Can You Acquire Pitch Accent Naturally?
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- Answer: No.
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#PitchAccent
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING NOTES before commenting:
-*This video is NOT meant to comment on the value or importance of pitch accent. It is simply meant to display the reality that it is unlikely to be acquired naturally.*
-This video is NOT meant to be a criticism of the speakers who appear in it. By any standard, everyone in the video speaks outstanding Japanese.
-All the pitch accent corrections in the video were checked by a native Japanese speaker who was born and raised in Tokyo.
-I tried to give the speakers in the video the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, and purposely left debatable pronunciations uncorrected. For example, “アドバイス” being pronounced as nakadaka (in reality practically no natives pronounce it this way, although this pronunciation is listed in popular pitch accent dictionaries).
-Although it is true that different dialects of Japanese have different systems of pitch accent, in every aspect besides pitch accent, all the Japanese spoken in the video is clearly Standard Japanese. So, using regional dialects as a defense for pitch accent mistakes is not reasonable.
-“They just need more input/exposure” isn’t really a practical argument. Keep in mind that some of the speakers in the video have had tens of thousands of hours of exposure to Japanese and live the bulk of their life immersed in the language.
-Even if you manage to find an L2 speaker of Japanese whose native language isn’t tonal and started learning Japanese after the age of 13 who WAS able to acquire pitch accent naturally, this would be an extreme edge case and wouldn’t discount the overall message of the video. Even if 1 in 100 people can acquire pitch accent naturally, it’s naïve to assume that you will in the top 1% in terms of natural talent.
If the words you have corrected prove that pitch accent can't be acquired naturally, wouldn't you say that the words that they DO pronounce correctly prove that it can be acquired naturally? I don't think what you show in this video goes either in favor or against natural acquisition or studying. Is your argument that somebody who studies pitch accent will be able to produce it accurately 100% of the time in spontaneous conversation?
@@thorhbar1255 That's not the point of this video though. What he's saying is that a correct pitch accent probably can't be acquired without actively studying it. He's not saying that you can't learn pitch accent, just that you probably can't do it just by being exposed to Japanese without actively trying to improve in that area.
@@DreamingSpanish thats a really good point tho. how come they can pronounce most of the words correctly?
@@DreamingSpanish You could say that my argument is that you are extremely unlikely to ever reach a high level of pitch accent accuracy without putting conscious work into training yourself to pay attention to pitch in real Japanese. The idea is that, even the very best foreign Japanese speakers that I could find (who never paid attention to pitch), are still far from fully acquiring pitch, so it's unreasonable to assume that if you do the same thing they did, you will get different results. "If the words you have corrected prove that pitch accent can't be acquired naturally, wouldn't you say that the words that they DO pronounce correctly prove that it can be acquired naturally?".... Yes and do. Some people in the video clearly are above 50% accuracy, which does show that they have acquired parts of pitch accent. But it's also true that the people in the video pronounce words in inconsistent ways. They may say one word correctly in one sentence, and incorrectly in the next sentence (this literally happens with the word どうやって around 2 minutes into the video above). So just because they say something correctly once, doesn't mean they have acquired it. Many things in pitch accent come down to binaries (like verbs and adjectives), so you have a 50% chance of getting it right when going off chance. Also, there are certain aspects of pitch accent that are easier for foreigners to grasp than others. For example, although you are likely to naturally pick up on the accent of compound verbs, you are extremely unlikely to naturally pick up on the difference between longer heiban and atamadaka nouns.
@@thorhbar1255 This channel is *not* about how to acquire a language effortlessly through having fun. That's AJATT, not MIA. Like I showed in the video, Khatz, the creator of AJATT, did not fully acquire pitch accent. So clearly, his philosophy of "you can master everything effortlessly through having fun", has some flaws in it. The key to pitch accent acquisition is training yourself to *hear* pitch in real native speech, not consciously studying facts about it like traditional language learners suggest
Apparently pitch accent is hot topic among Japanese learners recently. I blame Dogen. He raised awareness and pushed his product. Good marketing.
bring attention to a problem while selling a solution.
Gotta love capitalism. :D
In all seriousness it's a good thing dogen brought it to the for-front of japanese learners.
Dogen is definitely the main reason that pitch accent is currently a hot topic, but for the record, I made this video a few months before Dogen released the first video of his phonetic series: ua-cam.com/video/-wSSzDbLNqY/v-deo.html
lol yep dogen is the reason I’m here lol
Funny enough I have a couple of Japanese textbooks from the 50s-60s and they include pitch accent marks as a general rule, so it seems that it was once a normal thing to include in textbooks.
@@alicewyan I wonder if things weren't dumbed down in the Eighties when America decided that Japan was the business language of the future, and there was such a big push for "normal people" to learn it (America not always having the highest opinion of its average citizen's language-learning capacity).
I heard Japanese Pod 101 is working their new Atamadaka 2000 collar which shocks the users into proper pitch accent.
50% off the first month if you sign the liability waiver.
Naisu
ナイス
Strohmann That momey is probably better spent on a VPN that let‘s you access Japanese Netflix or just a Netflix account if you don‘t have that yet.
Actually that would probably work
😂😂😂...😅...wait, this is a joke right??
Intresting video. I give you props for showing clips of Khaz and even yourself as examples of incorrect pitch accent.
This happens in the Swedish learning community all the time and there are almost no learning resources for picking it up. Every single person who thinks they picked it up naturally didn’t.
@Kenura Medagedara I mean, if you sound Finnish you don't sound like a native, right? Presumably a native would sound like a Swede. Did I get something wrong here?
@@VieiraFi Swedish is also a national language in Finland, not just Finnish.
Both languages are taught in Finnish schools as well.
So Finnish-Swedish is _technically_ an accent.
@@ludwigv928 I've read that they study swedish in Finland and it's a second language officially, but I thought it was more for historical reasons, I didn't know they were counted as native speakers. That's interesting.
Thanks for the answer!
@Kenura Medagedara The most famous finlandssvensk is almost certainly Linus Torvalds.
@@leocomerford good pick, although I would also nominate Tove Jansson, The creator of the Moomin characters.
So cruel. You were much too hard on that poor guy at the end :(
Recently I've been seeing more and more people say 'study pitch accent', and while I agree, there doesn't seem to be much written documentation about how one should go about studying it. For advanced learners like the ones in the video, what would be the best method to correct their pitch accent? Would something like Dogen's material be effective?
I agree with Matt that pitch accent needs to be learned manually. However one must really wonder if it's worth it. I learned Japanese so I could watch anime, read books, make some friends, and maybe get some extra job opportunities if I'm lucky. After spending thousands of hours studying I have achieved a decent level of Japanese. However, I am very skeptical if learning pitch accent would give me a good return on my time investment. I feel that learning another language or spending more time with my friends might be a wiser decision.
No it won't. Think of all the people you know that speak english well but sre obviously not from an English speaking country. Thats all it is. Some people want to aquire a native accent but its a plintless venture if people alreafy understanf you and can see you are a foreigner anyway
I think pitch accent is mainly important for those people like Matt that want to be as close to perfect in one language as they can be, or if it is vital for certain languages (ie Chinese where pitch accent changes the whole word and you can become unintelligible). If your motivation is mainly to understand Japanese media, with a minor interest in communicating with natives to become friends, then pitch accent would probably not be too worth learning depending on how long it would take to correct.
I would say unless you are sure that you will use Japanese in a business context (ie job), or that becomes a goal of yours, its perhaps something to keep in mind for now rather than actively pursue.
Pitch accent is as important as "stress" is in English. Take that as you will.
