An example I saw from another video that was really helpful was comparing the pitch changes to the vocalizations English speakers use for "yes" and "no". "Uh huh" is low->high and "uh uh" is high->low.
@@Nytrouse I knew a guy who would say uh huh with that backwards tone like every two seconds when someone was talking to him and it was annoying as fuck.
@@Nytrouse the interesting thing is that L-H uh-huh/mm-hm and H-L uh-uh/nuh-uh sound natural for answering say, yes-no questions, and unnatural when you reverse them in that context, but for other situations reversing them sounds natural depending on what emotion/nuance you’re conveying. like say you’re a little kid trying to grab a sneak a cookie and your mom says, “uh uh! not until after dinner.” if she says it high-low and more staccato, it sounds more like a disapproving reprimand. if she stresses/elongates the second “uh” and goes low-high-low (but still much higher than the initial low), it sounds more like a finger-wagging “tsk tsk! you know better, did you think i wouldn’t see you sneaking that cookie?” and as for H-L uh-huh, my partner and i use it pretty often as an emphatic agreement, e.g. “i’d call that a productive day” “uh-huh!” kind of a similar pitch to the phrase “and how!” of course the exact pitch and intonation in japanese will change depending on emotion and nuance conveyed, but the pitch accent/pattern for a word will still be followed and won’t switch around in that way.
Japanese pitch accent is a funny thing to me because I didn't consciously recognize it, nor was I ever told about it, during my entire Japanese language bachelor's courses. Looking back, when I studied abroad and such, I was always told I had the best pronunciation, and I think it's because I was imitating the pitch to some degree without realizing what I was doing. Back then I probably would have said getting the phenomes correct was the ticket, but I know now that pacing and pitch does way more to create an impression of good pronunciation.
You are the best language teacher I have ever seen. I've studied Italian for years and I haven't seen anyone explain the concepts as concisely and as well as you do with Japanese. Please keep making videos! I want to learn more from you!
For some of us Europeans the concept of pitch is very hard to grasp unless you took music lessons of some sort. In most of the indo-European languages we use upwards-downwards tone across multiple words in a sentece to charge it up with a certain emotion (or ask a question). All that without even realising what's going on with the tone.
Swedish is weird in that regard cause there's pitch happening but it _mostly_ doesn't "encode meaning" - what we think of and talk about is school is mostly just stressed/unstressed syllables, and the pitch that happens is more part of "sounding native" than anything that actually matters for being understood ...EXCEPT in some two-syllable words that stress can only be expressed in pitch and there actually is a word for "each version" (like "anden" which can be either "the duck" or "the spirit" depending on if you go down/up) So it's like, it does exist, some people think Swedish/Norwegian sounds "singing" because of it, but it's so "limited" that it's not really gonna help Swedish speakers learn "proper" pitch accent languages where it has a bigger role
@@metallsnubben I am guessing since you're Swedish, it may not be so obvious since the meaning encoded in the use of tones is something you don't usually think about, but in linguistics, even a neutral tone that doesn't seem to affect the lexical meaning of the words spoken is actually communicating very specifically that it is the literal exact meaning of the words spoken that is the intended message. This will always be true as long as there exist other ways to use tones that can alter the meaning. Both the absence or presence of elements that make up communication communicates something, including saying nothing at all. _All_ verbal languages are tonal in that they encode grammatical, lexical, morphological, emotional or other paralinguistic information into pitch variation. But for a native speaker it is usually going to be one of those things they don't even realise they're doing most of the time, making it hard to apply to a foreign language where it is done differently and you suddenly have to give conscious thought to something you might not even have known you'd been doing, and thus it's like learning an entirely new concept for the very first time and, as you point out, it is hard to apply what you know from your own language to learn a new one. You use anden/anden as an example of a minimal tonal pair, and for Norwegian faren/faren (the father / the danger) is a common example, but in both Swedish and Norwegian, almost all words would have an associated pitch accent that you don't even think about because they're not part of minimal pairs, and even if it may not feel like it, you will already have all the tonal tools you need to master Japanese tones. And you might realise how you use tones in your native tongue even better while you do.
Great video. I notice you call the pitch accented morae "stressed", but the term can be confusing to speakers of many languages, especially the Germanic ones like English, where a stressed syllable by definition is louder, stronger, higher pitched, but crucially it is also significantly _longer_ than an unstressed syllable. In addition, the natural rhythm of the languages is one where the time from one stressed syllable to the next gravitates to being of equal length, regardless of whether there is two, one, or no unstressed syllables between the stressed ones. If you tell an English speaker the stress of for instance あなた is on な, they are very likely to then pronounce it あなあた for a while because that is how it has to be pronounced based on their understanding of what word stress means. It is actually a little difficult for a native English speaker (or a Norwegian like myself) to properly pronounce a long unstressed vowel next to a stressed short vowel, like the name of Czech composer Janáček, for instance, which is correctly pronounced with a short "a" on a stressed vowel followed by a long "a" on an unstressed one. It just doesn't feel natural. Or "Tolkien", whose name is also supposed to have the stress on the first short syllable, but is often pronounced with the stress moved to the longer second one because it just feels more natural to an English speaker. This also has the effect that many who put the stress in the right place mistakenly pronounce his name as three syllables so that the second and third syllables can be short.
"Stress" may have a different meaning technically in linguistics. Yet, as a native English speaker, I understand perfectly. It's the clearest explanation I've ever heard. However, we still need to listen to native speakers for some time to properly execute it.
@@Aeroxima The unambiguous term is simply "pitch accent". Word stress is something else, as I described in my comment. It's not really harder to say, and it has the additional advantage of not causing misunderstandings. Win-win.
@@Aeroxima Linguistics is a way to simplify the way a language is described, but only down to the features that are distinctive, that carry a potential change in meaning if all other things remain equal. This would be different things in different languages, and sometimes linguists can't even agree exactly what is a significantly distinctive feature in a particular one, but for Japanese, since there is a clear accent that carries a meaningful distinction at the point where a relatively high tone is followed by a drop in pitch, that is also the phonological phenomenon you would describe as the pitch accent. And the language would be described as "pitch accented" - to disambiguate it from languages that primarily use other kinds of phonetic emphasis, such as volume accent, quantitative accent (vowel length), or the most common: stress accent (a combination of several intensified properties). And of course many languages, including my native Norwegian, might be mainly stress-based but also use tonal accent to distinguish meaning.
I've always had correct pitch accent but I've never thought about it till this video. I think it must be from starting to learn Japanese from an early age (Learning Japanese was mandatory in my country until grade 9 at least when I was in school) and being a massive weaboo my entire life so I've been listening to spoken Japanese for a long time. (Unfortunately when I was a kid I didn't know the value of getting a free foreign language education so I never properly applied myself in the classes and now I'm paying for it both figuratively and literally lmao)
@@saimirfan902 A lot of Japanese people like Australia and go there to study or even just as a vacation since it's like the closest Western developed country. My Japanese mother went there in college, and a coworker I know also went there when as a student.
