@Steve, ok, just a thought. Actually, come to think of it Chinese people are pretty notorious for bad pitch-accent, so being able to hear tones must not have much cross-over benefit. Just a wild idea.

I wonder if you heard a wider variety of pitch-accents when you were in Japan in the 70s. People were still moving in to Tokyo from the provinces, and it was probably more common to hear different regional accents. As well, I think there was less standardization in the casual spoken language across Japan. Traveling around, you probably heard a lot more variation than we might hear today.

It was more a matter of what I heard when I traveled. Many people in the lumber business in Tokyo, working for trading companies were from Kansai. I heard an awful lot of Kansai accent.

@Bortrun: "But the question is to what degree does that enter your natural speech, ie during those times when you are speaking normally and are unable to consciously anticipate the next upcoming accent."

If the sentence that comes up is made up of words I know well, words whose pitch I know well, it probably comes out naturally with correct pitch and intonation, but I don't know if that's something I should say about myself. Who knows what the others hear...

Bortrun: "The real question here is there anything that learners can deliberately do in order to better pick up pitch-accent. Being aware of it is step 1, but what is step 2? I look forward to hearing your ideas."

I don't have a definitive answer, but the first step is definitely information, and that includes either being taught the system or having access to material geared towards learners. In the absence of that, one would have to be determined enough to try to figure it out on their own, and we know that's extremely rare. Moreover, the degree to which students will want to learn pitch will be heavily influenced by the way it's introduced. Presently, it's virtually entirely ignored and dismissed, so it's no wonder nobody bothers to learn it, and even less so from the onset. And the idea that you should learn it later is another one of those crazy ideas. Who would suggest you learn English for years and start learning stress a few years down the road? Ridiculous. Not that it can't be done -- but it's not a good suggestion.

Once a student has learned -- or first got an overview -- of the types of processes involved, then it's up to the student to continue, or up to the teacher to reinforce, paying attention to pitch in oral production, possibly with some level of correction.

Another major issue we face is that although there are sources for looking up pitch, there are no written materials that mark pitch. If you decide to read a novel because you want to improve your vocabulary, you will necessarily learn new words without acquiring the pitch. On the other hand, I don't know if this exists for English either (although I've seen it for Russian). I do know English readers often mark stress on words when they are introduced in the margin or at the bottom of the page.

After a student learns about pitch, after he's been told that he should pay attention to pitch, try to reproduce the pitch he hears, look up the pitch when learning new words, after he's been encouraged to polish his pronunciation and has received some degree of correction, I think he will be well on his way to being able to self-correct -- and ultimately, that is probably the only way someone could learn to speak with good pitch.

Basically, it doesn't have to be this weird intricate system that no one can master -- it can be taught well, from the beginning, and students can be taught to hear it and self-correct.

@Alexandre, it's not the case that it's completely ignored. It was introduced in Colloquial Japanese, and I also remember pitch-accent markings being used in an intermediate level textbook from Japan Times when introducing vocabulary.

You're right though that awareness and demystification are a good first step.

@Alexandre, by the way, are there videos of you speaking Japanese up on the net somewhere?

Only one that I know of and it was rehearsed. It's when I participated in a speech contest in 2010, about a year and a half into my studies. A bit embarrassing because I was really nervous, though, but I'll post it just for you... You might need Firefox to watch it though.

http://tinyurl.com/7cw4p9y

Go to slide 58.

Otherwise, I did speak a bit of Japanese with Steve when we met.

Ok, I'll take a look at it. I still don't think that I hear pitch-accent very well, particularly not to the degree that Japanese people hear it. I think I'll try to make a point of listening for it the next couple weeks and see what happens. If your natural unscripted speaking had natural pitch-accent, that would lend a lot of credibility to the idea that it is something that it is possible to deliberately learn/improve, particularly as you haven't lived in Japan.

I just watched it. The speech was very good, particularly for just having studied for a year and a half, but I have to say that I didn't hear anything special with your pronunciation. You sound, to me anyway, like a normal foreigner speaking Japanese. On the other hand, I have to admit that I haven't listened to lots of foreigners speaking Japanese. Mostly I just hear my friends who are long-termers in Japan and who speak Japanese well. I probably don't hear a lot of people speaking with what would be very heavily-accented or badly-pronounced Japanese.

I don't know. I'm still on the fence about this. That Peter Barakan guy has been in Japan for almost 40 years more or less constantly surrounded by Japanese and, yes, his Japanese is very natural-sounding and his pitch-accent is, I'm sure, great. But I'm still doubtful of whether it's something we can really "learn".

If you're going to make the argument that it's possible to learn proper pitch-accent more-or-less from the beginning by paying attention to it, or doing whatever it is that you did, then I think that at some point you're going to have to record a sample of yourself speaking freely in Japanese so that native speakers can judge whether your pitch-accent is native-like. If your pitch-accent is indeed native-like, or at least much better than most foreigners, then this would probably encourage more people to pay attention to pitch-accent from an early point in their studies.