Quick metaphor concerning pitch accent. Pitch accent is like Nen from Hunter Hunter. You can fight without it, but it makes you much stronger. Only once you are taught, you notice its existence. You can pick up parts of it naturally, like Gon with his stealth, but you can't pick it all up without formal training. In the beginning it's hard but it becomes easier if you keep training. Don't worry about it too much in action and try to do 100% correctly, this will make you slow and take out the flow element. I hope you watch Hunter Hunter because otherwise this won't make any sense to you.
This is why I've been studying pitch and pronunciation from day 1. It's been over a year and a half and I can tell a distinct difference in all of the mistakes identified in this video in addition to already knowing the correct way to say those words.
My one piece of advice to anyone who wants to reach native-like proficiency is study pitch accent from the start as the first thing you do. look up the accent of every word you learn, and constantly force yourself to "hear" correct pitch through endless repeptition. If you have to put off other areas of Japanese study first, then do that. I studied pitch accent and pronunciation for a solid 4 months before discovering Ajatt, at which point I just continued along with RTK and then sentence mining. No regrets.
Thank you for the advice, good sir
One thing to note that it's one thing to notice OTHERS making mistakes, it's another thing entirely to notice yourself. I can "hear" non-nativeness too, when I listen to others. But with myself, I can't hear my own problems.
Hello, sorry this comment is 2 years in the future but...how does one look up the pitch accent for a word?
@@marLamaDeo the pitch accent follows several patterns, were are represented by numbers in some J-J dictionaries like Daijirin or shinmeikai. Alterantively you can run words through an automatic pitch-parcer called "Prosody Tutor Suzuki-kun" which you can search for online. I'd also recommend you check out Dogen's ptich accent series, which he offers through patreon.
@@marLamaDeo Yomichan has pitch accent dictionaries that you can add
While there were obvious mistakes or "wrong" accents, there were also some I (as a Japanese native) wouldn't have noticed and that sounded completely fine. For example, the way one guy says "Paku paku ぱくぱく" and ”Mogu mogu もぐもぐ" is totally natural to me. As for "Oboetenai おぼえてない" that came right after, I would even go as far as to say it is more natural to say it with his accent. One other thing I want to point out is that people from the Tokyo area don't necessarily speak "standard" Japanese in the casual setting. Tokyo has its own accent different from the standard accent. So it is more natural to hear some kind of regional influence from anyone in daily/casual conversation, meaning if someone speak all "standard" it would actually sound a bit strange. BTW it was fun to see someone rip apart Dave Spector's Japanese.
As for おぼえてない, I asked a standard accent native speaker and they said it's only natural with two drops: おぼ＼えてな＼い
@@j5679 I wonder if matt forgot to add the last drop, おぼ＼えてない without a drop on the last mora sounds very unnatural to me, but hey maybe I'm wrong
I was a firm believer you could just learn it intuitively. I think this was the video I needed to see.
Although you're right that most foreigners don't acquire pitch accent naturally, and that most of us find ourselves in a position where we have to do conscious study of pitch accent in order to jumpstart proper acquisition, I think it's important to ask why this is the case, in order to perhaps pave the way toward innovation. Just because almost no foreigners acquire pitch accent naturally doesn't mean that it simply doesn't happen naturally. There might be a mistake that virtually every single person makes when they learn the language.
I don't know what the answer is, but I want to advance a few points which might be helpful. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I've heard that there's a rule with pitch accent where whenever the pitch drops within a word, it can't go back up again. If you think about the implications of this for a moment, you might realize that this essentially means that pitch accent encodes a similar type of information as spaces in English, in that it gives a reliable indication of where one word starts and the other ends. Now, consider that the brain always looks for the most efficient (or let's say, lazy) route to solving problems. When you're acquiring the spoken form of a language, your subconscious needs to figure out how to break the stream of sounds into individual words. For a Japanese child this would probably involve latching onto the pitch-accent patterns, among other things, in order to figure that out. For virtually every foreigner who studies Japanese, however, this happens by another method. Since they memorize vocabulary right from the beginning, read, and so on, their brain doesn't need the pitch-accent patterns at least for this purpose. Their vocabulary lists, Anki flashcards, reading, etc., chunks the sounds of the language into discrete words and they essentially get that information for free. If they learned the language entirely through audio all the way up to a high level before jumping into reading, it seems plausible that their brain would be forced to pay much more attention to pitch accent and that in the end they will have acquired it for that reason. As is often the case, it may be that this issue with the way foreigners end up speaking Japanese may come from the fact that they learn it in a way that breaks the natural progression.
Many foreigners, even those who think that it's important to learn pitch accent in order to sound like native, seem convinced that pitch accent is basically arbitrary and kind of just like this random thing they should learn. That may be the case, but I lean toward thinking that pitch accent does have a function. Pitch accent not only conveys the sort of information that spaces convey (or so my theory in this comment goes), but of course also disambiguates words (e.g., 日本 vs. 二本), among other things. I can't put my finger on the mechanism, but sentence-level pitch accent patterns sort of give me a sense of where one sentence (or thought) starts and the next begins and so forth. This seems to further extend the idea that pitch accent sort of does for spoken language what punctuation does for written.
Besides the foreigners who consider pitch accent important to acquire but largely linguistically arbitrary, there are countless foreigners who say things like: "Who cares about pitch accent? Even if you mess it up, everyone will understand you anyway. Isn't the point of speaking to be understood?" Beyond the fact that pitch-accent patterns seem related to emotional communication, emphasis, and so on, there's also thefact tHat You can und erstand This. Just because natives can understand you doesn't mean it's not jarring to listen to you. And I think that's exactly what it's like for a native to listen to someone with bad pitch accent. It's like they're putting spaces in random places, capitalizing random letters, using periods in a way that doesn't make sense, and so on. Also, pronouncing 日本 and 二本 the same way would be like writing "there" and "their" both as "their". Theirs no problemreadingthis right?
The conclusion, I believe, is that pitch accent does a lot of things, both related to things like emotion, identity, and emphasis, and also related to punctuation-like or spaces-related flow, and that foreigners rarely acquire the system naturally because there's something mistaken about the normal progression that foreigners go through in their acquisition. We of course can't learn exactly as children do once we've entered our adult years, since our brains and psychology have changed and L2 interference is inescapable. But what we can do is look at our children acquire, figure out the steps involved and what their brains do at each step, and then implement something that's different on the surface but equivalent on a deeper level. In this particular example, I think what would need to be tested is something rarely done: An adult would have to start learning Japanese, forgoing not only reading but also lists of words or anything else that would shortcut the process of finding word breaks. They would need to get to a high level in the language without ever touching the writing system.
@@ArtymusPrime I didn't say that spaces exist in spoken language. It's just an analogy.
@@ericwulff4844 and it's a very poor analogy that is based on a false equivalence of something that is inherently uncomparable. You can't compare something that is fundamentally a matter of different speech with something that is a matter of different spelling.
@@ArtymusPrime When you acquire words through auditory input, you need to be able to break the stream of sound into a discrete sequence of words. Since once the pitch falls in a word it never rises again, that means that pitch accent gives the listener a clue for where one word ends and the other begins. Of course there are cases where pitch accent doesn't give you that information, but it provides that information reasonably often. By analogy, when someone is reading text in English, spaces give them the information for how to break the stream of text into discrete words. Spaces in English *always* give you that information, while pitch accent in Japanese *sometimes* does.
There are probably a lot of other functions of pitch accent in Japanese, but the point is that the method that foreigners usually use, which involves being given that information for free in the form of word lists and Japanese text (which makes word breaks obvious in many cases, such as with variation between hiragana, katakana, and kanji), makes it less necessary for the brain to pick up on the pitch-accent patterns. If you need to determine where each word ends and the next starts and pitch-accent patterns give you a series of clues, then your brain will latch onto pitch-accent and use it for that purpose, allowing you to acquire it. That's what seems to happen with natives. However, if you gain that same information from another source (by using word lists and jumping straight into the written language), then your brain won't need to pick up on pitch accent at least for that purpose, and your brain, which values efficiency, has one less reason to acquire pitch accent.
