I am a beginner and the more I learn the more I emphasize “beginner”. Had a discussion on this last week with three generations of Japanese with 2 dialects and various levels of English competence. They said it’s context in most cases. It started with Hashi, we had a lot of laughs. It was fun….
I really enjoy the Pitch accents lessons because they are extremely easy and accessible when you have a good knowledge of the language. Hope more people get interested and join in.
It helps me to think of it like a music piece you're learning to perform. The hard part is learning the notes for the first time. You're not gonna give an expressive performance if you're worried about messing up the basics of the piece. Only when you have it fully learned and you have it in muscle memory are you going to be able to practice the dynamics and other more expressive aspects like that.
Wow, what a great lesson! Thanks for making it available for free. The way you described the pitch accent and compared it to English syllable emphasis was a really clear and intuitive (for me) way to understand it. Thanks again!
I mean I’ve reached the point where I managed to say “ないです日本言葉” All by myself, no google translate! Which yes I know is the shittiest, most foreigner sounding sentence ever. But keep in mind I started learning like a month ago! I’m impressed I even remembered the word for “word”. We’re getting there boys
Thanks so much for posting this! This is the next video I'm about to watch in the Patreon series and I'm really looking forward to the additional context it will provide. I feel like the beginning physics student who only knows how things work without friction and in a vacuum, and this lesson is where I start learning how the real world works.
Thanks for this. I wonder if I’ve been away from study long enough to have had my old habits broken. I also worry my ears are broken. I hope this is a skill that practice improves.
Ahh I've always wanted to know if the pitch accenting was so strict or if there were levels of subtlety to it. The spectrographs really drive home that the pitch accenting is always there, but the interplay between syllables is what develops the emotion and delivery of the word.
Honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time for me because I just started using the Shadowing method :)) For some reason, my brain also struggles with the accent. When I hear a speaker with a high voice, my voice goes high as well in order to “match” their sound. I’m trying to unlearn this though.
Pitch Accent between regions can definitely trip you up sometimes. 雲 vs 蜘蛛 in Kansai vs Kanto is one that got me. Cause I spent my formative Japanese learning years in Kansai, I still tend to naturally use that pitch accent and confuse people here in Kanto about "Rain Spiders" or "Clouds crawling around" ;) .
I barely know hiragana and katakana but I do still find this stuff interesting, and even with basic phrases when I visit Japan on occasion I can sound at least a little bit more intelligible from some of the things I've picked up. I have absolutely gone low on the 'go' on 'nihongo ga' in the past, so every little helps haha!
This reminds me of learning Japanese on Duolingo, and how Lily (the purple haired character) has such a deadpan tone that it's hard to derive the base pitch accent from words sometimes. Thank goodness for the dictionary I use having the binary graphics
Duolingo is absolute garbage for Japanese, they put those 'new' voices in a year ago and their pitch accent is totally wrong on a lot of words and they even use the completely wrong kanji pronunciation on a lot of words. I just had to disable sound when using it duolingo, it was so annoying. (Recently they even started animating the characters while you're trying to read, which makes it incredibly difficult to read Kanji when you're eyes kept getting drawn to the animation. Basically makes the site useless)
I use Duolingo strictly as a fancy version of flash cards. It’s absolute garbage for learning a language. But it’s a great tool to build confidence and reinforce things you already know and get a good semblance of how far along you are
@@takanara7 The pitch accents are correct in most cases, I always double check new words in Takoboto (the dictionary i use). Like I said, just Lily's monotonous voice sucks for learning pitch so I end up relying completely on takoboto for words only she has audio for. Also unless you have ADHD or something (fair enough if you do ofc) those animations are hardly that distracting, and there is a setting to turn off all animations in the android app. The complaint I is how the new voices have no idea how to read kanji. I've had to forcefully read 米 as こめ out loud to drown out Lily saying べい, and that's just one out of many incorrect readings
in my own annotations, I use ancient Greek's acute, circumflex and grave accent markers to remember the pitch accent of new Japanese words. It works well enough, and is quite compact.
It would make a fun graphic to compare: A) basic pitch accent versus the vocal riffs people do on it. B) basic ("bones!") kanji structure, versus the expressive riffs people do on it.
I am currently trying to learn Japanese and I found your videos and found them really helpful and funny, I do already know 2 languages on a native level due to strict parents at home always asking to speak my mother tongue at home, Spanish, so while living in the united states I was learning and using English outside the house but with family and friends I spoke Spanish, so I ended up becoming native in proficiency in both languages, so I enjoy finding the nuances and similarities, as well as how my experience learning 2 languages can help me learn this new one. 1 thing I noticed is that as a native sounding speaker, pronunciation in japanese is really easy (at the very least in my case) because Japanese and Spanish vowels sound exactly the same and any other word/kana using those vowels will sound the same every time, unlike English were the letter A can sound like, apple (a) snake (a) father (ä) ball (o) Many (e). but in Spanish for example the word for Apple is, "Manzana". if both a Spanish speaker and Japanese speaker were to pronounce this word for the first time I bet 100% they would pretty much sound the same.
Thanks for this video! Something I’ve wondered for a while is if song lyrics are affected by pitch accent patterns - like do some melodies sound more or less “correct” because they match the pitch accents of the words?