OMG!!! this video is great!!! as a spanish native speaker this was really hard for me to understand, I just learned it by practice and habit when I lived in Japan. It was specially hard for me to understand when japanese people tried to explain it to me because there is "accents" in spanish that is kind of a similar concept but different at the same time so I couldn't understand the actual difference till today!!! Thank you so much!
With the anata examples it was clearer, but raising and falling pitch sounds a bit ambiguous imo. But basically you mean that it is low pitched until you reach the high pitch mora, and then low pitched until the end. Usually I see people explaining this mora by mora あなた = LHL (low high low pattern), but the raising falling explanation feels a bit more visual.
They told me in my 2 Japanese classes that this wasn’t a thing. That there was no pitch or accent. Blatant lie apparently. I don’t actually remember how to speak any Japanese…
I've been told that too which is so wild bc all languages and all words have pronunciation and emphasis. You have to train your ear and practice as you learn the words. It's a lot to learn retroactive.
It is more correct to say that Japanese is not tonal like Mandarin or Thai. Japanese is pitched and "just say it flat" makes it easier to quickly pick up vocabulary, the problem is that native Japanese may have a problem understanding and one has to unlearn saying it all flat to apply pitch correctly.
These titles are so incredibly clever. I click on them every time thinking you’re going to speak the words in the title in the video and always get mislead but end up watching anyway.
In my view and lingstudies Japanese pitch accent is down up down phonetics that priorizes first the down tones in the beginning and in the end in the middle high tone. It's a down tonal asian idiom very musical too in a down up down acoustic.
The pitch accent may be pretty obvious to you, but it's pretty hard to grasp for native speakers of non-tonal, stress based language. For languages like German or English, their stress system is different, it's marked differently, not just through pitch, and there is no concept of a "stressless" word, a word with several syllables always has one that is more stressed (or even several, with secondary stress). These language's are also stress-timed instead of mora-timed, so stress just has a very different role. Yet other langauges like French and Finnish don't have lexical stress at all (words can't be distinguished by stress), the stress is usually always on the first syllable of a word in Finnish, and on the last syllable of an utterance in French.
As far as I know, one difference between final-stressed and stressless words is that when a clitic is attached (は, の, が etc), the pitch will fall on the clitic if the word is stressed on its final mora, otherwise, the pitch will stay the same. This is because clitics are phonologically part of the same word, so it behaves as if the particle is part of the word. I've even heard people claim that this is the only way final-stressed and stressless words actually differ, idk if that's true, maybe depends on the speaker.
We have this in arabic, especially when reading quran, but it is more dependent on the situation or events like happiness , advice , etc... but here it seems fixed somehow , Try to hear some quran by Al Afasi, and you will get the point 😁
Don't forget to note that some words that have the same mora pattern will have a different interaction with the particle following them. For example, hana for nose and hana for flower have the same pitch accent pattern, a mora or high pitch on the na. However, the particle following hana for flower will be pronounced at the same pitch as the ha, so back to low, whereas a particle following hana for nose will be pronounced at the same pitch as the na, so high.
One way to practice this is to snap your fingers while pronouncing. e.g. when you say "ex'tremely", the emphase is on 'tre, so you snap your fingers while reading it, and it becomes exTREmely. I don't know if that's clear enough!
can you make a video about when to use wa particle vs when to use ga particle? like for example when I say someone is doing something, is it お母さんが買い物する。Or do I use ば?
@kanamenaito, thank you for this video! Some Japanese language learning source once told me that all Japanese words are pronounced without intonation. That is obviously not true, but you said many are "flat." Is it so many that we can assume *most* words are pronounced without an emphasis on any syllable? Arigatou gozaimasu!
Hi Kaname, thanks for this great video on pitch accent. In attempting to read text, unfortunately, unlike in your video, there is no visual indication on where the emphasis is. May I know how then to learn 'pitching', besides listening and repeating from videos of Japanese people speaking (slowly enough). Thank you. Keep up your wonderful content!
This may seem like a nutty question, but I’m mostly just curious: do you think an older rural native Japanese speaker - who maybe didn’t study English in school - would be familiar, or unfamiliar, with the origins of katakana loan-words borrowed from English? In other words, I guess what I’m asking is: if I were deep in the countryside, and I pronounced _ハンバーガー_ as “hamburger” instead - or, to give a trickier example, if I said “hard disk” instead of _ハードディスク_ - might the Japanese speaker think “Oh, okay, I recognize that word, this U.S. dude is just using its original pronunciation,” or is it likelier they’d think “Who is this clown butchering my beautiful Japanese?” or possibly even “Huh? What’s that word he said?” I ask because my instinct, when encountering a word typically written in katakana and borrowed either from English or from my other native tongue Spanish - such as _パン_ - is to just say the words as they’re pronounced in my native languages. I suppose what I picture is being in Tokyo, talking to a cosmopolitan Japanese person around my age or younger, maybe a shop clerk, and saying in halting Japanese that I’m looking for a _ドレス_ for my girlfriend, or a _ネクタイ_ for myself, or a _スカート_ for a friend, and them thinking “Oh, who is this try-hard, why doesn’t he just say the words in English?” or worse yet, them thinking “Is this guy trying to speak correctly, or is he just making fun of our Japanese accents?” But on the other hand, maybe these loan-words are now so ingrained into Japanese language and culture that to pronounce them in their original tongue would be to obscure them, and to render them unintelligible? Especially to a listener who only spoke Japanese. I mean, the words are written in katakana, so that’s an open acknowledgment that they’re borrowed … but talking to people in the U.S., our magpie of a mother-tongue steals words from other languages all the time, and I guarantee you most folk here spend 0% of their time thinking about the origins of “hoosegow,” slang for jail, from the Spanish _juzgó._ Maybe that’s how it is around the world. Anyhow. Sorry, I know that’s a niche question. In short: what would be the consequences of a U.S. tourist to Japan, speaking Japanese, pronouncing words borrowed from English as they were originally pronounced … and conversely, what might be the consequences of that person trying very hard to pronounce those words just as they are spoken in Japanese? Thank you for your uploads, they are very enlightening!!
I think it helps to learn non verbs with は or が particle, attached. Many flat sounding words have the particle at the same pitch but others at a low pitch. It's not that hard. Foreigners have to learn the stress for every English word. The sad thing is that most Japanese classes and teachers almost always ignore pitch and say it doesn't really matter. Then you get to an intermediate level and have to relearn basic vocabulary so you know that the は after 私 is at the same level, but the は after 弟 is low.