My suspicion is that being aware of pitch-accent will make it easier to hear, and if it's easier to hear, the learner is more likely to pick it up. I also suspect that doing speaking exercises in the beginning where you follow a particular pitch pattern, perhaps under the guidance of a native speaker, will also make it easier to recognize pitch-accent. You know, if you have a tutor for one hour a week, maybe spend a few minutes reading sentences with proper pitch-accent or something. I know some people don't like, or even disapprove of, these sort of activities, but I do think that, done regularly and over time while listening to lots of content, these activities can make a difference. It's part of the recognition-production loop. You recognize better when you can produce, and you can produce better when you can recognize.

At any rate, if you just want to make videos explaining this phenomenon in Japanese, that's great. But if you want to argue that paying attention to pitch-accent will yield dividends, because doing so helped you acquire much better pitch-accent than is normal for foreigners, than you may have to demonstrate your casual Japanese in order to lend some credence to the idea.

As musicians, we have to deal with such parameters like intonation, pitch, stress, quality of sound. My experience, as a music teacher, is that it is more difficult for learners to hear and recognize this characteristics of music than to play them on the instrument. It often occurs that pupils and students cannot play something with the correct feeling, not because they are not able to, but because they simply do not hear it. Therefore I find it is really important to tell the learners what they have to listen to, to train to hear what they at first do not hear, and not simply listen to a lot of music (or spoken texts in the case of language) with the hazardous hope that they will after some time automatically reproduce it correctly.

@jpljpl, I have a music background too, and I agree with what you're saying. This may be a difference between people who advocate "ear training" for language learning and those who don't. Musicians probably intuitively understand that "pronunciation" training doesn't have to focus on production, it can focus on training the ears. Personally, I think that this "ear training" approach to language learning is sorely underrepresented.

@Bortrun -- I can appreciate what you're saying, but I feel I have to clarify that I never claimed to be a model speaker for anyone.

What strikes me most in your last post is what you are implying. It hadn't occurred to me that if I were to make videos on Japanese pitch accent, some people would want to evaluate my Japanese in order to determine whether that knowledge lead to tangible results or, in the absence of such results, would be considered useless.

I made the video to help, not with the intent to prove anything.

I was told by some people who analyzed the speech that in some places, some phrases sounded native-like. Obviously, it's not something I can or should evaluate, and there'd be little point because the speech was rehearsed and it was two years ago. But even if it were horrendous, it doesn't alter the value of the information contained in my video. It's knowledge anyone can take to do whatever they want. It doesn't have to lead to automatic improvements in the majority of viewers to be deemed valuable.

At this point, I don't have the time or energy to attempt to validate the claim that acknowledging pitch leads to improvement. I consider it a reasonable enough expectation.

@Alexandre,

Just to be clear, I'm not attempting to challenge you. For people who are interested in the more technical side of language, your videos will be very interesting. But you did talk about how most foreigners ignore pitch-accent and therefore end up with terrible pitch-accent. If you hope to convince people to change this, someone will have to demonstrate the results of paying attention to pitch-accent, otherwise these people will not be persuaded. I was under the impression that you were not just trying to explain a linguistic aspect of Japanese, but that you were attempting to convince people to pay attention to it because doing so would result in improved pronunciation.

As it is, I enjoyed your first video and I'm looking forward to the others.

Alexandre, I think that in your video you say that it is very important to focus on pitch. I think therefore you do need to validate the postion that people who deliberately focus on pitch, or are aware of pitch, end up speaking Japanese better. I must say I am skeptical, but I await the next videos.

While I'm not saying everyone must care about their pronunciation, I am indeed saying that pitch won't be acquired passively. As for whether people who focus on pitch learn it or not, frankly, I can't say -- I don't personally know anyone else who focused on pitch. But none of the speakers I know personally have good pitch, nor have they ever worked on it.

"I am indeed saying that pitch won't be acquired passively"

This is the crux of our disagreement. I was recently reviewing another video I made in Japanese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNGVKZSkpEA

If anything I feel there is a Kansai influence in my pitch. I cannot imagine that my pitch is 100% wrong. I wonder how close to accurate pitch I achieve, in your opinion, not just one or two words, but overall. If I had put as much time into listening to Japanese over the past few months, as I have put into other languages, my pitch would be better, and it would all be acquired passively.

I would be very interested in the opinions of native speakers as well, if anyone has the patience to listen to the video .