@@ericwulff4844 Actually, pitch accent never provides that information because most words have no drop in pitch, sentence level intonation can create a rise in pitch that wouldn't be there phonemically, and if there is a drop in pitch it can happen at any point in the word.
If I make up a bunch of fake japanese words (that is, words that fit the rules of japanese phonology, but just happen to not be words) and string them together, you will not be able to figure out where the word boundaries are armed with the rules of pitch accent. Pitch accent is not how Japanese native speakers identify word boundaries.
@@ericwulff4844 actually, via minimal pairs it comes down to literally being unable to understand which word is being used (without contextual inferences). Coming from a language with some minimal pair pitches, I can tell you that it literally sounds like a different word because it is a different word. No extra info.. because you really don't need it, however useful it might be.
I think specifically focusing on pitch accent for some of these learners and starting to speak later could have helped them. Imagine if all of these Learners did spend thousands of hours listening but spoke far too soon and didn't pick up some of those total habits....also Adding yourself proves you are just trying to bring your arguments to light. Good job 👍
I've been listening to Japanese for over 10 years, having literally watched multiple tens of thousands of hours of Japanese TV (from anime to drama to variety shows and even baseball and cooking shows, well over 10,000 hours), I only realized now that I have a huge pitch accent problem.
And I don't study or converse or "speak too soon" or anything. I don't know any Japanese people. I Literally only listen all the time.
I mean I can't hear it myself still, because it's just so "easy" mapping normal english pitch accent patterns to japanese words that it sounds "natural" to me. But native speakers tell me my accent is obviously wrong.
I stumbled onto your channel by accident, fully J/E bilingual here. Ultimately, the pitch accent doesn't matter much as a tool, it's more aesthetic, not functional. I do agree that it's most likely not a natural learning process. I picked up English a LONG time ago in the 70's when there wasn't any awareness of these subjects. Over time, I have noticed that I use different muscles in the tongue/jaw when I switch between the languages.
I’m very interested in the part about how other tonal languages can have an advantage to acquiring Japanese pitch accent due to the fact that I’m from Sweden and Swedish is a tonal language with 2 tones and over 150 words where the only difference are these tones for example, “Anden” depending on which tone you use it can either mean “the spirit” or “the duck”, my mother can’t hear the difference as she is not brought up in Sweden but I’m very sensitive to the difference.
From my experience I believe pitch accent knowledge is not needed for communications due to context but if you want to have a smooth sound where the native person can easily grasp what your saying then acquiring an ear for tonal differences is crucial and then together with conscious immersion and recorded practice you can acquire a more native sound.
I also want to point out that hearing pitch accent is more important than correct pronunciation because then you can hear when you pronounce a word wrong which is tbh still common among natives but in a more conscious way, you know like any other error in communications.
I also want to say that if you never do a conscious effort to learn to hear pitch and tone then you won’t grasp it with immersion but as long as you’ve conditioned your brain to hear pitch accent then you will pick it up unconsciously.
lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8925472&fileOId=8925480
I found this study of the perception of intonation in Japanese sentence types by Swedish speakers and it sounds interesting so I’m gonna read it tomorrow
I just did an experiment with my mom(not grown up in sweden thus can't hear tone/pitch) and my brother(grew up in sweden) where I said 4 sentences where 2 are similar in words but differ in pitch giving different meanings. the sentences were "Tomten på tomten" and "Anden i flaskan" the 2 meanings for the first one is "The santa claus on the lawn" and "The lawn on the saunta claus" and the meanings for the second one is "The genie in the bottle" and "the duck in the bottle". My mother couldn't hear any difference and guessed purely on context meaning the ones that sounded more plausible while my brother heard the difference and only struggled due to the weirdness of the sentences with "wrong" pitch accent!
Due to the fact that swedish and japanese only differs in amount of different pitch variations, 2 in swedish and 4 in japanese, and in the amount of words relying on pitch, japanese with every word and swedish with 350 to 500, I would say that the experience would be similar to japanese people meaning context helps with communications/meaning but a struggle for the native listener exists.
As another Swedish speaker this is very interesting, this newfound knowledge will be very useful as I continue to practice Japanese pronunciation -- I had no idea speaking Swedish could be beneficial when learning Japanese. The most glaring example is "Anden" which you already brought up. If someone were to point towards ánden and say ànden I would be extremely confused at first. Another good example is b́iten, quite a stark difference between section and being bitten especially when walking my dog haha.
As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese (and English), I have to say... I have no advantages. I'm not sure if it's because I grew up being schooled in English, but my mind automatically maps Japanese words to English intonation, so saying it like in English sounds natural to me, and I don't hear intonation problems of my own unless I have a correct version to compare right beside.
And this is coming from a person who has watched well over 10,000+ hours of Japanese content, from anime to drama to variety shows, cooking shows, baseball... I still can't get the pitch accent. Or I think i get it, but it's obviously wrong from the responses I get from native people.
ピッチアクセントが難しいのは分かる。声調みたいに正確な情報が全ての単語にある訳じゃないし、日本語を学んだのかネイティブなのかは最終的にこれでしか判断出来ない。
マットがいる限り正確な情報はあるか。
How am I supposed to remember pitch accent for every single word I learn? Is there a pattern?
There are general patterns, especially for compound nouns, two-kanji, four-mora nouns, certain verb types + conjugations, and i adjectives, etc., but for the bulk of it you have to learn through a lot of memorization and exposure
While English stress accent is a bit easier to notice since it also affects the pronunciation of vowels - the same way a non-native English speaker would learn how to pronounce and stress every single English word they learn. Lots of time and effort.
HypronVideos well actually I effin wish we had been made aware of word accentuation when I was learning English. No one said anything in the 10+ years I studied, until it was mentioned in passing in a random “English for scientists” class. I have one of the shittiest accents and not much motivation for shadowing (I sure it helps) now that I’m interested in another language. It’s just mad how the brain won’t listen even though I’m nearly as bilingual as one can be without being a native. I hope things are different these days...
As someone with a native language that includes pitch accent, it's "baked" into the word. So it really sounds like a different word (minimal pairs) when the accent is different. That's the gist of it.
@@BlueCatSW9 if it makes you feel any better, as an immigrant, my parents and all of their friends have problems with English accentuation/stress placement when speaking, **despite** the fact that they knew about it since before I was even born. Which is almost 30 years ago now. So...
Is there any significant evidence of Japanese people on the internet saying that "Japanese cringe when they hear other Japanese people pronounce words with the wrong pitch accent, and the same is true when they are listening to gaijin"? I did a quick search on google in Japanese and I couldn't really find anything where people were saying foreigners accents bothered them. Though I did find a fair bit about Japanese people saying it's hard to understand foreigners sometimes when it comes to katakana english words such as places/people's names.
I've lived in Japan 5 years and I use Japanese in my daily life as my co-workers and girlfriend cannot speak English, but I've never heard this talk of incorrect/different accents being cringe worthy. The only time I seem to see the topic even come up is when a word is said individually or within 「」.
I personally think accent is an important thing to think about and do some studying, but I'm not sure how much of an emphasis should be put on it unless you are doing a lot of professional public speaking.
I for one know my English varies extremely heavily in terms of accent. I grew up in Eastern Canada with a Canadian mother and a British father then my friends are all from different areas in the States. I rarely have people comment on how I accent words, but when I do it's usually more of them being surprised and telling me how they say the word differently. The same seems to happen in Japanese sometimes where a co-worker will repeat the word out loud like "あ、洗車ね"(this doesn't even happen that often, but it has happened a few times to me). I've seen the same happen between Japanese people as well too, though to a lesser amount.