That was well explained. Now, I guess I’ll have to learn by exposure which word has which pitch accent for the rest of the Japanese vocabulary… sigh. (And the complications of how it applies in sentences, too… double sigh.) 😅
Does pitch accent differ by region? I have previously asked my Japanese professor about it, and he said not to worry about it because it varied by region and that I would pick it up if I spent time in Japan.
It would be really great to see a video in this same style for pronouncing different words that are spelled in the same romaji i.e. uncle (oji) versus grandfather (ojii). This video was very helpful, thank you. ありがとうございます
I started studying Japanese in Japan in 1990, and at the time nobody mentioned pitch accent. But it's a real problem because if you don't get it right, people will not understand you. So, is there a SYSTEM or METHOD for learning pitch accent, or do you just have to memorize the pitch of every word?
Thank you! ... I think I want to speak pitch accents correctly,... but, somehow, I want to pronounce incorrectly so I have that ' I have the cool foreigner accent ' style (^-^)
Defining Words used : Tone Pitch Rythm Stress Increasing Stress Increasing Tone How does all this differ, This video really does not add much value, all these terms above are distinct and different.
speaking about accents, please check how you make accent in "adjective", it's really distracting when you pronounce it as "objective" 😆 great videos though, thank you and good luck!
Stress accent and pitch accent are completely different. Japanese words don't have "stressed" moras, they have high pitch and low pitch. Stress implies greater volume, elongation, AND pitch. Japanese pitch accent is JUST pitch. Its misleading to call it stress. They're downsteps. There are also other things in this video that are misleading. Japanese pitch accent doesn't rise over several moras, it goes from high to low or low to high in 1 mora. In your own example of コミュニケーション, you even pronounced it in a different way then how you showed it visually. The downstep IS on the ケ like you pointed out, but it happens instantly, not over theション. I assume you are a native speaker, and if you listen to your own voice you can clearly hear that you are adding the downstep instantly and not over the ション. (There is a slight reduction in pitch over time in sentence level pitch accent called terracing, but that's not really useful to teach or learn because it happens naturally usually.) Its very hard to hear and work out the rules of our own languages, you should check out Dogen's pitch accent lessons if you want to learn how pitch accent works.
This seems nearly impossible to learn without actually speaking to native Japanese speakers for a long time or watching every anime ever. And maybe Japanese dubbed western media while you're at it. So this is JLPT N2 or N1 level learning.
Can’t even say it is n2 or n1 as it is never taught. There are people that have been living in Japan for years on end completely fluent but don’t have any sense of pitch
lemme say this - if you think about it, every language is basically a "group project" of a population, where EVERYTHING gains a meaning, even down to body language. japanese is very much that way, where meaning is embedded into everything, from pitch accent, kanji readings, slang, body language etc, and it has all been "collaboratively agreed on" over time. for a native speaker who doesn't know anything about grammar, things like pitch-accent and rhythm, they would just categorize as "feel" / "intuitive" - they might not be able to explain how it works to you...but they still do it right every time. why? because they're immersed, and they picked it up unconsciously from hearing the language being used constantly. i say this to say japanese is a language where there's a lot of "vibes", "underlying meanings", and things like this, and you're only going to pick it up by immersing yourself in the japanese language being used, until YOU start to subconsciously feel those "vibes". a person can tell you WHY it sounds crazy to say certain things in certain contexts in japanese, even though they "technically" make sense, but you're never going to understand that by trying to "book-learn" your way through it, memorizing what to do or not do in each situation. the way people "naturally" learn language is through immersion. japanese is not really that way, because the language is such a large formal system, you need to do a lot of "book-learning" with traditional language study, learning to write and read kanji, etc. (which japanese kids do through school.) but even that large amount of formal study can only teach you so much. for things like pitch-accent, you're not going to learn it without hearing the language a ton, and speaking the language a ton. for that, you want to immerse yourself (and immerse yourself in talking, with a keen ear!) you can understand all the rules and formalities of the language, but you will never understand the rhythm, sound, vibe, embedded meanings of the language without immersion.
I'm far from that level, however I think I'm doing okay with pitch accent. I like to watch kimono and food youtubers. Also Jeans Repair Goemon, other sewing youtubers. So you're sort of right. You don't have to limit yourself to anime. Also I highly recommend Tomoko Tomoko. She has such a beautiful accent and speaks slowly.
Wow. That's so much easier to understand than that famous white youtuber. Your explanation is so simple and clear. This is the place to study for sure. 🥰
Is "pitch accent" the right term to use when another youtuber incorrectly pronounces "akeerah" "kazooya" "kasooga"? It's not like completely mispronouncing karate like "kuhratty," but they're still pronouncing Japanese incorrectly, and it sounds jarring compared to native Japanese speech
An example I saw from another video that was really helpful was comparing the pitch changes to the vocalizations English speakers use for "yes" and "no". "Uh huh" is low->high and "uh uh" is high->low.
actually try reversing the pitch but leaving the "uh huh" "uh uh" the same. upward uh uh strange
@@Nytrouse the pitch and stress of “uh-uh” is entirely based on the context of what the speaker is reacting to.
@@Nytrouse I knew a guy who would say uh huh with that backwards tone like every two seconds when someone was talking to him and it was annoying as fuck.
@@Nytrouse the interesting thing is that L-H uh-huh/mm-hm and H-L uh-uh/nuh-uh sound natural for answering say, yes-no questions, and unnatural when you reverse them in that context, but for other situations reversing them sounds natural depending on what emotion/nuance you’re conveying. like say you’re a little kid trying to grab a sneak a cookie and your mom says, “uh uh! not until after dinner.” if she says it high-low and more staccato, it sounds more like a disapproving reprimand. if she stresses/elongates the second “uh” and goes low-high-low (but still much higher than the initial low), it sounds more like a finger-wagging “tsk tsk! you know better, did you think i wouldn’t see you sneaking that cookie?” and as for H-L uh-huh, my partner and i use it pretty often as an emphatic agreement, e.g. “i’d call that a productive day” “uh-huh!” kind of a similar pitch to the phrase “and how!”
of course the exact pitch and intonation in japanese will change depending on emotion and nuance conveyed, but the pitch accent/pattern for a word will still be followed and won’t switch around in that way.
@@ErikaCartetI believe the OP is referring to a "base level" intonation and also to a basic yes-no meaning.
Japanese pitch accent is a funny thing to me because I didn't consciously recognize it, nor was I ever told about it, during my entire Japanese language bachelor's courses. Looking back, when I studied abroad and such, I was always told I had the best pronunciation, and I think it's because I was imitating the pitch to some degree without realizing what I was doing. Back then I probably would have said getting the phenomes correct was the ticket, but I know now that pacing and pitch does way more to create an impression of good pronunciation.
