay attention.

EDIT:  Side note- there are dictionaries with pitch marked for you.  And learning how to speak through an audio course will help tons with the pitch thing.

Last edited by amtrack (2012 December 28, 4:38 pm)

I feel like we're arguing in two different directions here.

I think the people that don't like studying pitch are saying that you can't learn pitch while just memorizing numbers.  (You guys are not saying to just completely ignore pitch, right?  That definitely wouldn't work.)

However, the people in favor of studying pitch are not saying that all you need to do is memorize numbers.

dtcamero wrote:

My biggest problem with the whole idea of studying pitch accent, as opposed to just listening for the way these words are pronounced, is that pitch accent descriptors are kind of like katakana describing English words or romaji describing jpnese words. Honestly there is a lot more going on.

This could also be said about memorizing 漢字→かな.  There is a lot more going on in the pronunciation than just the かな.  And yet, this is what a lot of people do.  People in favor of studying pitch accent just want to add one more nugget of info to this.  So now you can go 漢字→かな＋accent.  You still can't get a perfect pronunciation with かな+accent alone, but it is certainly better than just かな. 

Idealy you could go 漢字→pronunciation, which, if needed, would give you the ability to produce かな+accent.  But that's really hard for some people, including myself.  I can't really think of a way to accurately grade myself when I'm studying  alone (assuming I'm using an SRS).  I guess it would be possible if I had a teacher that would listen to my pronunciation and grade me, but I don't :-(


Edit:

amtrack wrote:

It's not difficult per se, its just that our ears aren't used to the sounds and the speed at which they come out.

TL;DR- Everything seems hard at first until it's not.  The thing itself isn't hard, its just that we aren't used to it yet.  Walking used to be the hardest thing evar, but guess what?  We got used to it.  Now we say its easy.  All a matter of perspective.

Let me just go change my prospective real quick...  Okay great!  Now I'm awesome at pitch/pronunciation!  Thanks bro!

But seriously, this is what we're arguing about.  How do you go from pitch seeming hard to being easy?  Just being aware of it is not enough for some people.  So the obvious thing to do is to go about studying it.

Last edited by partner55083777 (2012 December 28, 10:08 pm)

dtcamero wrote:

how about kanji -> kana + audio...?

core 10k does this pretty well... Subs2SRS would also be dandy. no?

I'm actually doing something quite like this.  core10k with kanji -> kana, kanji -> pitch accent, and kanji -> audio. 

My problem is grading myself on kanji -> audio.  I can't tell when I've gotten something right.  I just can't tell if I'm doing it well enough.

In the same way, I also can't sing.  Not only that, but I can't tell when I'm singing something wrong.  I can't do do re mi fa so la ti do.  However, I imagine that if I practiced a lot I would be able to do it.  I would hopefully learn to hear it as well.  That's what I'm hoping studying accents (along with pronunciation in general) helps me with.  The ability to be more confident in my hearing abilities, along with the ability to "grade myself". 

So far I'm only about 100 words into Core10k, and it's working out alright.  I want to get to at least 1000 words before I make any kind of judgment.

amtrack wrote:

I'm not telling ppl to simply be aware of it, I'm telling ppl to listen out for it and shadow.

So this is kind of what I'm doing.  I'm going through Core10k, shadowing the sentences, trying to memorize the pronunciation of words, and trying to memorize the accent numbers.  Whether or not you should memorize the accent numbers seems to be the only thing we disagree on.

If anyone wants to learn pitch, the best way to do it is to listen to a native speaker and try to copy the sounds.  We can all *hear* pitch, so its not like this is a problem.

EDIT:  I recognize its frustrating, but trust me when I say you'll just have to have patience.  Idk if you've ever done jpod or pimsleur, but those will help.  The hardest part is, of course, mimicking the pitch.  But even that is just a matter of time, which is what learning a language is all about.

EDIT2:  Also listen (read: LISTEN) to a looooooot of native Japanese.  I mean a lot.  You don't have to go overboard, but try to actively listen to *something* every day.  If anything, just focus on your listening/speaking abilities (with an audio course preferably) for a good few months.  You might surprise yourself.

Purely just listening to audio and trying to mimic the pitch does not work.  It may work for some people, but it does not work for me.  I never saw any improvements until I actually started studying pitch.  I listened to AlexanderC's videos, went out and researched more about pitch, added pitch to all my cards, and actually started to do pitch recognition and production cards. 

Now that I'm actively studying it using Anki I've started to get more comfortable with it.  Whether or not it will reflect in my conversations has yet to be seen... 

At the very least I can now say 箸, 端, and 橋 with confidence that I'm hitting somewhat of a correct pitch.  Also, people don't think that I'm saying "彼を食べた" when I'm actually trying to say "カレーを食べた".  This is completely due to repping these things in Anki, and not just listening for it.  (However, when studying words in Anki, I guess I do use the "just listen to it and repeat" strategy for lack of anything better.)

amtrack wrote:

Yeah.  The only reason I say no to accent numbers is that I think it places too much burden on the brain, especially in conversation.  Who wants to have to think about that lol.  Getting the right word/sounds is hard enough.

For me, it's the same with conjugation, or even learning kanji->kana. 

At first, conversation is slow because you have to do the conjugation in your head before you can say anything.  But eventually you get used to it and don't even have to think about it. 

I feel like there is two ways to go about things like this, using conjugation as an example.

1) Learn that "to eat" is たべる.  Then learn that those types of verbs lose the る and gain a た to go to the past tense.  So when you want to say "I ate", you have to do the conjugation in your head at first (i.e. たべる -> たべ -> たべた).  Eventually you get used to it and don't have to do the conjugation in your head.

2) Learn that "to eat" is たべる.  Then learn that "ate" is たべた.  So when you want to say "I ate" in conversation, you immediately think of "たべた". 


Obviously both ways have pros and cons.  For the first way, all you have to do is learn a handful of rules, and then each individual verb.  You will be able to conjugate each individual verb as you need it.  It's much easier to memorize because there is not as much information, but it's much slower when actually speaking (at first).

For the second way, you have to memorize a lot more (the conjugation for each verb), but your conversations will be pretty fluid from the start because you don't even have to think about it.


As far as pitch goes, I would say that actively studying/memorizing pitch is similar to the first method, while just listening for it and shadowing it is similar to the second method.  I guess it's really just two means to the same end.