Anyway, I just worry about the degree of importance to be placed upon "pitch accent". It's important, but it seems like some blow it out of proportion. Sorry for the rant
Edit: Just had my girlfriend listen to the video one time and she personally had trouble picking up on a lot of the accents displayed in red text, until she watched the video while looking at the text.
Her background is a little interesting though because her mother is from the countryside in Kumamoto, father from Saga, but spent a lot of time in Hyogo and herself spent time in Fukuoka/Hyogo so sometimes she's told the way she pronounces some words is different than her co-workers.
@げっぷ aren't they saying that it's the pitch accent when words are connected that's the main problem? which you can't even learn from pitch accent dictionaries...
@sanserif Agreed. It's like here where making fun of an immigrant with an accent will get you labeled a "racist" but making fun of Trump for saying CHIIIIIIIINA is A-okay.
Some people might feel so worried about pitch Japanese accent now, that they might even feel afraid of speaking. I'm one of them I think I'll never try to speak with a native Japanese after this.
You should try talking to Japanese people. You'll notice that the average person is very lenient when it comes to pronunciation mistakes (unless they happen to be so awful that it sounds like you're saying something completely different), but also that they're not very interesting to talk to (just like in any other country in the world).
just watch tkyosam talking to natives. he fucks up everything possible, and nobody really cares. you'll be fine.
I'm curious how noticable, distracting, confusing and/or unpleasant it is listening to someone with incorrect pitch accent is. Is there a comparable analogy that someone can give me, like "it's like listening to someone speak like this in English" or something? I've occasionally come across videos of native speakers talking about how odd gaijin accents are, but only when they're so bad that even I recognize them, i.e., almost every word is wrong, as opposed to the speakers in this video who miss every one in ten or so.
On a related note I've also wondered for some time now if there are any accents that native Japanese speakers like, kind of like how many native English speakers like the sound of a (slight) French, German, Russian, Japanese etc. accent. Or do all foreign accents just sound wrong and annoying?
I can comment somewhat as i natively speak Norwegian which is a pitch accent language. I've never heard someone non-native that didn't learn Norwegian when they were very young get the pitch accent correct. If you're perfectly fluent in the language but mess up tones (which I know of many people that are/does) it doesn't sound annoying at all and it's perfectly fine to have a good discussion/be friends with that person, it's just that I'm very aware that they're not native from the very first sentence I hear them speak.
I am also Norwegian and can confirm that it just makes you aware that you're speaking with a foreigner. Sometimes the friend I'm thinking of (who came here at the age of 8) uses wrong stress as well as intonation but mistakes in intonation is the most noticeable.
I'm from sweden where we have pitch accent and I would say it sounds a bit like if someone were to stress a part in a word wrong, like "libr[A]ry" instead of "l[I]brary" you would be able to understand it for most parts but you instantly notice it
There are some words that HAVE to be performed with a pitch accent. It's like present (gift) vs. Present (time). So Hashi (bridge) hashi (edge) and hashi (chopsticks) all have different pitch accents, and can be a little more difficult to be understood.
@@luck0717 Thank you for your reply. I actually have been studying and paying attention to pitch accent a lot since I made this comment. It's kind of hard to unhear it now, and incorrect pitch accent really stands out to me now. And as you said, it helps with discerning certain homophones.
Unrelated but, I also feel the language sounds more beautiful now that I'm conscious of pitch accent. That was a nice little side benefit!
I’ｍ a Japanese native speaker. I felt "おぼえていない、ぎたいご、ぎせいご、どうやって and other words" said in the video are perfect pitch although there are words that are not naturally said. Pitch between Kansai dialect and Kansai dialect are huge difference.
ぎせいご、ぎおんごsounded ok to me too
Kansai dialect and "Kanto" dialect are different.
This is most definitely the case. The one thing I have always struggled with in Japanese is pitch accent, and I've had COUNTLESS hours of language exposure. It has taken a loooot of effort and time to improve. Still does.
Ey rafy, whats up !
@@koutta-idiomas8118 good to see you around!
@ Gracias por tus videos :) no me extraña encontrarte por aquí
@@sai7521 Gracias!
Really insightful analysis video!
-Are there certain pitch accent patterns that non-native speakers tend to get wrong more frequently?
-Also, do any of the pitch accent errors only occur when the speaker is trying to convey emphasis in the sentence and defaults to a certain pitch accent pattern?
I'd heard that around the age of 13 people lose the ability to passively obtain language. So I imagine perhaps a child who was learning Japanese and exposed to a lot of Japanese speech could perhaps obtain it passively, though I don't think many kids would have that kind of drive in the first place.
As a somewhat related anecdote: I remember more of the German I was taught in primary school than the French (which I remember none of) I was taught in secondary school.
I think this all comes down to the way we learn. I would in fact argue that the way we learn leads to the single biggest and most common bad habit which is wrong pitch accent. What I've started doing recently has had a tremendous impact I believe on my pitch accent.
If you think about it babies learn by listening and trying to mimic sounds. Pitch accent is core to their learning method. Most of us however, even if we immerse 100% we mostly learn by reading. If you use an srs tool to learn new words by reading them and then through immersion try to understand them, you are doing nothing to acquire pitch accent "naturally". You just "learned" thousands of words and you don't even know what they naturally sound like. Not only don't you know but you've also internalised an assumed pitch accent most of the time.
What I started doing lately is I only use sound cards for learning new words. Then I use reverse sound cards where I read the meaning and guess the word. I only rate myself good if I match the pitch correctly, no reading in Japanese involved.
For kanji I use matt's method of rating myself on the meaning only but revealing the reading in between. However I don't reveal furigana but rather play the audio.
Some may argue that its hard to know if you matched the pitch correctly but I think this is way easier than people believe. If you know what a question sounds like you can distinguish nuances in pitch just fine. My concern was that this will double or triple the learning period. I was surprised. Not only doesn't it take that much longer but you're saving yourself the effort of having to relearn the correct pitch accent later. The only negative I've found is I always need headphones outside.
I don't know for Japanese, but being 2,5 years into studying Chinese, I absolutely agree with what you say! For some people it may be possible to acquire the right pitch accent (or in case of Chinese the tones), but for most of us non-native speakers it is inevitable to actively study the correct pronunciation if we want to reach an (almost) native level. I've tried acquiring the correct pronunciation for Chinese "naturally" during my first year in, but honestly I really got almost everything wrong and people often had problem to understand me. And it was only after I started actively studying the correct tones/pitches and correcting myself everytime I mispronounced a word that I finally felt my Chinese was improving properly.
This might be especially true for tonal languages, but I think if you want to sound like a native speaker of any language, you have to put in a huge amount of work. Take an American actor/actress for instance who needs to play a role that requires a British accent. Although English is his/her native language, he/she has to actively learn how to sound 'British' - either on their own or with the help of a coach.
Oh and props to you for also including yourself into that video!
That's awesome man. I always wanted to lear Chinese too, Can you give me any tips on how to start learning chinese, like books or courses?
*English is not my first language
@@matheussantiago6246 I barely scratched the surface doing anki sentence cards for an hour a day for 3 months. However, I did learn the tones as I was going because it was all in pinyin and had the tones written and pronounced. After not doing any Chinese for a few years I feel that I can still pronounce the correct tones for those basic words that kept coming up. Depending on your goals, if you just want to speak and not read then it's pretty easy in the beginning if you can nail the tones. I can't speak about afterwards.
I think the point about pitch accent can be generalized as follows: if the target language is very different from one's native language then some features of the target language are not _fully_ acquired by most people without some conscious efforts despite having plenty exposure to the language.
Language features that are not _fully_ acquired through exposure alone usually satisfy two conditions:
- do not cause misunderstanding under most circumstances
- one's native language does not have a similar feature
Perfect recipe for pitch accent to not be acquired.