I guess you're right. I've also heard children's songs were composed so that accents and melodies match. Please try listening to the song "Karatachi no Hana".
Pitch Accent of words is changed in songs to fit the melody that the artist wants. Music is super fun to listen to, but for this reason it's best to listen to natural, unscripted Japanese (like UA-cam videos or podcasts) if you want to improve your listening comprehension. Anime, Dramas, and Audiobooks are also really good resource; just remember that they're scripted and the formality/register of speech that you hear is not going to be the exact same as actual speech (however the pronunciation and accent will be spot on because it's all professionally done by voice actors).
@@XgamersXdimensions I'm with you. A song can benefit greatly from word choice with different accents from the melody. What I meant in the previous comment was that word choice is 'affected' by pitch accent to some extent. I've heard a lyricist mention something like that on the radio. I also heard that songs for elementary school pupils called Shooka(唱歌) were composed in accordance with the accents. Finally, if I had to say something regarding how to learn pitch accent, I would recommend to Japanese learners an online Japanese lessons by NHK WORLD JAPAN which have scripts with accent marks in every sentence.
Oh boy wait till we get to the third feature that's prominence. Though in my general preface to japanese linguistics the order is pitch accent intonation and prominence
I find it really interesting that it's just like in English where that slight upward inflection at the end of the word kind of turns it into a question.
Okay, I felt that. I've always tried to match the pitch correctly, so when you presented the incorrect pitch, it hit hard. Like listening to an orchestra play and, somewhere along the line, someone hit a bad or sour note.
i don't study japanese. I study danish, but as you demonstrated with english, many lenguages have a similar phenomena. I have noticed is actually hard to speak with the correct accent while giving an intonation that is not neutral with new words/words you dont usually speak. This makes sense tho, and kids have this problem too when learning words of their native language. It is a bit frustrating at times tho haha but is all a process!!
I feel like there are many English comparisons ... "The factory produces new clothes" and " I brought produce from the grocery store" would both sound different. I didn't realize this until recently I've been saying the word produce and suspect differently based on grammar. =P
That is almost entirely verb-noun, though, where all that changes is whether the word is used as a verb or as a noun. In Japanese it can be to differentiate between nouns, which I don't think happens in English (it might in rare cases). A good European equivalent is Greek, where for example ταξί and τάξη are different and differentiated in speech only by their accent (ι and η are pronounced the same, so it's as if it were taxee and taxi).
i was waiting a comedy video when i saw the notification but damn, this is way more better also, while looking at にほん accent i thought it is similar to something i know, and then realized it looks like the accent in french (^), then realized that the shape of accent that are used with vowel letters in french look like the accent binary system in nihongo, low to high, high to low, and then this ( ^ ) if this is true, it will help me a lot in pronouncing french if ever studied it again dai fan desu, dogen san
The circumflex (^) in French writing notes a place where a word used to have a consonant that is no longer pronounced and so it was dropped from the spelling of the word. The reason for the ^ is that the word is pronounced differently than it would be if no ^ was present. In other words, the missing consonant is no longer pronounced but the fact that it used to exist still affects the pronunciation of the word so the circumflex is added to avoid ambiguity. That said, the circumflex originated in written Ancient Greek and was used as a pitch accent marker there (Ancient Greek was a pitch accent language). So the symbol does sometimes relate to pitch accent; just not in French (since French doesn't use a pitch accent).
@@argyrendehringterimksaccu174 I said consonant, not 's'. Often it is 's', but not exclusively. It doesn't really matter which consonant it was though, just the fact that there was one.
@@mikebmcl guess you didn't even check the k Klein video about egg with circumflex, some comment there listed a word that doesn't have and s in it's older form in etymology I've checked Wiktionary and it's true. We use circumflex e for schwa but in Javanese they uses inverted breve, acute for /e/ grave for the ɔ in kokoh
I always think of an example you gave on stream, actually. A viewer was wondering how pitch accent stays consistent when you put emotion into it, and you said to think of someone saying "majide". The accent is on ma, so it's pronounced MAjide. If the speaker were really in disbelief, they might go even higher in pitch and say *MA*jide, but they'd never say maJIde.
It's always funy to see how some learners of Japanese come up with more and more elaborate excuses specifically not to give the pitch accent a shot. Like come on, the speaker's emotions and intonation for emphasis in a sentence do overlap with the word-level stress in English, but obviously it doesn't mean they somehow "break" the entire stress accent system or "overwrite" which syllable the word-level stress falls on.
yoo. that's cool. I used to think like, broo its so pointless to study grammar and even phonetics like wtf iş that... I used to think it was kinda pointless and nerdy and useless. because I thought it was enough to learn the language by immersion. then I realized when I actually studied grammar, my language wisdom went crazy. I started hearing things that I normally wouldnt care about. THEN I started to get my phonetics classes(ima linguistics freshman). now I realise how important these are. thank you for that man. Even though i'm in a 3rd world country(and as a student) im going to try to save some money up for your patroeon only classes. よろしくねえぇぇぇ
can you roll/trill your R's, mr. dougen? or is there anyone here in the comments that can't or had to learn how to do it? I feel like an incomplete japanese learner knowing that I can't properly turn チンピラ and bust out a fat rolled おらあぁ‼ if i wanted to. im curious to hear experienced learners thoughts on this, and maybe how said learners went about learning it perhaps.