You are the best language teacher I have ever seen. I've studied Italian for years and I haven't seen anyone explain the concepts as concisely and as well as you do with Japanese. Please keep making videos! I want to learn more from you!
As a vocalist myself, it's good to see Kaname using his vocals for explaining the nuances.
For some of us Europeans the concept of pitch is very hard to grasp unless you took music lessons of some sort.
In most of the indo-European languages we use upwards-downwards tone across multiple words in a sentece to charge it up with a certain emotion (or ask a question).
All that without even realising what's going on with the tone.
Forgot to mention, I really like how concise your videos are! Instant subcribe! :D
yep
Swedish is weird in that regard cause there's pitch happening but it _mostly_ doesn't "encode meaning" - what we think of and talk about is school is mostly just stressed/unstressed syllables, and the pitch that happens is more part of "sounding native" than anything that actually matters for being understood
...EXCEPT in some two-syllable words that stress can only be expressed in pitch and there actually is a word for "each version" (like "anden" which can be either "the duck" or "the spirit" depending on if you go down/up)
So it's like, it does exist, some people think Swedish/Norwegian sounds "singing" because of it, but it's so "limited" that it's not really gonna help Swedish speakers learn "proper" pitch accent languages where it has a bigger role
@@metallsnubben I am guessing since you're Swedish, it may not be so obvious since the meaning encoded in the use of tones is something you don't usually think about, but in linguistics, even a neutral tone that doesn't seem to affect the lexical meaning of the words spoken is actually communicating very specifically that it is the literal exact meaning of the words spoken that is the intended message. This will always be true as long as there exist other ways to use tones that can alter the meaning. Both the absence or presence of elements that make up communication communicates something, including saying nothing at all.
_All_ verbal languages are tonal in that they encode grammatical, lexical, morphological, emotional or other paralinguistic information into pitch variation. But for a native speaker it is usually going to be one of those things they don't even realise they're doing most of the time, making it hard to apply to a foreign language where it is done differently and you suddenly have to give conscious thought to something you might not even have known you'd been doing, and thus it's like learning an entirely new concept for the very first time and, as you point out, it is hard to apply what you know from your own language to learn a new one.
You use anden/anden as an example of a minimal tonal pair, and for Norwegian faren/faren (the father / the danger) is a common example, but in both Swedish and Norwegian, almost all words would have an associated pitch accent that you don't even think about because they're not part of minimal pairs, and even if it may not feel like it, you will already have all the tonal tools you need to master Japanese tones.
And you might realise how you use tones in your native tongue even better while you do.
@@hakonsoreide o.o
This is hard for me as a Finn. In Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable of every word.
あなたの説明は素晴らしかったです！It was very easy to grasp as a beginner in studying japanese pitch-accent, どうもありがとう！Time to watch the rest of your videos!
Great video.
I notice you call the pitch accented morae "stressed", but the term can be confusing to speakers of many languages, especially the Germanic ones like English, where a stressed syllable by definition is louder, stronger, higher pitched, but crucially it is also significantly _longer_ than an unstressed syllable. In addition, the natural rhythm of the languages is one where the time from one stressed syllable to the next gravitates to being of equal length, regardless of whether there is two, one, or no unstressed syllables between the stressed ones.
If you tell an English speaker the stress of for instance あなた is on な, they are very likely to then pronounce it あなあた for a while because that is how it has to be pronounced based on their understanding of what word stress means.
It is actually a little difficult for a native English speaker (or a Norwegian like myself) to properly pronounce a long unstressed vowel next to a stressed short vowel, like the name of Czech composer Janáček, for instance, which is correctly pronounced with a short "a" on a stressed vowel followed by a long "a" on an unstressed one. It just doesn't feel natural.
Or "Tolkien", whose name is also supposed to have the stress on the first short syllable, but is often pronounced with the stress moved to the longer second one because it just feels more natural to an English speaker. This also has the effect that many who put the stress in the right place mistakenly pronounce his name as three syllables so that the second and third syllables can be short.
"Stress" may have a different meaning technically in linguistics. Yet, as a native English speaker, I understand perfectly. It's the clearest explanation I've ever heard. However, we still need to listen to native speakers for some time to properly execute it.
I don't know what else you would call it without it turning the single word that fits well in the sentences into a phrase, sentence, or paragraph.
@@Aeroxima The unambiguous term is simply "pitch accent". Word stress is something else, as I described in my comment. It's not really harder to say, and it has the additional advantage of not causing misunderstandings. Win-win.
@@hakonsoreide Oh, so the part of the pitch accent that's highest is also called pitch accent.
@@Aeroxima Linguistics is a way to simplify the way a language is described, but only down to the features that are distinctive, that carry a potential change in meaning if all other things remain equal.
This would be different things in different languages, and sometimes linguists can't even agree exactly what is a significantly distinctive feature in a particular one, but for Japanese, since there is a clear accent that carries a meaningful distinction at the point where a relatively high tone is followed by a drop in pitch, that is also the phonological phenomenon you would describe as the pitch accent.
And the language would be described as "pitch accented" - to disambiguate it from languages that primarily use other kinds of phonetic emphasis, such as volume accent, quantitative accent (vowel length), or the most common: stress accent (a combination of several intensified properties).
And of course many languages, including my native Norwegian, might be mainly stress-based but also use tonal accent to distinguish meaning.
I've always had correct pitch accent but I've never thought about it till this video. I think it must be from starting to learn Japanese from an early age (Learning Japanese was mandatory in my country until grade 9 at least when I was in school) and being a massive weaboo my entire life so I've been listening to spoken Japanese for a long time.
(Unfortunately when I was a kid I didn't know the value of getting a free foreign language education so I never properly applied myself in the classes and now I'm paying for it both figuratively and literally lmao)
dono kuni desuka?
オーストラリア
@@Skalias hontou ni? Sore kakkoii desu ne.
I did not know that japanese is taught in Australia
@@saimirfan902 A lot of Japanese people like Australia and go there to study or even just as a vacation since it's like the closest Western developed country. My Japanese mother went there in college, and a coworker I know also went there when as a student.
@@blasianking4827 Oh alright. Thats such a cool thing.
Where has this been all my life! Looking forward to the next pitch accent video. So helpful
Extremely high quality Japanese learning content AND A CORGI! Subscribed!
OMG!!! this video is great!!! as a spanish native speaker this was really hard for me to understand, I just learned it by practice and habit when I lived in Japan. It was specially hard for me to understand when japanese people tried to explain it to me because there is "accents" in spanish that is kind of a similar concept but different at the same time so I couldn't understand the actual difference till today!!! Thank you so much!
With the anata examples it was clearer, but raising and falling pitch sounds a bit ambiguous imo. But basically you mean that it is low pitched until you reach the high pitch mora, and then low pitched until the end.