Funny enough, this video actually seems to show that you do acquire most of it naturally. It seems they get most things right. If it wasn't acquired, there'd be corrections all over the video.
I guess that you do need to be more mindful of it than not. Kinda similar to grammar, not essentially necessary for you to know all, but must at least understand.
General question, how long do you think it will take to 'finish' your MIA website?
I have a similar one: how long until Stage 2 is finished?
Completely depends on your rate of learning and how much time you spend.
Theodor Wicklin the question here is about when will Matt finish the website, not a when will a learner finish MIA. As of now, stages 3, 4 and 5 are still empty, but 1 and 2 should be enough to get you started while the rest is being prepared, I hope. At least the Overview in stage 0 can be used if you need help on what to do next.
Although not exactly the same thing, Krashen has written at length on the efficacy of phonetic awareness training (of the sort that dogen likes).
Krashen argues that phonetic awareness develops in all learners, regardless of training, and that training in phonetic awareness has no impact on literacy. However, he says, there is evidence that phonetic awareness training improves scores on tests of single-word pronunciation. This is true in both L1 and L2 language learners.
So can you acquire pitch accent naturally? Almost certainly yes.
Does pitch accent study improve pitch accent? Likely in single-word recall, but little in actual speech, with almost no improvements in comprehension.
www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2011_krashen_hastings_phonemicawareness_ijflt_11-11.pdf
www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2017_does_phonics_deserve_the_credit_for_improvement_in_pirls.pdf
www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2002_defending_whole_language.pdf
www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/phonemic_awareness_training.pdf
but does it say anything about tones? this is about awareness of pitch not of positions in the mouth aka pronounciation.
I mean yeah, it's nice to aim for perfection. But realistically speaking, you can either choose to keep going or be nitpicky about shit and make less progress. For example, when Steve Kaufmann speaks Spanish I can hear every little mistake that he makes, but does it bother me? of course not. If a person is talking about something worth listening, it really doesn't matter if the pronunciation is a bit off, the message is way more important. I really can't stand those native Spanish speakers who are nitpicky about how English should be pronounced down to the atomic level, AND THEY ARENT FUCKING EVEN FLUENT LOOOOOOL. Besides, who even "speaks" nowadays anymore, it's all about reading, pushing the keyboard and listening.
I’d like to see a comparison with L1 speakers to see if native speakers still make pitch accent mistakes sometimes, especially when speaking fast because there doesn’t seem to sound like there’s much of a difference the faster and more fluent someone speaks
Bravo sir!
Holy shit.
Some comments share examples of Chinese people who have learned Japanese to a very high level and sound like native speakers. But, how certain are you that they aren't themselves just outliers? How are you able to claim with any amount of validity that it is actually because their native language has tones that they are inclined to produce better results with respect to pitch accent? That sort of discredits their approach, motivation, and other variables that could have played a large part in how they were able to do it.
I'd be more interested in interviewing those individuals to find out what they did differently than jumping to the conclusion that it's because they speak a tonal language that they could achieve such great results. (Although, certainly it's an interesting hypothesis worth investigating!)
That being said, I appreciate this video because it brings awareness to something that is often ignored. It's definitely solid advice for anyone wanting to improve their accent that you should pay attention to not just consonants and vowels, but also to other properties of the sounds of the language.
As always, thank for the interesting content, Matt!
very informative my dude
do you have proof its the same in chinese? I don't really care enough about japanese people enjoying my accent but I wonder if it gives you a big leap in having to rely on context less to understand what people are saying. I remember talking to foreign people speaking english with a really thick accent at a software company. Sure it sucked but I was still able to follow them. I think it mostly depends on wether you want to increase your chances of succes in japan or if you enjoy developing an accompanying accent.
As a native speaker of Mandarin chinese, japanese pitch accent and chinese tones are NOTHING alike. NOTHING. I cannot recognize pitch accents without carefully comparing different versions side by side, and don't know what sounds right/wrong. And I've been listening to japanese for 10+ years.
Chinese tones come super naturally and easily to me.
Matt is wrong. Once again.
Accent is hard. I saw many people fully immerged in German. Similar to ajatt and for many years and they still don't sound right.
i get what you mean but thats not the kind of "accent" this video is about
german doesnt have pitch accent
Question from someone who wants to learn a nonstandard dialect (Kansaiben): How consistently different is pitch accent for nonstandard Japanese? Is it a matter of, standard Japanese does pattern A, and this is what Kansaiben does, instead? Or are the actual categories different? (I mean, by and large, since I assume there are exceptions even in fairly regular patterns of difference.)
Languages mix and split. There are probably exceptions.
Self lashing at the end;)
As an absolute beginner who knows Hiragana/Katakana and has started to get into RTK when do you recommend starting to learn pitch accent?
Dylan Robertson )) I’m a bit late, but prolly rn
it’s harder to learn when you learn bad habits first
Ok so how does one learn pitch accent?
dekinai
@@stayskeptic3923 They do provide pitch accent info. There is a whole guidebook at the end of the Shinmeikai Accent dictionary and the NHK Dictionary. They are about 50 bucks to import each tho. I went with the Shinmeikai and was very happy with the result and I know many people like the NHK one too.
Shinmeikai: www.amazon.co.jp/新明解日本語アクセント辞典-第2版-CD付き-金田一-春彦/dp/4385136726/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_ja_JP=カタカナ&keywords=新明解日本語アクセント辞典&qid=1566430201&s=gateway&sr=8-1
NHK:www.amazon.co.jp/NHK日本語発音アクセント新辞典/dp/4140113456/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_ja_JP=カタカナ&keywords=新明解日本語アクセント辞典&qid=1566430201&s=gateway&sr=8-2
Copy / Shadow Japanese speakers that you want to sound like. I'd pick the Tokyo dialect / accent.
Just wondering, have you watched Anime Man's japanese? what do you think of it? great vid!
the anime man is half japanese lol
I showed a video of his to a Japanese friend and she said he sounded native.
@@FartyFartyPoopyPants Obviously, considering that he is billingual in both Japanese and English and has lived in Japan before
@@zachsilva6201 yeah, was thinking it was his L2 dont know why.
*laughs in tonal language*
can't speak for shit, but I can hear the pitch differences pretty well.
you should really have marked the words that have the initial-lowering rule too.
Like ↓ア↑メリカ
↓か↑んじょう
↓お↑と↓なのか
↓つ↑かえない→
↓ぎ↑たいご
↓ぎ↑せいご
↓ぎ↑おんご
↓て↑んじ
↓れ↑きし→
↓ま↑なんでいる
↓じ↑んこう
↓そ↑れで↓ですね
↓は↑じめて↓から
↓で↑きな↓かった (this one's iffy)
↓と↑れな↓かった
↓そ↑れに→
↓た↑いけん
↓そ↑れま↓での
↓べ↑んきょう
I didn't know the existence of these types of words.
As a Mexican we have the "advantage" of naturally paying attention to the "tones" because we also have that in Spanish, we don't have 4 tones like mandarin (only 2) but still, it helps a lot, but even paying attention to how words are pronounced I have to look at the pitch accent in the dictionary a lot of times.
That's stress, not tone.
@@dawson6294 I appreciate the correction.
As Dawson just said, seems like I'm referring to stress, not tone, sorry for the confusion.
In spanish is called "acento tonal" so I was translating it to something like "tonal accent", but i'm not sure about the difference.
As Spanish and Cantonese speaker myself I can tell you that the "acento" is not just stressing a syllable. It is a proper tone
南九州出身だけど、訛りが強すぎて標準語で喋ろうとしてもこんなふうに間違った？アクセントで喋るから、外国人っぽく聞こえる要素って実際は何なんだろう
I'm from countryside of Japan and have thick accent of South Kusyu. And my accent actually has monotone pitch accent and it's so hard to fix to normal Japanese one so I sometimes speak like people in the vid.