But there are times I'm pretty sure I've heard a word pronounced with an accent not in the standard way. Like I'm pretty sure I've heard Ame pronounced like aME when referring to rain in an anime. Aren't there exceptions to the pitch accent sometimes?
i think its kind of funny that i've heard you use nihon and nihongo as examples for pitch accent enough that the wrong pitch accent actually sounded wrong to me
Pedagogically, the brain needs a GOOD STRONG SIGNAL to let the hearer know the difference between good models and bad models. Otherwise, the brain stores them all indiscriminately. Maybe. . . a GONG or SAD TROMBONE after each BAD MODEL. and a little happy bell doing DING! after each GOOD MODEL.
I honestly just prefer the neutral spectograph. I find the binary stuff to be super confusing because it's really not lining up remotely (in my mind) with what I'm hearing. It's not unreasonable to assume the learner can adjust those accents to angry, tired, frustrated, etc. from there since the pattern of those emotions changing tone tends to be relatively consistent.
So then Japanese is a pitch accent language that somewhat follows the rules of stress accent languages, such as English? A more pure pitch accent language, such as mandarin, can't quite be played with in the same way you described Japanese here, so I'm curious.
While it can be mapped in a similar way graphically, the Japanese syllables always are pronounced with consistent timing between them regardless of pitch since syllable length is almost important for distinguishing different words. English stress usually slightly lengthens the stressed syllable as well as the volume of the specific syllable. Pitch Accent also varies depending on regional Japanese accents, but English stress is a bit more consistent even across accents.
@@ErikaCartet hm. Sure enough, learned something new today. That means my comment makes sense, but was also dead ass wrong 😂 I think now I would say that a pitch accent lies somewhere between a tonal and stressed language, adding a tonal "pitch" on the stressed syllable? Idk, I feel like I'm cheating because it feels like I'm mostly using stress to mimic pitch accent, so I'm tryna make it make sense
@@ErikaCartet and what's worse is I took three years of mandarin in high school, and still forgot it was a tonal language. Somewhere along the line I forgot tonal language was a thing and assumed that's what pitch accent was referring to
@@g45h96 hey! wasn’t expecting to revive this conversation. i’m glad you took my comment at face value as just a clarifying correction in passing, and not trying to be all “well, actually 🤓👆” sounding haha i actually don’t think your original (or follow-up) comment was a too far-off way of looking at things. it seems like a lot of japanese learners either view pitch accent as something entirely foreign to them as an english speaker, or they map english stress accent onto japanese words because to them it doesn’t feel like there’s a difference, when it’s really something in-between. in both cases, an accent is just a way of giving prominence to a certain part of a word. in stress accent languages, a syllable is stressed by modulating the volume, length, and pitch of that part of the word - not necessarily all three, but at least volume or length. in english, the stressed syllable is louder, longer, and a higher pitch (though i have heard there’s at least one dialect where the pitch is lower). japanese, on the other hand, has pitch accent, which means only the pitch changes between mora. all mora are given the same length within the word whether they are accented or not. if you were to use english stress accent instead while speaking, even if you were using correct vowel sounds and pitch, you would still sound somewhat off because you aren’t saying words with a natural japanese rhythm (i think you’d be able to get away with it if you just stressed the mora by saying it louder than the rest, but i mean if you did the whole louder AND elongated english stress thing). in either language, the intonation of a speaker means that their volume and pitch may rise and fall while speaking, but as shown here, individual words still retain the same pattern of stress or pitch, and the overall changes in intonation within a sentence aren’t going to suddenly change what syllable or mora is accented within a word. tonal languages describe something different, though it also relates to pitch. rather than pitch accent, which describes the pattern of how pitch changes within a word, a tone describes the pattern of how pitch changes within a syllable. this means a tonal language can have stress accent or no accent. for example, mandarin speakers in parts of china may speak with a stress accent by elongating one syllable of the word (stress-timed), but mandarin speakers in taiwan give syllables equal length (syllable-timed, similar to how japanese is mora-timed) and so words are generally accentless. and again, intonation also exists on top of tone and accents, so it’s another layer that may change the pitch, volume, etc of a speaker’s voice even if the actual pattern of tone within a syllable or accent within the word remains the same. i’m not as well-versed in linguistics as i would like to be, and this was kinda wordy, but hopefully it helped to further your understanding somewhat haha!
I'm awful with visual representations of pitch and intonation. I took a course in English phonetics in university and never managed to really map the intonation I hear onto the paper or vice versa, and when I see Japanese pitch markings and try to follow them, I end up sounding completely wrong.
I haven't been watching your pronunciation serious for a while, but having watched this now got me a whole new impulse to finish the damn thing 💪🏻お疲れさん and thanks a lot!
Now I know how it feels , if the Japanese just can't distinguish between R and L. It's almost impossible to hear that difference in Pitch-Accent for me.
Every year of study of Japanese, I realize that everything that I learned the previous year is a lie. So basically, you want to be using your voice with as much intelligence as you would your calligraphy brush. Everything HASS to done exactly perfectly, according to Japanese rules; AND everyone has to be searching for personal expression within those rules.