Usually I see people explaining this mora by mora あなた = LHL (low high low pattern), but the raising falling explanation feels a bit more visual.
Thank you very much for the explanation, I'm looking forward to further explanation of this topic. ❤
Thank you! I'm trying to learn japanese so I can communicate with my overseas friend better and your videos so far are helping me
They told me in my 2 Japanese classes that this wasn’t a thing. That there was no pitch or accent. Blatant lie apparently. I don’t actually remember how to speak any Japanese…
I've been told that too which is so wild bc all languages and all words have pronunciation and emphasis. You have to train your ear and practice as you learn the words. It's a lot to learn retroactive.
It is more correct to say that Japanese is not tonal like Mandarin or Thai. Japanese is pitched and "just say it flat" makes it easier to quickly pick up vocabulary, the problem is that native Japanese may have a problem understanding and one has to unlearn saying it all flat to apply pitch correctly.
このビデオはめっちゃ役に立つ。ありがとうございます！
これからもっとめっちゃ役に立つ動画を作ります！
Thank you very much for making this video, very helpfull.
I am glad I found your channel.You teach Japanese in the way that I cannot find from any book.
どもありがとうございます。
Your videos are amazing. I decided to learn hiragana and katakana a couple years ago and this is really helping me put that to use! Thank you!
accented perhaps. not stressed.
Japanese doesn't use stress accent. So only the pitch changes. Not the strength or the length like in English.
I like your video very much, I look forward to see the video talking about how the stress accent shifts😊
These titles are so incredibly clever. I click on them every time thinking you’re going to speak the words in the title in the video and always get mislead but end up watching anyway.
In my view and lingstudies Japanese pitch accent is down up down phonetics that priorizes first the down tones in the beginning and in the end in the middle high tone. It's a down tonal asian idiom very musical too in a down up down acoustic.
Wow! This has been so helpful!!! I never realized this before.
The pitch accent may be pretty obvious to you, but it's pretty hard to grasp for native speakers of non-tonal, stress based language. For languages like German or English, their stress system is different, it's marked differently, not just through pitch, and there is no concept of a "stressless" word, a word with several syllables always has one that is more stressed (or even several, with secondary stress). These language's are also stress-timed instead of mora-timed, so stress just has a very different role. Yet other langauges like French and Finnish don't have lexical stress at all (words can't be distinguished by stress), the stress is usually always on the first syllable of a word in Finnish, and on the last syllable of an utterance in French.
Very straightforward. Thank you.
BTW, the words with "no stress" that you call "flat" actually aren't (as you noticed yourself), even if we call the pattern _平板型_ normally
Isn't ðat ðe Chinese term for it?
@@danielantony1882
I don't speak Chinese, 謝謝 very much
This is very interesting! Was the next video shown already? I mean the one where it's explained how accent shifts within a sentence.
As far as I know, one difference between final-stressed and stressless words is that when a clitic is attached (は, の, が etc), the pitch will fall on the clitic if the word is stressed on its final mora, otherwise, the pitch will stay the same. This is because clitics are phonologically part of the same word, so it behaves as if the particle is part of the word. I've even heard people claim that this is the only way final-stressed and stressless words actually differ, idk if that's true, maybe depends on the speaker.
Your videos are the most helpful I’ve ever encountered
ありがとうございます❤
We have this in arabic, especially when reading quran, but it is more dependent on the situation or events like happiness , advice , etc... but here it seems fixed somehow , Try to hear some quran by Al Afasi, and you will get the point 😁
Thank you. This is a very helpful video.
OMG this is really helpful!! Thnkyouuu
Very well explained. This helped me a lot with understanding pitch accent. Thanks
Oh man I was instantly able to recognize the Jiraiya sound at the end there 😂
Don't forget to note that some words that have the same mora pattern will have a different interaction with the particle following them. For example, hana for nose and hana for flower have the same pitch accent pattern, a mora or high pitch on the na. However, the particle following hana for flower will be pronounced at the same pitch as the ha, so back to low, whereas a particle following hana for nose will be pronounced at the same pitch as the na, so high.
Dear sir, please uploaded more basically sentence structure vedio.i am very grateful to us.
すごく便利な動画でありがとう！
One way to practice this is to snap your fingers while pronouncing.
e.g. when you say "ex'tremely", the emphase is on 'tre, so you snap your fingers while reading it, and it becomes exTREmely.
I don't know if that's clear enough!
ビデオをありがとうございました！
Thanks a lot for the link to that "ugly looking"website!
Thank you for your videos i love them !
can you make a video about when to use wa particle vs when to use ga particle?
like for example when I say someone is doing something, is it お母さんが買い物する。Or do I use ば?
@kanamenaito, thank you for this video! Some Japanese language learning source once told me that all Japanese words are pronounced without intonation. That is obviously not true, but you said many are "flat." Is it so many that we can assume *most* words are pronounced without an emphasis on any syllable? Arigatou gozaimasu!
Thank you for your videos!
先生、あなたの vedio が素晴らしいです。
Subscribed! You have a very nice teaching style! Looking forward to more videos! :)
Hi Kaname, thanks for this great video on pitch accent. In attempting to read text, unfortunately, unlike in your video, there is no visual indication on where the emphasis is. May I know how then to learn 'pitching', besides listening and repeating from videos of Japanese people speaking (slowly enough). Thank you.
Keep up your wonderful content!
This may seem like a nutty question, but I’m mostly just curious: do you think an older rural native Japanese speaker - who maybe didn’t study English in school - would be familiar, or unfamiliar, with the origins of katakana loan-words borrowed from English?
In other words, I guess what I’m asking is: if I were deep in the countryside, and I pronounced _ハンバーガー_ as “hamburger” instead - or, to give a trickier example, if I said “hard disk” instead of _ハードディスク_ - might the Japanese speaker think “Oh, okay, I recognize that word, this U.S. dude is just using its original pronunciation,” or is it likelier they’d think “Who is this clown butchering my beautiful Japanese?” or possibly even “Huh? What’s that word he said?”
I ask because my instinct, when encountering a word typically written in katakana and borrowed either from English or from my other native tongue Spanish - such as _パン_ - is to just say the words as they’re pronounced in my native languages. I suppose what I picture is being in Tokyo, talking to a cosmopolitan Japanese person around my age or younger, maybe a shop clerk, and saying in halting Japanese that I’m looking for a _ドレス_ for my girlfriend, or a _ネクタイ_ for myself, or a _スカート_ for a friend, and them thinking “Oh, who is this try-hard, why doesn’t he just say the words in English?” or worse yet, them thinking “Is this guy trying to speak correctly, or is he just making fun of our Japanese accents?”