In this vid, some parts sound like Kansai dialect and if they have East Asian face, I'd misthink they are from Japan.
I wonder how they differentiate Japanese spoken by actual Japanese people🤔
Thank you for pointing that out. Something similar is the case with Swedish. the pitch accent of the so called "standard language" differs from other regions of Sweden, and in Finland they have no pitch accent differentiation at all.
3:04 woah
Having learned mandarin when I was younger I found myself naturally finding pitch accent in Japanese. So I’d say unless you have a background in pitch accent languages at a young age it might not come naturally. It does not have to be your native tongue.
true that. it's unfortunate that no native speakers of Chinese or another tonal language is included in this video.
Also some people have perfect pitch so pitch accent might not be a problem for them either
@@dogestep64 fun fact: the amount of people with perfect pitch is much higher in places speaking pitch oriented languages
@@Et-chan that's actually really interesting I didn't know that 🤔
Hey this might be unrelated, but I've downloaded the voice pitch accent recording for anki cards from the MIA website. After testing it out, i feel like the heiban accent pronounced (single word) dropped slightly in the end. I've compared it to google Japanese voice, and the voice is more flat towards the end. Which one is more accurate tho?
I know in sentence level the heiban sounds very flat, but it seems that the recording (i don't know if it was from native speaker or not) doesn't sound like heiban accent, because of the slight drop of pitch in the last mora.
They all drop if the phrase gets too long.
I've noticed sometimes singers change the pitch of words in songs so that it fits more, is that correct or am I just mishearing it?
Embrace the impossibility! If you will never acquire pitch accent to a native speaker level, then let it be! Be different, stand proud with your distinct mark on your pitch. You know, when someone speaks a second language and its native language leaves a mark on it (e.g. Italian speaking English), that actually makes it cool and refreshing! You don't need to talk like a native just to be understood, and if you are a foreigner and speak good Japanese sounding like a foreigner, that's perfect. There's nothing to hide, spice it up!
That's a valid perspective, but at the same time, a little pitch accent study can make your Japanese much more pleasant for natives to listen to. I don't really see any reason to actively avoid it.
Sorry it's a year late. I see this argument very often, but I think English is a special case. Japanese is largely homogeneous and many Japanese have this idea that only Japanese people can perfect their language, so stuff like pitch accent is rarely taught or pointed out to learners. Italians speaking English KNOW that they are speaking with an Italian accent. And even Italians are not putting stress on the wrong syllables, it's more like an even spread of Italian "flavour" while keeping the internal structure consistent within "Italian accented English". But when foreigners speak Japanese they are usually completely unaware they're using the wrong pitch and it's not consistent between different words even in the same sentence. It would be like, speaking English with a random mix of Italian, German, Russian and Spanish accents and no discernible pattern. Imagine how annoying that would be to listen to. That's how Japanese people hear a lot of foreigners when they speak, yet they are blissfully unaware because " 何々ちゃん said I'm so かっこいい and 日本語上手. "
You need a control group. Maybe survey native speakers to see if they make pitch accent mistakes at times? 8D
ALRIGHTIGETIT ill stop putting off learning pitch accent already…...…
How it's going?
^^^
Worrying about having an accent is actually the reason why I didn't end up learning Japanese from my family.
My aunt (my mother's older sister) came to America from Japan when she was 14, not knowing any English and was thrown into an all English environment and tried really hard to learn English. She has been a US citizen for 50 years now and yeah, she still has an accent and is seen as a foreigner despite having lived in the US for such a long time. She actually doesn't even remember Japanese anymore other than very basic words.
My mom who is much younger than my aunt was born in the US. Not wanting my mom to have an accent like my aunt, she didn't teach my mom Japanese at all.
Now here I am, a hapa that wants to learn Japanese and now I gotta be concerned about having an American accent while speaking Japanese?
What is so wrong with having an accent from your native language in the first place? I come across people who speak with heavy Spanish and Asian accents in fluent English everyday. Doesn't the effort they put into learning English outweigh the small amount of effort we as native English speakers have to put in understanding their accent? An accent too symbolizes where you come from. Why should we be ashamed of sounding like we're from another country when we are?
So what you're saying is...
It's possible?
It seems that, at least for those people in the video, the most common mistake is to pronounce a word using atamadaka pitch when it's actually heiban (sometimes another pattern). It looks like a subconscious tendency. Did you notice that? Do you think that could mean something? I wonder if it has any relation to their L1.
Most languages don't have the heiban pattern.
@@prog112 That makes sense, but I'm more concerned with the fact that they go for atamadaka most of the time (sometimes when the correct pitch is nakadaka or odaka).
I think atamadaka is the easiest pattern to recognize, as it's the only one that doesn't start low, so that might be related somehow. Maybe, in an attempt to accent the word, they end up going for the "most distinguishable" pattern.
@@fullHDMI yeah that makes sense. say how do japanese people place emphasis on a word?
@@joemuis23 Well, my limited experience shows that they pronounce long accented mora even longer (with い adjectives, like かわいい, for instance, you can hear a very long いい) or make the accented mora even higher in pitch.
2 years late but it will become obvious when you compare it with English. They are just mapping English stress accent onto Japanese, likely due to still identifying strongly with their native language when speaking Japanese. It's known that those with good accents in a 2nd language usually are able to identify with it better. For example, when I'm speaking Japanese, I almost become a Japanese person, and it doesn't even occur to me to try and map English stress accent onto Japanese. (for example at 1:03 he says べんきょう with the drop straight after the べん because in English we would say "I've been STUdying". The stress on the STU. He hasn't heard enough natives actually say the word 勉強 either that or wasn't listening properly and hence the only pattern his brain can come up with is that from his native language. A lot of it is in personal identity and how well you can listen. Personally I think one can absolutely pick up pitch accent subconsciously, it's just a lot of learners of Japanese on the internet are Americans. And Americans tend to identify very strongly with their country, and with English before learning another language. It sounds harsh but this is the conclusion I've come to when hearing (other) foreigners speak Japanese. I only speak with natives now because it's just so jarring to hear atamadaka on every other damn word. Japanese is beautiful largely because of the ratio between heiban, atamadaka and odaka. The rhythm is so obvious to me I don't understand how people can't even hear the difference lol.
Tbh seems like a huge time investment for a very marginal revenue at the moment. The way I don't sound native when speaking english, I wouldn't mind sounding equally "bad" in japanese. What practical benefits do you see in working so hard on it? Comparing your old 自己紹介 video to your current speech for example, do you perceive much of a change in your experience with the language (easiness at been understood by natives perhaps)?
The biggest difference I notice is that it takes much less time for Japanese people to recognize my ability and stop "withholding" theirs because they're afraid I won't understand. Now it happens in seconds/minutes. I also know that my Japanese is simply more pleasant for Japanese people to listen to. That said I'm still far from perfect
Is the point of this video that exposure and immersion aren’t enough, or that even practicing by listening and repeating isn’t enough?
ピッチアクセントの大事さはもっと広く知られて欲しいなぁ
Fortunately my mother tongue is a pitch accent language, Norwegian, and I have background in Thai, a tonal language! Yay!
If "naturally" isn't working for you, there's always . . . TRAINING LIKE A DOG.