Something I've been having a hard time understanding is basically what a "pitch accent" really is or what is actually going on. Are you just being... louder during that part or like more forceful with speaking it?
Accent means marking a syllable or mora in speech. This can be done by pronouncing it longer (quantitative accent), with more loudness (stress accent), or with an audibly different frequency from surrounding syllables/morae (pitch accent), or with a combination thereof
Pitch accent is changing the pitch based on the accented syllable/mora. The rest of the syllables tend to be in one pitch while the accented syllable is in a different one. In Japanese, most of the word is low while the accent is high-pitched. In other languages, there might be 3 levels or rising and falling pitches during one syllable. It's like raising the pitch at the end of a question sentence, but as a way of displaying accent in a word.
@@EvgenyUskov Simply put, stress changes the loudness, pitch and length of the syllable. Compare CONtract and conTRACT. The pitch accents of は\し (HL) and は/し (LH) are different but strength and length doesn't change even if the pitch does.
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
Nobody said it's tonal, pitch accent is not the same as a tonal language. Ancient Greek was also pitch accent based, he's not "making it a thing" you Neanderthal.
Yes, Japanese is a pitch accented language. Ask anyone who has studied Japanese linguistics. You are correct that it's not a tonal language. But the pitch accents matter. If you don't use correct pitch accents (at least consistent with a single dialect) you will probably be understood but sound very non-native and will create a lot of cognitive load on native speakers trying to understand you.
@@blazecaller8486 Suprasegmental pitch contour is not the same thing as lexical pitch accent. And stress accent *includes* pitch among other factors, including volume.
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
I am a beginner and the more I learn the more I emphasize “beginner”. Had a discussion on this last week with three generations of Japanese with 2 dialects and various levels of English competence. They said it’s context in most cases. It started with Hashi, we had a lot of laughs. It was fun….
By the way 橋 is Hash pronounced like you are yakuza. 箸 is just Hashi (no one agreed).
The first part...absolutely relatable!! BE-GIN-NER
@@aajohnsoutube hashi with devoiced is masculine
@@prezentoappr1171 lol. I was like、Ok 箸 is “Hash!” More laughter.
> the more I learn the more I emphasize “beginner”
In other words, the Dunning-Kruger affect
Good to know I've been pronouncing 日本語wrong for about a decade...
Damn bro, how you holding up?
Same. Half a decade for me, but still... 😐
Same! I came to this channel for the memes, but stayed for the soul crushing existential crises.
It gets easier the more languages you learn. To deal with the knowledge that you'll never quite reach fluency, is what I mean.
4 years here...
I really enjoy the Pitch accents lessons because they are extremely easy and accessible when you have a good knowledge of the language. Hope more people get interested and join in.
Hearing Dogen speak english after like 50 videos is very surreal
His pronunciation is really good.
@@peterfireflylund yea no he is English, So that makes sense
英語上手
@@RulerQfEverything He's English? Wow, his American accent is really good.
@@Dealanach yeah he is English, He is just very very good at Japanese
It helps me to think of it like a music piece you're learning to perform. The hard part is learning the notes for the first time. You're not gonna give an expressive performance if you're worried about messing up the basics of the piece. Only when you have it fully learned and you have it in muscle memory are you going to be able to practice the dynamics and other more expressive aspects like that.
Really appreciate these Pitch accent lessons, thanks for making these and sharing them with us Dogen!
Wow, what a great lesson! Thanks for making it available for free. The way you described the pitch accent and compared it to English syllable emphasis was a really clear and intuitive (for me) way to understand it. Thanks again!
This takes me back to my days studying phonetics, so it’s nice to see how it applies to Japanese in particular. Thanks for the info, Dogen!
Tried to explain this to someone a few weeks ago, now I can just send this video instead! Thanks Dogen!
I mean I’ve reached the point where I managed to say
“ないです日本言葉”
All by myself, no google translate!
Which yes I know is the shittiest, most foreigner sounding sentence ever. But keep in mind I started learning like a month ago! I’m impressed I even remembered the word for “word”. We’re getting there boys
I'm a Japanese speaker but what exactly is that translation in English?
"Not Japanese word"? sorry if it's a dumb question 😭
I’ve never looked at these two in such depths. Very intuitive explanation.
Thought I'd be having a nosebleed a few minutes into this nuanced explanation. But suddenly it's all very clear. This Dogen chap really is 上手！
This is a really valuable lesson, Dogen! Thanks for sharing your insights as we appreciate it!
Thanks so much for posting this! This is the next video I'm about to watch in the Patreon series and I'm really looking forward to the additional context it will provide.
I feel like the beginning physics student who only knows how things work without friction and in a vacuum, and this lesson is where I start learning how the real world works.
The teacher’s polite Japanese side comes out in this video. How nice! 🇯🇵 🙂
Very informative! Thank you, Dogen.
Thanks for this. I wonder if I’ve been away from study long enough to have had my old habits broken.
I also worry my ears are broken. I hope this is a skill that practice improves.
First thing when I opened UA-cam! Thanks for the lesson
as an English TTC student reviewing intonation practices, this is just what I needed
That was such a good lesson!