But on the other hand, maybe these loan-words are now so ingrained into Japanese language and culture that to pronounce them in their original tongue would be to obscure them, and to render them unintelligible? Especially to a listener who only spoke Japanese. I mean, the words are written in katakana, so that’s an open acknowledgment that they’re borrowed … but talking to people in the U.S., our magpie of a mother-tongue steals words from other languages all the time, and I guarantee you most folk here spend 0% of their time thinking about the origins of “hoosegow,” slang for jail, from the Spanish _juzgó._ Maybe that’s how it is around the world.
Anyhow. Sorry, I know that’s a niche question. In short: what would be the consequences of a U.S. tourist to Japan, speaking Japanese, pronouncing words borrowed from English as they were originally pronounced … and conversely, what might be the consequences of that person trying very hard to pronounce those words just as they are spoken in Japanese?
Thank you for your uploads, they are very enlightening!!
ありがとうございます😍
I think it helps to learn non verbs with は or が particle, attached. Many flat sounding words have the particle at the same pitch but others at a low pitch. It's not that hard. Foreigners have to learn the stress for every English word. The sad thing is that most Japanese classes and teachers almost always ignore pitch and say it doesn't really matter. Then you get to an intermediate level and have to relearn basic vocabulary so you know that the は after 私 is at the same level, but the は after 弟 is low.
These videos are so helpful. Also I love the puppy!!!! What's their name?
Thanks!
Wait, isn't 弟 中高 pattern? お^とうvと? That's what I always heard, both google and Jisho seems to agree, haha.
THE SNOW DOGGY IS SO CUTE!!!
Pitch is the reason why I never managed to speak japanese properly. Tahnks!!
That was well explained. Now, I guess I’ll have to learn by exposure which word has which pitch accent for the rest of the Japanese vocabulary… sigh. (And the complications of how it applies in sentences, too… double sigh.) 😅
Very nicely done, thank-you Kaname!
But maybe a little more helpful for drill-purposes, if the words are groups together by similar pitch-pattern.
Here are some lines from a DRILL-BOOKLET I did for the Pitch-Accent of Ancient Greek.
("Miner's Prosody.")
The XII Latin word forms, then the 37 Greek word forms.
In DISYLLABLES, the accent falls on the first syllable.
ácū túō nóvam stólam díēs híems ᴗ́ ‒ 3
Éstne? Súrge! Mā́rce hṓra vḗnor ómnis ‒́ ᴗ 3
Cátō bónā sédent fídē vénīs férē ᴗ́ ‒ 3
déntēs Lū́́cī cúrrunt tḗctīs últrā quídnī? ‒́ ‒ 4
dúōs Iúbē! nóvī Válē! lóquāx hómō ᴗ́ ‒ 3
béne páter úbi méa síne mágis ᴗ́ ᴗ 2
lávō fórīs dómī quótā túae rósās ᴗ́ ‒ 3
creā́tus habḗsne puélla senā́tor inī́qua vidḗtur ᴗ ‒́ ᴗ 4
labṓrāns magístrī tabérnās amī́cō Subū́́rā moléstae ᴗ ‒́ ‒ 5
octā́va servī́re cēnā́re sūdā́mus īgnṓsce piscṓsus ‒ ‒́ ᴗ 5
aestī́vās pīstrī́nā lēgístī strūctṓrēs accéptī tōnsṓrēs ‒ ‒́ ‒ 6
. . . otherwise, the third-to-last (or "antepenult") is accented.
áliquid ánimal hólera núdius émere lóqueris ᴗ́ ᴗ ᴗ 3
pópulō pátinās áliquōs hódiē mínimē súbitō ᴗ́ ᴗ ‒ 4
crū́́stula témpore pérdere grándinat Álpibus íntulit ‒́ ᴗ ᴗ 4
cómparō cúrsitās bálneō fḗriās rī́vulō grā́tiās ‒́ ᴗ ‒ 5
37 Greek Word Patterns: 11 Disyllables
ᴗ́ ᴗ pyrrhic paroxytone
μάλα γέρον ἔτι βίον ὅδε πάλιν
mála géron éti bíon hóde pálin
ᴗ ᴗ́ pyrrhic oxytone
κατά καλόν ἐπί (*) γλυκύ διά βιόν
katá kalón epí glyký diá bión
ᴗ́ ‒ iamb paroxytone
φράσεις ἄναξ ἔσω γράφεις βίου θέλῃς
phráseis ánax ésō grápheiz (*) bíū thélēs
ᴗ ‒́ iamb oxytone
πολύς τ' ἐμός (*) καλόν πατρός φρενός θεός τε
polýs t' emós kalón patrós phrenós theós te (**)
ᴗ ‒̃ iamb perispomenon
θεῶν πονεῖς βραχεῖ Φρυγῶν στολῇ ἐρῶν
theō̂n poneîz brakheî Phrygō̂n stolē̂ erō̂n
‒́ ᴗ trochee paroxytone
σπέρμα πρέσβυ τόνδε δέλτον ὄγκον ὄντας
spérma prézby tónde délton óngkon óntas
‒ ᴗ́ trochee oxytone
ξανθόν ἐγγύς ὀξύ (*) θνητός ἐκτός ἀμφί
‒̃ ᴗ trochee properispomenon
στεῖχε τῶνδε γῆρας Αὖλιν ἧσσον ἦλθον
steîkhe tō̂nde gē̂ras Aûlin hē̂sson ē̂lthon
‒́ ‒ spondee paroxytone
βέλτιστ' ἔσται πέμπει Κάλχᾱς φράζεις σφάξαι
béltist' éstai pémpei Kálchas phrázdeis spháxai
στείχω σπεύδω λεις οὔκουν χαίρειν οὕτω
steíkhō speúdō lȳ́eis ū́kūn khaírein hū́tō
‒ ‒́ spondee oxytone
ἀνδρός χρηστόν δεινός τ' ἐσθλός γ' αὐτός τ' ἀισχρόν τε
andrós chrēstón deinós t' esthlóz g' autós t' aischrón te
ἀγνώς αὐτούς σῑγαί Γουνεύς αἰθήρ σπονδς
angnṓs autū́s sīgaí Gūneús aithḗr spondā́s
‒ ‒̃ spondee perispomenon
σκηνῆς ζηλῶ ἀνδρῶν τῑμαῖς λῡπεῖ συγχεῖς
skēnē̂s zdēlō̂ andrō̂n tīmaîs lȳpeî syngkheîs
26 Trisyllables
ᴗ́ ᴗ ᴗ tribrach proparoxytone
σφάγιον ἔμολον Ἄρεος ἄδικον ἔριδι τέμιδος
sphágion émolon Άreos ádikon éridi témidos
ᴗ ᴗ́ ᴗ tribrach paroxytone
λιγέα μεγάλα Ῥοδίος ἐμέθεν ὁ-λόγος ἀπόδος
ligéa megála Hrodíos eméthen ho-lógos apódos
ᴗ ᴗ ᴗ́ tribrach oxytone
σφαλερόν ἑανός ἱερόν ἁδινά θαλερόν ἰταμός
sphalerón heanós hierón hadiná thalerón itamós
στιβαρόν ἁπαλός ἀτραπός ἀφανές ἀγαθά μαλακός
stibarón hapalós atrapós aphanés agathá malakós
ᴗ ᴗ́ ‒ anapest paroxytone
ἀνέμων ὀπίσω θυμέλᾱς ἀπόρων ἀλόχῳ κροκάλαις
anémōn opísō thymélās apórōn alókhō krokálais
ἀπόρως ὑδάτων ἐλάταις κλισίᾱς Ἰθάκην Ἑλένη
apórōs hydátōn elátais klisíās Ithákēn Helénē
ᴗ ᴗ ‒́ anapest oxytone
ἐπιμίξ ἁπαλός σφαλερόν μαλακός στιβαρόν φοβερόν
epimíx hapalós sphalerón malakós stibarón phoberón
ᴗ ᴗ ‒̃ anapest perispomenon
ἀδικεῖ βασιλεῦ προαλεῖ Δαναοῖς χαλεπῶς σταφυλῆς
adikeî basileû proaleî Danaoîs khalepō̂s staphylē̂s
ᴗ́ ‒ ᴗ amphibrach proparoxytone
μέλαθρον (*) ἄριστα πάρεστιν ἔχουσι πρότῑμον ἔπεμψα
mélathron árista párestin ékhūsi prótīmon épempsa
* -λαθρ- is an example of muta cum liquida making position.