*Think about foreigners in the USA who have lived there for a very long time. To a native born American they can still easily detect that the person does not sound like a native born person. I 100% believe in Matt VS Japan's approach. I suck at Japanese and am still very much a beginner. However, I have tried to make the small amount of Japanese that I do know sound authentic by flat out emulating and doing my best to impersonate a native Japanese sound as well as working on pitch accent. While I was in Japan I was complimented on my Japanese constantly even though my language ability is very limited. How did this happen? I made sure the small amount of Japanese that I do know sounds good. I know I began trying to output way too early but I was in Japan on vacation so I wanted to give it a shot.*
to be fair, if you're a foreigner in japan attempting any Japanese at all, japanese people will say "nihongo jouzu desu ne". while it's a compliment, it's more of a "you're not good, but i appreciate the effort" they say to make us feel more comfortable.
can you make a followup video with asian people speaking japanese instead
wait, にほん(2)に at 5:55, but にほん(0)の at 3:13... guess i'm not as far as i thought with the whole pitch accent theory
The particle の turns odaka words into heiban. Words that have an accent on the second-to-last syllable and end in ん, っ, or an extended vowel are treated as odaka. Therefore, にほん [2] → にほんの [0]
@@mattvsjapan not an expert but I found this paper that says 日本の is an exception: user.keio.ac.jp/~kawahara/pdf/HandbookAccentPublished.pdf "Further, /+no/ does not tend to delete final accent on heavy syllables, as in (38), although /niho’n/ ‘Japan’ (38i) is an exception to this sub-generalization."
@@justinsilvestre Ah. Matt was wrong.
I feel like it’s easier for men to follow this accent. I as a woman have a deep voice, especially compared to Japanese women. Only woman I found there with my voice uses it for her comedy act!
Is there a possibility that pitch accent is extremely late acquired and that early reading, output or conscious study can interfere with the acquisition process and stall or halt it’s development in the learner before they can perceive/use it?
Oh fuck khatzumoto is in this. Matt has truly picked up where khatz left and nurtured ajatt into mia.
How do i even begin learning and practicing my pitch accent for Japanese? I’m a complete beginner rn but wanna start on the right foot
Wanna use me as a test subject for your hypothesis in a few years? Currently doing MIA. My native language is Papiamento. It has a high and a low tone so I wonder if I'd be able to pick up pitch-accent naturally.
Just test minimal pairs, if you can hear it you can speak it
I will admit. I just want to be good at pitch accent without any studying. Which is why I'm studying anyway.
I've been thinking about to learn kansai dialect, what should I do? Because in the kansai dialect has different pitch accent pattern. What your thoughts guys ?
@sanserif Thx for your reply, Yeah, I've been thinking about it, since that day, and I made the same conclusion as you do. So maybe in the future when I'm fluent I'll study osaka dialect.
But you can't really blame people for this belief either though. I mean if you can pick up a lot of grammar and other elements of Japanese intuitively, then certain logic follows that you could do similar with pitch accent. Anyways good video as always!
It’s scary to think that when your pitch is off it’s like nails scratching a chalk board to trained ears. Sigh time to buy a pitch accent dictionary.
just use weblio.jp. It has the accents of every word.
also OJAD is great.
@@ArtymusPrime the problem is that pitch changes in actual sentences
@@sanl2210 yeah, you learn those changes too through focused exposure to those patterns. A lot of the changes follow general rules and trends, which you notice through using programs like ojad and voicetext.jp constantly for every bit of a sentence you encounter you don't know the pitch of.
You and Khatz are really not off-putting at all compared to the others. I wouldn’t notice it if not pointed out with you two
Dave Spector sounds the better than me and Khatz imo
So where are you supposed to learn pitch accent from? A large amount of words have no pitch accent resources to reference.
Does pitch accent go out the door when you are in an emotional state: angry/yelling, crying, drunk,etc?
Usually not. Japanese people usually cry and yell with correct pitch accent. To them it's a fundamental aspect of a word
@@mattvsjapan That's interesting. I'm a heritage speaker of Serbian (incomplete acquisition during childhood, only fully mastered it as an adult) who has been trying to work on their pitch accent. My understanding is that in Serbian sentence-level intonation can often override lexical pitch, so it may be that it's more crucial in Japanese. I once read a paper that argues that "pitch accent" is a vague catch-all term for languages that are neither tonal nor fully non-tonal, so I guess Japanese pitch accent works differently to the Serbian system.
EDIT: I think it might be down to the fact that pitch in Serbian takes a backseat to vowel length and lexical stress, elements absent from Japanese. Certain syllable structures determine pitch; the pitch is only variable in multisyllabic words that are stressed on the first syllable.
I dont want to sound native. I want to engage with locals. how can i talk like locals (their pitch accent)? any advice if this cant be acquired naturally? learning std pitch accent pattern would help in it?
they are really natural
I think some of your pitch accents are kind of too close to call. For example, at 4:21 or so you say he said kuruma with a down step pattern which starts with the high pitch on ku then drops but honestly I think to me it sounds more like a heiban I think that guy has such good Japanese that it’s not noticeable. Also he puts a high pitch on the て clearly so I’m very confused how you hear that as a down step pattern. When a word has a heiban or rising pitch pattern they always put the high pitch (it’s not as high as a stressed or high mora, but it’s higher in pitch than the other surrounding mora) on the next particle or word. Idk i like this video but some of these examples are way too picky and I don’t think you’re hearing some of them quite right.
Also pitch isn’t the only thing used in stress Japanese people also have a higher volume in their voice typically with the higher pitch mora.
Everything in this video was checked by a native Japanese speaker who was born and raised in Tokyo. There were some things that I initially thought were mistakes but the Japanese person said are fine, and there were other mistakes I initially missed but the Japanese person pointed out. Both the Japanese person and I felt that the pronunciation of 車 was unambiguously wrong; her clearly pronounces it with the atamadaka pitch pattern, not the heiban one. In the phrase, "車って", to my ears, each mora is clearly pronounced with a pitch lower than the previous (く↓る↓ま↓って), so I'm not sure what you are earing when you say he puts a high pitch on て. In fact, the low て is what really gives it away that he is using the wrong pitch pattern. Just as you say, in this case, the て should have been the highest point in the phrase pitch-wise; instead, it's the lowest: clyp.it/03dl4mnt
@UC6hBPeti09obDCy01QTPMhw I agree with pretty much everything you say. It has also been my experience that when you ask most Japanese people to consciously reflect on their unconscious understanding of pitch accent, they often say very confused and misguided things. But, in this case, I simply told the Japanese person to "listen to the speakers and say whenever you hear something that sounds off". So I think it's fine to assume that the corrections are valid. Also, I have extensively studied pitch accent and intonation at the sentence level (including actually analyzing what native speakers do in natural speech, not just reading books), and took all the factors you mentioned into account when creating this video.
Also, although it is true that different dialects have different pitch accents, all the speakers in this video were clearly speaking "標準語". And there are widely accepted standards for "correct pitch accent" in "標準語". When Japanese people speak 標準語-ish speech with pitch accent that differs from the accepted norm, they are said to be "訛ってる" by other Japanese speakers. This is generally considered to be something that's embarrassing, and many Japanese people work very hard to acquire standard pitch accent. So, when a foreigner is clearly speaking something resembling "標準語", and uses accents that deviate from the accepted standard, I think it's fair to call those "pitch accent mistakes". If someone from kansai is speaking kansai-ben with keihan pitch accent, of course I'm not going to say they are making "pitch accent mistakes"
@@mattvsjapan Sorry I deleted my comment because I felt like I sounded like an all-knowing asshole, and I felt like I wasted your time enough as it was haha. I know about the whole standard Japanese thing, and Idk if as foreigners we should just go with the current political and cultural trend of the standardization of Japanese or if we should learn other dialects of Japanese and not only bow our heads to Tokyo ben. I think I see where you're coming from, and I think it's completely valid; but you should consider talking to some Kansai Ben speakers, Hiroshima, or Hokkaido speakers and see how they feel about what you're saying. I guess I feel iffy about this because I've learned a lot of Japanese in Kansai, so I'm very partial to the dialect.
Anyway, you should do more videos on pitch! Thanks for the great reply.