Ahh I've always wanted to know if the pitch accenting was so strict or if there were levels of subtlety to it. The spectrographs really drive home that the pitch accenting is always there, but the interplay between syllables is what develops the emotion and delivery of the word.
Honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time for me because I just started using the Shadowing method :))
For some reason, my brain also struggles with the accent. When I hear a speaker with a high voice, my voice goes high as well in order to “match” their sound. I’m trying to unlearn this though.
Dogenさん, マジすげ～. 7:00 のところって確かに, 無意識でやってたんだ. 40年間日本人やってて気づかなかったです😅
Dogen's English really has improved over the Years. Incredible.
You really helped me a lot in terms of the way I speak
Pitch Accent between regions can definitely trip you up sometimes. 雲 vs 蜘蛛 in Kansai vs Kanto is one that got me. Cause I spent my formative Japanese learning years in Kansai, I still tend to naturally use that pitch accent and confuse people here in Kanto about "Rain Spiders" or "Clouds crawling around" ;) .
I barely know hiragana and katakana but I do still find this stuff interesting, and even with basic phrases when I visit Japan on occasion I can sound at least a little bit more intelligible from some of the things I've picked up. I have absolutely gone low on the 'go' on 'nihongo ga' in the past, so every little helps haha!
This reminds me of learning Japanese on Duolingo, and how Lily (the purple haired character) has such a deadpan tone that it's hard to derive the base pitch accent from words sometimes. Thank goodness for the dictionary I use having the binary graphics
Duolingo is absolute garbage for Japanese, they put those 'new' voices in a year ago and their pitch accent is totally wrong on a lot of words and they even use the completely wrong kanji pronunciation on a lot of words. I just had to disable sound when using it duolingo, it was so annoying. (Recently they even started animating the characters while you're trying to read, which makes it incredibly difficult to read Kanji when you're eyes kept getting drawn to the animation. Basically makes the site useless)
@@takanara7 that's an exaggeration
@@stephenc909 exaggeration or not they're not lying, duolingo still sucks for japanese.
I use Duolingo strictly as a fancy version of flash cards. It’s absolute garbage for learning a language. But it’s a great tool to build confidence and reinforce things you already know and get a good semblance of how far along you are
@@takanara7 The pitch accents are correct in most cases, I always double check new words in Takoboto (the dictionary i use). Like I said, just Lily's monotonous voice sucks for learning pitch so I end up relying completely on takoboto for words only she has audio for.
Also unless you have ADHD or something (fair enough if you do ofc) those animations are hardly that distracting, and there is a setting to turn off all animations in the android app.
The complaint I is how the new voices have no idea how to read kanji. I've had to forcefully read 米 as こめ out loud to drown out Lily saying べい, and that's just one out of many incorrect readings
in my own annotations, I use ancient Greek's acute, circumflex and grave accent markers to remember the pitch accent of new Japanese words. It works well enough, and is quite compact.
I've Level 1 JLPT - what you say in this video makes a lot of sense. As someone who never really studied pitch accent, it's eye-opening.
It would make a fun graphic to compare:
A) basic pitch accent versus the vocal riffs people do on it.
B) basic ("bones!") kanji structure, versus the expressive riffs people do on it.
I am currently trying to learn Japanese and I found your videos and found them really helpful and funny, I do already know 2 languages on a native level due to strict parents at home always asking to speak my mother tongue at home, Spanish, so while living in the united states I was learning and using English outside the house but with family and friends I spoke Spanish, so I ended up becoming native in proficiency in both languages, so I enjoy finding the nuances and similarities, as well as how my experience learning 2 languages can help me learn this new one. 1 thing I noticed is that as a native sounding speaker, pronunciation in japanese is really easy (at the very least in my case) because Japanese and Spanish vowels sound exactly the same and any other word/kana using those vowels will sound the same every time, unlike English were the letter A can sound like, apple (a) snake (a) father (ä) ball (o) Many (e). but in Spanish for example the word for Apple is, "Manzana". if both a Spanish speaker and Japanese speaker were to pronounce this word for the first time I bet 100% they would pretty much sound the same.
Here for sarcastic contents but end up learning really useful knowledge
Thanks for this video! Something I’ve wondered for a while is if song lyrics are affected by pitch accent patterns - like do some melodies sound more or less “correct” because they match the pitch accents of the words?
I guess you're right. I've also heard children's songs were composed so that accents and melodies match. Please try listening to the song "Karatachi no Hana".
Pitch Accent of words is changed in songs to fit the melody that the artist wants.
Music is super fun to listen to, but for this reason it's best to listen to natural, unscripted Japanese (like UA-cam videos or podcasts) if you want to improve your listening comprehension. Anime, Dramas, and Audiobooks are also really good resource; just remember that they're scripted and the formality/register of speech that you hear is not going to be the exact same as actual speech (however the pronunciation and accent will be spot on because it's all professionally done by voice actors).
@@XgamersXdimensions I'm with you. A song can benefit greatly from word choice with different accents from the melody.
What I meant in the previous comment was that word choice is 'affected' by pitch accent to some extent. I've heard a lyricist mention something like that on the radio. I also heard that songs for elementary school pupils called Shooka(唱歌) were composed in accordance with the accents.