ᴗ ‒́ ᴗ amphibrach paroxytone (*)
λαβόντες ἐόντα διδόντος ἑλόντα δαμέντα παρόντα
labóntes eónta didóntos helónta daménta parónta
* This pattern does not occur with acute accented long vowels.
ᴗ ‒ ᴗ́ amphibrach oxytone
μεταξύ παλαιός ἀοιδός ἀληθές ὀχληρός ἀναιδές
metaxý palaiós awoidós (*) alēthés okhlērós anaidés
ᴗ ‒̃ ᴗ amphibrach properispomenon
ξυνᾶγε βροτοῖσι γυναῖκα ταχεῖα διῇξε κατεῖδον
xynãge brotoîsi gynaîka takheîa diē̂xe kateîdon
ᴗ ‒́ ‒ bacchius paroxytone
θαλάσσης ὀλέθρῳ (*) συνάψαι φυλάσσων τεθρίππων ἰδέσθαι
thalássēs oléthrō synhápsai phylássōn tethríppōn idésthai
ᴗ ‒ ‒́ bacchius oxytone
ἀδελφόν βαβαιάξ! παλαιός ταραγμόν γυναικός τιθηνός τε
adelphón babaiáx! palaiós tarangmón gynaikós tithēnós te
ᴗ ‒ ‒̃ bacchius perispomenon
στρατηγεῖν Ἀχιλλεῖ βοηθεῖν ἀδελφῶν Ἀχαιοῖς ἁμιλλῶ
stratēgeîn Akhilleî boētheîn adelphō̂n Akhaioîs hamillō̂
‒́ ᴗ ᴗ dactyl proparoxytone
πράγματα γράμματα σύγγονον ἅρμασιν ὄλβιος Ἄρτεμι ς
‒ ᴗ́ ᴗ dactyl paroxytone
Πλειάδος εὐρέϊ παρθένον Ἑλλάδος ἀντίον ἀσπίδος
Pleiádos euréi (*) parthénon Helládos antíon aspídos
βουκόλος Αὐλίδος ἐνθάδε Νῑρέα μητέρα Χαλκίδα
būkólos Aulídos entháde Nīréa mētéra Khalkída
‒ ᴗ ᴗ́ dactyl oxytone
Τυνδαρίς οὐδενός Ἀλφεός ἀσθενές ὀμφαλόν ἀσκελές
Tyndarís ūdenós Alpheós asthenés omphalón askelés
‒ ᴗ́ ‒ cretic paroxytone
ἐμπύρων εἱμάτων ἀσπίσιν προσφέρων παρθένου εὐφρόνης
empýrōn heimátōn aspísin prosphérōn parthénū euphrónēs
‒ ᴗ ‒́ cretic oxytone
ἡ δὲ σάρξ ἡ ὁδός τὴν ὁδόν τὴν θεόν νυμφικόν θ' ἡ δὲ φλέψ
hē de sárx hē hodós tēn hodón tēn theón nymphikón th' hē de phléps
‒ ᴗ ‒̃ cretic perispomenon
ἡδοναῖς εὐπρεπῆ συμφοραῖς ἀντερεῖ δεσποτῶν συμβαλῶ
hēdonaîs euprepē̂ symphoraîs antereî despotō̂n symbalō̂
‒́ ‒ ᴗ antibacchius proparoxytone
Ἕλληνες ἔκδημον ἔστεψε κέλσᾱσα δέσποινα! κάλλιστον
Héllēnes ékdēmon éstepse kélsāsa déspoina! kálliston
‒ ‒́ ᴗ antibacchius paroxytone
εἰς-πάντας ἐνθένδε τοιόσδε θῡμόν-τε τὸ-σπέρμα τοιάνδε
eis-pántas enthénde toiózde thȳmón-te to-spérma toiánde
‒ ‒ ᴗ́ antibacchius oxytone
θησαυρός ἀνθηρόν ἀσπερχές οὐ-πιστόν ὀρχηστύν οἰωνός
thēsaurós anthērón asperkhés ū-pistón orkhēstýn oiōnós
‒ ‒̃ ᴗ antibacchius properispomenon
μνηστῆρες ἐνταῦθα λαμπτῆρος εἰσῆλθε γλαυκῶπις οὐ-χρῆν-σε
mnēstē̂res entaûtha lamptē̂ros eis-ē̂lthe glaukō̂pis ū-khrē̂n-se
‒ ‒ ‒́ molossus oxytone ALF 13
Εὐρυσθεύς ὀτρηρώ ἐξελθών αἰχμητήν Νημερτής Ἀψευδής
Eurystheús otrērṓ exelthṓn aikhmētḗn Nēmertḗs Apseudḗs
‒ ‒ ‒̃ molossus perispomenon
εὐχωλῆς οἰωνῶν καινουργεῖς Βοιωτῶν ὀφθαλμοῖς γαμφηλαῖς
eukhōlē̂s oiōnō̂n kainūrgeîs Boiōtō̂n ophthalmoîs gamphēlaîs
I hope to have private lessons with you someday.😊
How do we know what’s the position pitch accent of word
Interesting. My dictionary lists 韓国 as 平板型. Is 頭高型 also acceptable? Or is my dictionary wrong?
thanks!