Do you think that a proficient acquisition of a tonal language prior to learning Japanese could improve the success chances of naturally mastering pitch accent?
Yes, but it's not necessarily. All you have to do is approach pitch accent the same way that Chinese learners approach tones: through *paying attention* to them
@@mattvsjapan Thank you for your video Matt, I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Also, this comment answered my own question, ありがとう！
@@kupferknochenAs a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I have to say no. I have a huge pitch accent problem that I didn't even realize I had until I consulted native japanese speakers, and I've been listening to Japanese for over 10 years, having listened to literally 10,000+ hours of anime, drama, cooking shows, baseball, etc etc etc.
@@YSFmemories That's really interesting actually, thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious whether you think having a basic understanding/awareness of pitch accent before you started acquiring Japanese would have helped you to acquire it "naturally"? (i.e. understanding that it's there and paying attention to "Japanese pitch")
Also, did you mean to reply to Matt's comment, since mine was just thanking Matt?
@@kupferknochen 1. Definitely. I was 10 years younger too ;). 2. No, I figured you might be interested since you said "this comment answered my own question" i figured you had a similar question as the first commenter.
In terms of why us gaijin have trouble with pitch accents, I think I have the answer:
I only found out about the importance of pitch accent (or its existence) today, but what I realized is that it's not that I can't recognize pitch accents. It's that my brain has been tainted with English pitch patterns (I was born in China but grew up in Canada so I'm also a native English speaker, and in fact had all my schooling in English);
So for example, if we take the word "最高に", the pitch should go "--- up flat"; yet English speakers may be tempted to go "---- down flat". Why? Because 最高 sounds a lot like the English word "cycle", which has an "up down" pattern.
Take another example. アメリカ. Amerika. Even though that also has a "heiban", "--- up flat flat" pattern, but English speakers naturally would say it "--- up down down", just like how we would say "America" in English since the two words are so similar (they are the same word, lol).
So the thing is, we have a set of patterns we follow, the English pitch accent patterns unconsciously, and that interferes with the Japanese patterns. It's not that I can't recognize the correct Japanese pitch patterns as correct, I can. But I also tend to unconsciously use English pitch accent patterns when I make a sound (which makes sense, since I speak english way more often), while at the same time, when I hear a Japanese word pronounced with the English pitch accent pattern, it also registers as "natural" or "correct" to me even though it shouldn't.
So the problem isn't not being able to recognize the pitch accent, it's getting rid of your native pitch patterns or divorcing it somehow from Japanese.
I haven't figured out how yet, but that's where I'm at right now.
You got Hikosimon in there but you forgot to put in Gimmeabreakman. I'm calling it. Incoming feud!
Pretty sure he only wanted to include high level speakers in this video.
Their accents sounds like Osaka dialects lol
No they just sound like they're mapping English stress accent onto Japanese. Hence the overuse of atamadaka (dropping after the first mora). Osaka dialect would be more like overusing odaka (rising on the last mora)
@@kougamishinya6566 I mean, I’m Japanese and I grew up in Japan. I feel like this is more like 大阪弁!
日本で育った生粋の日本人だけど、若干大阪弁に聞こえるよ！
I mean, for the "mimicking doesn't work"
At a certain point, isn't mimicking the same as focusing on pitch?
Depends on how you define it. I just meant that if you attempt to copy how they speak without understanding pitch, you'll likely end up speaking with wrong pitch
@@mattvsjapan I think at that point, it's more about insufficient training methodology than it is anything specifically about pitch accent.
When I'm mimicking, I have kinda always tried to copy literally every single aspect, like, the breathyness, how nasally sounds are, the sounds in between syllables, how long it takes to say each syllable, and so on.
Basically I'm trying to do an impression of that exact speaker's line I guess, as itf I were to say "Eat my Shorts" or "To infinity, and beyond"
I have quite a bit of history with vocal performance and felt it was ok, but obviously I'm not an objective judge.
Update, I did Dōgen's test and it matched, so, yay I guess
My native language is Swedish, a language which uses pitch accent. What is the odds that I will aquire it naturally?
99%
To me the goal of language is to be able to pass and collect information. I don't want to be Japanese.
Fun fact: Some people are genetically predisposed to do better at pitch accent languages than others
and I reckon one's native language also helps differentiate the pattern. I read that Chinese speakers actually pick up the pitch accent pattern naturally.
Too bad no Chinese native speakers are shown in this video.
How do yall identify pitch accent in normal speech?
3:53 does he say "ku (high) ru (low) ma(low)"? Shouldn't it be "ku (flat) ru (high) ma (high)"?
I remember you saying that you are trying to work out the structure of Japanese pitch accent, so I had a question, I realised that when speaking in Japanese, some 尾高 words have の attach to them high so it sounds like 平板, for example 犬、家、ゴミ etc. I wasn’t sure how an explanation for this would work so I thought I’d ask.. aha
When の follows 2+ mora 尾高 nouns, the noun usually becomes 平板. This is one of the many structural pitch accent rules
Matt vs. Japan ah, I can think of a handful of outliers to that though, would you say it’s just a general rule for the majority?
@@AshleyKobayashi In my experience, it applies 99% of the time to 2+ mora words. It almost never applies to 1 mora words. It also tends to not be applied to words related to 順序 like 次
Matt vs. Japan That’s quite interesting, thank you!
I'm trying to understand what the arrows mean but failing...
But does pitch accent even matter that much? I mean... the words still mean the same thing, it's not like the words mean something else from how you use the pitch accent(unlike in some languages). I mean, can you always tell when it's not used correctly and if so, how many tens of hours have you spent listening and practicing for this? You are a perfectionist, but it might be good to relax a bit.
Pitch accent often changes the meaning of words, and if you have shit pitch accent, it won't be rare for Japanese people to misunderstand what you are saying because of it (although of course USUALLY, context will make things clear). Working on pitch accent as a foreigner is more about sounding more pleasant to listen to than improving the comprehensibility of your output. It's not fun for natives to listen to Japanese with unnatural pitch accent.
Words don't still mean the same thing, 橋(はし) and 箸(はし) both have different pitch accents, and that's just one example out of thousands. In Japanese, because there are less variations in possible syllables you can speak, a lot of words have the same readings, so you need pitch accent to tell them apart.
The more you know. I though that for the words that are read the same, the only way to differentiate them is through the kanji they are written with.
I'm interested in knowing how much they say correctly in terms of pitch accent. Do you have a rough estimate?
For the parts he didn't correct, the fact he didn't correct it means it's probably correct.
I literally can't hear the difference between correct and incorrect japanese pitch accent. Am I deaf or just stupid?
Yes.
Pay attention.
@@default632 2 months after writing this comment I can say that I do actually hear it. It takes a lot of focus but I do hear it. I've tried integrating it into my pronunciation practice.
sometimes the pitch changes from what is shown in the dictionary like 事 and 時 or two 平板型 nouns that are put together and it's annoying because i can't figure out if there's an established rule. i can't discern what the pitch of words are from just listening because my listening sucks fml
The individual pitches of words are really only half the story. You need to learn all of the usage/combination/conjugation rules in order to get how pitch accent works
@@mattvsjapan at the very least the conjugations for the verbs are super straightforward. i haven't even attempted to look at adjectives yet
This is a wild guess but I’m gonna go with a hard NO
Spanish speakers we're doomed in that topic. Since Spanish is a "plain pitch" language lol
new learner here of 2 weeks. so how do i go about learning pitch accent properly?
デーブスペクターのあけていただいて、は日本人のおっさんでもこういうアクセントの人いるから気にならないな...
How often do natives make pitch accent mistakes?
Hardly ever. It's infrequently enough that when it does happen, it feels like a big deal, and other natives will often point it out.
MUかし の KUるま sounds more like なまり than a pitch accent mistake to me