Finally, if I had to say something regarding how to learn pitch accent, I would recommend to Japanese learners an online Japanese lessons by NHK WORLD JAPAN which have scripts with accent marks in every sentence.
Oh boy wait till we get to the third feature that's prominence. Though in my general preface to japanese linguistics the order is pitch accent intonation and prominence
I find it really interesting that it's just like in English where that slight upward inflection at the end of the word kind of turns it into a question.
Algorithm do be really kind to you today Dogen, nice
英語の勉強にもなります✏️
ありがとう(__)
どんな風に？
Thanks for the video :)
Amazing explanation
Good topic
Wow I'm super early. Saw this as soon as I went onto the homepage, and with 17 seconds ago at that.
Okay, I felt that. I've always tried to match the pitch correctly, so when you presented the incorrect pitch, it hit hard. Like listening to an orchestra play and, somewhere along the line, someone hit a bad or sour note.
i don't study japanese. I study danish, but as you demonstrated with english, many lenguages have a similar phenomena. I have noticed is actually hard to speak with the correct accent while giving an intonation that is not neutral with new words/words you dont usually speak. This makes sense tho, and kids have this problem too when learning words of their native language. It is a bit frustrating at times tho haha but is all a process!!
Yes... Pitch accent patterns with compound words
I feel like there are many English comparisons ...
"The factory produces new clothes" and " I brought produce from the grocery store" would both sound different.
I didn't realize this until recently I've been saying the word produce and suspect differently based on grammar. =P
Yup some word change some don't demand, project, desert, umfahren, übersetzen, kaki in Japanese
@@argyrendehringterimksaccu174 MatcchelMiudemadeu
That is almost entirely verb-noun, though, where all that changes is whether the word is used as a verb or as a noun. In Japanese it can be to differentiate between nouns, which I don't think happens in English (it might in rare cases). A good European equivalent is Greek, where for example ταξί and τάξη are different and differentiated in speech only by their accent (ι and η are pronounced the same, so it's as if it were taxee and taxi).
thanks dogen.
i was waiting a comedy video when i saw the notification but damn, this is way more better
also, while looking at にほん accent i thought it is similar to something i know, and then realized it looks like the accent in french (^), then realized that the shape of accent that are used with vowel letters in french look like the accent binary system in nihongo, low to high, high to low, and then this ( ^ )
if this is true, it will help me a lot in pronouncing french if ever studied it again
dai fan desu, dogen san
The circumflex (^) in French writing notes a place where a word used to have a consonant that is no longer pronounced and so it was dropped from the spelling of the word. The reason for the ^ is that the word is pronounced differently than it would be if no ^ was present. In other words, the missing consonant is no longer pronounced but the fact that it used to exist still affects the pronunciation of the word so the circumflex is added to avoid ambiguity.
That said, the circumflex originated in written Ancient Greek and was used as a pitch accent marker there (Ancient Greek was a pitch accent language). So the symbol does sometimes relate to pitch accent; just not in French (since French doesn't use a pitch accent).
@@mikebmcl some exhibit circumflex even though the etymology doesn't contain -s this is from the word egg in french vid by k klein
@@argyrendehringterimksaccu174 I said consonant, not 's'. Often it is 's', but not exclusively. It doesn't really matter which consonant it was though, just the fact that there was one.
@@mikebmcl guess you didn't even check the k Klein video about egg with circumflex, some comment there listed a word that doesn't have and s in it's older form in etymology I've checked Wiktionary and it's true. We use circumflex e for schwa but in Javanese they uses inverted breve, acute for /e/ grave for the ɔ in kokoh
I always think of an example you gave on stream, actually. A viewer was wondering how pitch accent stays consistent when you put emotion into it, and you said to think of someone saying "majide". The accent is on ma, so it's pronounced MAjide. If the speaker were really in disbelief, they might go even higher in pitch and say *MA*jide, but they'd never say maJIde.
weird I found stress but no mention of prominence in wikipedia, does wikipe-tan japanese includes prominence as a separate page?
This kind of stuff is always hard to wrap my head around fundamentally, coming from a language with no lexical accent.
Made me think of when Harry Potter said Diagon Alley in a slightly different pitch and ended up in the wrong side of town. じゃあ、頑張ります！
ありがとう
It's always funy to see how some learners of Japanese come up with more and more elaborate excuses specifically not to give the pitch accent a shot. Like come on, the speaker's emotions and intonation for emphasis in a sentence do overlap with the word-level stress in English, but obviously it doesn't mean they somehow "break" the entire stress accent system or "overwrite" which syllable the word-level stress falls on.
..."waiting for the punchline" I know hes buried it in there somewhere
There was a weird drop in video quality at the start and end of the video
yoo. that's cool. I used to think like, broo its so pointless to study grammar and even phonetics like wtf iş that... I used to think it was kinda pointless and nerdy and useless. because I thought it was enough to learn the language by immersion. then I realized when I actually studied grammar, my language wisdom went crazy. I started hearing things that I normally wouldnt care about. THEN I started to get my phonetics classes(ima linguistics freshman). now I realise how important these are. thank you for that man.
Even though i'm in a 3rd world country(and as a student) im going to try to save some money up for your patroeon only classes. よろしくねえぇぇぇ
Mapping confusion onto a sentence is easy in any language. So much so, they're often confused as well.