Great video! I'm a big fan of your channel. Is there any online dictionary or tool you recommend to know the pitch accent of each word?
I don’t know if he has a recommendation, but I would recommend JapanDict.
@@GogakuOtaku thank you!
@@javierfontenla You’re welcome! :)
I found that you read とasど and たasだ, same goes for て from what I heard in japanese, people pronounced で. Is it normal or I heard them wrong?
How to know where to put the high or low pitch. How to determine or how to locate the pitch
Interesting. In French the pitch is within the sentence structure, not individual words, as it is in English and Japanese.
Arigato Go Zai Mas, Nihhon Kokku!❤🇯🇵
Does pitch accent differ by region? I have previously asked my Japanese professor about it, and he said not to worry about it because it varied by region and that I would pick it up if I spent time in Japan.
But there isn't an accent symbol in the words? How one can know of the accent presence?
Waiting for next video about accent xD
It would be really great to see a video in this same style for pronouncing different words that are spelled in the same romaji i.e. uncle (oji) versus grandfather (ojii). This video was very helpful, thank you. ありがとうございます
どれも素晴らしいビデオですが、標準語アクセントでないところが気になりました。
どうもありがとうございます
Sounds like it makes you enunciate more.
How to know where the stressed mora is by just reading the word?
I started studying Japanese in Japan in 1990, and at the time nobody mentioned pitch accent. But it's a real problem because if you don't get it right, people will not understand you.
So, is there a SYSTEM or METHOD for learning pitch accent, or do you just have to memorize the pitch of every word?
is the dog in Kaboki ?
the only way to know where the mora is , is by listening to japanese speakers I guess ?
Interesting learning Japanese is like going up and down on chair
listen here i will pronounce communication as i want this is OUR word, wakattaka?
He looks so cute on the thumbnail 🥰🥰
Sugoi desu
Thanks desu
“The kana あ is obviously higher than the rest of the mora”
Meanwhile me thinking it’s obviously の 0_0
Thank you! ... I think I want to speak pitch accents correctly,... but, somehow, I want to pronounce incorrectly so I have that ' I have the cool foreigner accent ' style (^-^)
Yea but how do you find the stress
Wow It feels good when you see someone trying hard to learn a thing you learned with no effort
Defining Words used :
Tone
Pitch
Rythm
Stress
Increasing Stress
Increasing Tone
How does all this differ, This video really does not add much value, all these terms above are distinct and different.
Like sing learning 😂
speaking about accents, please check how you make accent in "adjective", it's really distracting when you pronounce it as "objective" 😆 great videos though, thank you and good luck!
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Stress accent and pitch accent are completely different. Japanese words don't have "stressed" moras, they have high pitch and low pitch. Stress implies greater volume, elongation, AND pitch. Japanese pitch accent is JUST pitch. Its misleading to call it stress. They're downsteps.
There are also other things in this video that are misleading. Japanese pitch accent doesn't rise over several moras, it goes from high to low or low to high in 1 mora. In your own example of コミュニケーション, you even pronounced it in a different way then how you showed it visually. The downstep IS on the ケ like you pointed out, but it happens instantly, not over theション. I assume you are a native speaker, and if you listen to your own voice you can clearly hear that you are adding the downstep instantly and not over the ション.
(There is a slight reduction in pitch over time in sentence level pitch accent called terracing, but that's not really useful to teach or learn because it happens naturally usually.)
Its very hard to hear and work out the rules of our own languages, you should check out Dogen's pitch accent lessons if you want to learn how pitch accent works.
This seems nearly impossible to learn without actually speaking to native Japanese speakers for a long time or watching every anime ever. And maybe Japanese dubbed western media while you're at it.
So this is JLPT N2 or N1 level learning.
Can’t even say it is n2 or n1 as it is never taught. There are people that have been living in Japan for years on end completely fluent but don’t have any sense of pitch
lemme say this - if you think about it, every language is basically a "group project" of a population, where EVERYTHING gains a meaning, even down to body language. japanese is very much that way, where meaning is embedded into everything, from pitch accent, kanji readings, slang, body language etc, and it has all been "collaboratively agreed on" over time. for a native speaker who doesn't know anything about grammar, things like pitch-accent and rhythm, they would just categorize as "feel" / "intuitive" - they might not be able to explain how it works to you...but they still do it right every time. why? because they're immersed, and they picked it up unconsciously from hearing the language being used constantly. i say this to say japanese is a language where there's a lot of "vibes", "underlying meanings", and things like this, and you're only going to pick it up by immersing yourself in the japanese language being used, until YOU start to subconsciously feel those "vibes". a person can tell you WHY it sounds crazy to say certain things in certain contexts in japanese, even though they "technically" make sense, but you're never going to understand that by trying to "book-learn" your way through it, memorizing what to do or not do in each situation.
the way people "naturally" learn language is through immersion. japanese is not really that way, because the language is such a large formal system, you need to do a lot of "book-learning" with traditional language study, learning to write and read kanji, etc. (which japanese kids do through school.) but even that large amount of formal study can only teach you so much. for things like pitch-accent, you're not going to learn it without hearing the language a ton, and speaking the language a ton. for that, you want to immerse yourself (and immerse yourself in talking, with a keen ear!) you can understand all the rules and formalities of the language, but you will never understand the rhythm, sound, vibe, embedded meanings of the language without immersion.
I'm far from that level, however I think I'm doing okay with pitch accent. I like to watch kimono and food youtubers. Also Jeans Repair Goemon, other sewing youtubers. So you're sort of right. You don't have to limit yourself to anime. Also I highly recommend Tomoko Tomoko. She has such a beautiful accent and speaks slowly.
@@Zach-rt9kg o.o
Wow. That's so much easier to understand than that famous white youtuber. Your explanation is so simple and clear. This is the place to study for sure. 🥰
正直、ピッチのアクセントをマスターするのはとても難しそうです。習得する価値があるのかどうか、よくわからない。
Is "pitch accent" the right term to use when another youtuber incorrectly pronounces "akeerah" "kazooya" "kasooga"? It's not like completely mispronouncing karate like "kuhratty," but they're still pronouncing Japanese incorrectly, and it sounds jarring compared to native Japanese speech
God damn...
That's very hard and complicated, i hate it when i have to learn the pronunciation and accent of a language, there's no way i can understand this shit
Pitch accent isn't necessary.
Focus more on grammar and vocabulary in context more.
@@digidoridvideos3672 thank you, may I ask something?
@@Kumozu-sp7lw yes
@@digidoridvideos3672 are you a native English speaker or if you're not, what's your English level
I guess, you waited for some bloke to compare you to or just simply name you Dogen Lite. So, here I am :3
Oh, I didn't want to mention names. I hate that guy. This is far superior.
@@verreal And who are you?
@@verreal why do you hate him tho? Just curious