The first time i heard 犬？that made me think for a few minutes
What is the tool called where you map the voice onto a graph / pitch pattern?
mfw i realize i’ve been mispronouncing 日本語 for 3 years… this habit gonna be hard to break
Hey Dogen, could you make a video about pitch accent in a whole sentence? I can't find one fixed answer on this case
can you roll/trill your R's, mr. dougen? or is there anyone here in the comments that can't or had to learn how to do it? I feel like an incomplete japanese learner knowing that I can't properly turn チンピラ and bust out a fat rolled おらあぁ‼ if i wanted to. im curious to hear experienced learners thoughts on this, and maybe how said learners went about learning it perhaps.
関係ないんだけどマジで日本語の発音が完璧すぎる！！
アメリカ人で日本語を一から学んだ人の中で1番アクセントが完璧だと思う！
まだまだ練習した方がいい所があるけど92%完璧です。
日本語を学ぼうとしている皆さんも頑張ってね！そして日本を知ろうとしてくださりありがとうございます♪
But there are times I'm pretty sure I've heard a word pronounced with an accent not in the standard way. Like I'm pretty sure I've heard Ame pronounced like aME when referring to rain in an anime. Aren't there exceptions to the pitch accent sometimes?
複合語の場合は後ろが上がります。
雨以外でも同じことがおきます。
雨が降っている Ame
明日は雨だよ Ame
天気予報は雨マーク aME
雨模様 aME
雨上がり aME
箸を置く HAsiwooKU
箸置き haSIOki
猫の耳 NEkonomiMI
猫耳 neKOMIMI
また「っぽい」の前にくる単語は大抵尾高になります
@@3wako なるほど。ありがとうございます! 失礼ですが日本人ですか。
@@DANGJOS 日本人です。日本語でしか説明出来なくてすみません。
方言ではイントネーション（ピッチアクセント）も変わってきて、日本人同士でも違いを面白がったりもします。
i think its kind of funny that i've heard you use nihon and nihongo as examples for pitch accent enough that the wrong pitch accent actually sounded wrong to me
Pedagogically, the brain needs a GOOD STRONG SIGNAL to let the hearer know the difference between good models and bad models.
Otherwise, the brain stores them all indiscriminately.
Maybe. . . a GONG or SAD TROMBONE after each BAD MODEL.
and a little happy bell doing DING! after each GOOD MODEL.
The deeper I go into trying to learn Japanese the less I want to learn it.
I’m trying to figure out what that think is on the left at the beginning of the video
@7:15 I'm not even native JPN and that sounded really weird and kinda cringe. lol
basically pitch accent is like frequency and intonation is like amplitude?
I honestly just prefer the neutral spectograph. I find the binary stuff to be super confusing because it's really not lining up remotely (in my mind) with what I'm hearing. It's not unreasonable to assume the learner can adjust those accents to angry, tired, frustrated, etc. from there since the pattern of those emotions changing tone tends to be relatively consistent.
This video then makes me wonder: why do we call it pitch and stress accent? Why arent they both called stress or both called pitch?
Pitch accent is a change in pitch alone, stress accent can be a change in length, pitch, volume, degree of articulation, or some combination of those.
Whoo hoo I'm early!! Just as I was practicing Japanese on my own haha
So then Japanese is a pitch accent language that somewhat follows the rules of stress accent languages, such as English? A more pure pitch accent language, such as mandarin, can't quite be played with in the same way you described Japanese here, so I'm curious.
While it can be mapped in a similar way graphically, the Japanese syllables always are pronounced with consistent timing between them regardless of pitch since syllable length is almost important for distinguishing different words. English stress usually slightly lengthens the stressed syllable as well as the volume of the specific syllable. Pitch Accent also varies depending on regional Japanese accents, but English stress is a bit more consistent even across accents.
mandarin isn’t a pitch accent language, it’s a tonal language
@@ErikaCartet hm. Sure enough, learned something new today. That means my comment makes sense, but was also dead ass wrong 😂 I think now I would say that a pitch accent lies somewhere between a tonal and stressed language, adding a tonal "pitch" on the stressed syllable? Idk, I feel like I'm cheating because it feels like I'm mostly using stress to mimic pitch accent, so I'm tryna make it make sense
@@ErikaCartet and what's worse is I took three years of mandarin in high school, and still forgot it was a tonal language. Somewhere along the line I forgot tonal language was a thing and assumed that's what pitch accent was referring to
@@g45h96 hey! wasn’t expecting to revive this conversation. i’m glad you took my comment at face value as just a clarifying correction in passing, and not trying to be all “well, actually 🤓👆” sounding haha
i actually don’t think your original (or follow-up) comment was a too far-off way of looking at things. it seems like a lot of japanese learners either view pitch accent as something entirely foreign to them as an english speaker, or they map english stress accent onto japanese words because to them it doesn’t feel like there’s a difference, when it’s really something in-between. in both cases, an accent is just a way of giving prominence to a certain part of a word. in stress accent languages, a syllable is stressed by modulating the volume, length, and pitch of that part of the word - not necessarily all three, but at least volume or length. in english, the stressed syllable is louder, longer, and a higher pitch (though i have heard there’s at least one dialect where the pitch is lower). japanese, on the other hand, has pitch accent, which means only the pitch changes between mora. all mora are given the same length within the word whether they are accented or not. if you were to use english stress accent instead while speaking, even if you were using correct vowel sounds and pitch, you would still sound somewhat off because you aren’t saying words with a natural japanese rhythm (i think you’d be able to get away with it if you just stressed the mora by saying it louder than the rest, but i mean if you did the whole louder AND elongated english stress thing). in either language, the intonation of a speaker means that their volume and pitch may rise and fall while speaking, but as shown here, individual words still retain the same pattern of stress or pitch, and the overall changes in intonation within a sentence aren’t going to suddenly change what syllable or mora is accented within a word.
tonal languages describe something different, though it also relates to pitch. rather than pitch accent, which describes the pattern of how pitch changes within a word, a tone describes the pattern of how pitch changes within a syllable. this means a tonal language can have stress accent or no accent. for example, mandarin speakers in parts of china may speak with a stress accent by elongating one syllable of the word (stress-timed), but mandarin speakers in taiwan give syllables equal length (syllable-timed, similar to how japanese is mora-timed) and so words are generally accentless. and again, intonation also exists on top of tone and accents, so it’s another layer that may change the pitch, volume, etc of a speaker’s voice even if the actual pattern of tone within a syllable or accent within the word remains the same.
i’m not as well-versed in linguistics as i would like to be, and this was kinda wordy, but hopefully it helped to further your understanding somewhat haha!
I'm awful with visual representations of pitch and intonation. I took a course in English phonetics in university and never managed to really map the intonation I hear onto the paper or vice versa, and when I see Japanese pitch markings and try to follow them, I end up sounding completely wrong.
Best example is "kurwa" in the polish language.
I haven't been watching your pronunciation serious for a while, but having watched this now got me a whole new impulse to finish the damn thing 💪🏻お疲れさん and thanks a lot!
audio seems out of sync
Gross oversimplification doesn't even begin to describe the expressive poverty of the binary diagrams.
Still, they're much better than nothing.
Now I know how it feels
, if the Japanese just can't distinguish between R and L.
It's almost impossible to hear that difference in Pitch-Accent for me.
Nice comparison. You'll get there with exposure and once in a while brushing up on the theory, I think.
Every year of study of Japanese, I realize that everything that I learned the previous year is a lie.
So basically, you want to be using your voice with as much intelligence as you would your calligraphy brush.
Everything HASS to done exactly perfectly, according to Japanese rules;
AND
everyone has to be searching for personal expression within those rules.
I feel depressed coz they all sound the same to me. 6:58
uh-merica? not ah-merica? Subtle joke?
Something I've been having a hard time understanding is basically what a "pitch accent" really is or what is actually going on. Are you just being... louder during that part or like more forceful with speaking it?
Accent means marking a syllable or mora in speech. This can be done by pronouncing it longer (quantitative accent), with more loudness (stress accent), or with an audibly different frequency from surrounding syllables/morae (pitch accent), or with a combination thereof
Pitch accent is changing the pitch based on the accented syllable/mora. The rest of the syllables tend to be in one pitch while the accented syllable is in a different one. In Japanese, most of the word is low while the accent is high-pitched. In other languages, there might be 3 levels or rising and falling pitches during one syllable.
It's like raising the pitch at the end of a question sentence, but as a way of displaying accent in a word.
Me: H A N A
Supportive engagement comment
Ni hooon?
I can't even say police. I say old currency...and I don't hear the difference
Shave it out brother..
It will suit you. 👌
にゃるほど
is it an accent or a stress?
Accent, Japanese is not a stress language
@@XGD5layer what category does "ME" in aMErica fall into? stress or accent?
@@EvgenyUskov Stress. English is a stress language
@@XGD5layer hmm... does not sound like there is any difference between them
@@EvgenyUskov Simply put, stress changes the loudness, pitch and length of the syllable. Compare CONtract and conTRACT.
The pitch accents of は\し (HL) and は/し (LH) are different but strength and length doesn't change even if the pitch does.
kowai, kawai, kawaii
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
tfw にほンゴ じョうズ
*Dude, stop trying to make this a thing. Japanese is not a tonal or pitch language. Jeez, so cringy.*
Nobody said it's tonal, pitch accent is not the same as a tonal language. Ancient Greek was also pitch accent based, he's not "making it a thing" you Neanderthal.
Is this some kind of weird joke, or maybe you're a Dogen's original stalker, or somebody has really fυсκed your brain up that badly? 🤔
Yes, Japanese is a pitch accented language. Ask anyone who has studied Japanese linguistics. You are correct that it's not a tonal language. But the pitch accents matter. If you don't use correct pitch accents (at least consistent with a single dialect) you will probably be understood but sound very non-native and will create a lot of cognitive load on native speakers trying to understand you.
@@blazecaller8486 English is stress accented, not pitch accented, but overall right idea.
@@blazecaller8486 Suprasegmental pitch contour is not the same thing as lexical pitch accent. And stress accent *includes* pitch among other factors, including volume.
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P
Might sound weird, but my Japanese pitch accent does occasionally leak into my English, and whenever I find myself doing it by mistake, ngl I feel a little autistic :P