The title of the video is
英語学習７つ誤解, (大津由紀雄の本英語学習7つの誤解について)
("The seven mistakes of language learning", a review of a Japanese book by that title)

@ Steve
In my opinion, pitch can be acquired passively, provided you have a good "ear training". It's probably the case, as you have already learned and listen to a lot of languages. However, I doubt it would be the case for a beginner for whom it is the first experience in learning a language. For these, Alexandre's video could be very useful.

@jpljpl; This is no doubt true, but it holds true for all aspects of pronunciation, not just pitch. In fact, the more languages we learn, the more attentive we are, the more open our brain is to new sounds and new structures, the more confident we are, the more willing we are to just "give her" and try to imitate...yes, but that is not unique to pitch.

I think that Alexandre's video helps to make us aware of pitch. I am awaiting the next videos to see how he proposes we learn them. I just don't know if this makes a beginner learner more nervous about the language, in other words, whether it really helps or not. In a classroom setting with the guidance of a teacher probably. For the more casual independent learner, maybe. I just don't know.

Pitch-accent is a funny thing. The essence of it is the alternation between high and low pitch. Either your voice does this or it doesn't.

At least in Tokyo Japanese, the voice generally rises until you hit an accent, then it drops, and begins to rise again until the next accent. So, strictly speaking, it's not alternation but rather a gentle rise followed by a sharp drop. Either you have this in your speech or you don't. If you do have it, another question is whether your accents are all in the right place or not. The phenomenon is called "downstepping".

Kansai pitch-accent doesn't work this way. It's much more volatile. Japanese is actually a very flexible language, and different dialects exhibit a range of different effects. Some dialects are actually syllabic instead of moraic, for example.

When I listen to Steve in the above video, I hear English-style stressing of syllables using force and volume (in the beginning - that kind of disappears as he keeps talking). I also don't hear downstepping (ie Tokyo-style pitch-accent). His pitch changes sometimes, but in the beginning long stretches seem fairly monotone. Some of his sentences actually seem to run down in pitch.

I'm not familiar enough with Kansai Japanese to say whether there's Kansai-style pitch in there. It actually seems like his pitch gets more animated as he gets into the video. Maybe it's a "warming up" thing. Certainly after 2 or 3 minutes, his voice is much more animated, and his speaking in general seems much more natural. But I don't think I really hear pitch-accent in there (meaning alternating between high and low pitch). It's just so hard to say as a non-native.

Steve (to me, at least) has a very pleasant and engaging speaking voice in Japanese, and he is very easy to understand. I like listening to him (and wish he would make more Japanese videos!). I think anyone speaking Japanese as well as he does should be very happy. I don't think that I have pitch-accent in my speaking. I mostly speak with a fairly flat pitch (at least that's what I tried to do, and what I've been told I mostly do). Most of the Japanese people I have shown his videos to have expressed amazement at how well he speaks.

Going back and listening to Alex's video, it does seem more melodious somehow, but I'm not sure if that's just his more melodious voice. Steve has a bit of a dry speaking voice. And Alex is performing a prepared speech. Your comments after the speech are at a very different level than the language in the speech. Nevertheless, even in your comments after the speech there was a nice, melodious tone to your speaking. But you didn't say enough after the speech to make any kind of real judgement.

There's no doubt though that lack of pitch-accent is a major marker of a foreign accent in Japanese. The question is whether or not there's any way to consciously improve one's uptake of pitch-accent. That's still an open question. And if Alex isn't going to make a video of himself speaking freely in Japanese, then it's probably going to remain an open question.

I'd also like to hear native speakers comments about Steve's 高低アクセント。 I suppose it'd be relatively easy to run someone's voice through some speech recognition software and analyze their pitch patterns. I think I'm feeling my inner phonetician stirring.....

As a French (Canadian) native speaker living in Japan since 1997, I also hear an English-style stressing of syllables in Steve’s videos, but it’s also obvious that he spent many years in Japan to reach this level. Personally I don’t really mind about pitch-accent (my way of learning Japanese in Japan was similar to the one he describes in one of his videos). What I personally find more interesting is that he says, somewhere else, that he doesn’t like katakana. As a result, it seems to me (as a French native) that his pronunciation of "gairaigo" is often closer to English than it is to Japanese. I would say that a relatively good pitch-accent can be, to a certain degree, acquired passively from "positive contamination" (daily live in Japan, intensive chat on Skype with Japanese natives, and so on), but that we need a different, much more aggressive approach to gairaigo pronunciation. I also feel that, for daily life communication in Japan, a good pronunciation of gairaigo is more important than a good master of the pitch-accent(s). But maybe this is just a conclusion based on personal (non-English and non-Japanese native) experience with the nightmare of gairaigo... I don’t know. :-)

In Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, he warns against using romaji as input due to the detrimental effect on pronunciation. I believe this is true but only in the beginning. After a while when the language is "ringing" in your mind independently, you can deal with any input. Same goes for Arabic.

Higashi, one thing about "gairaigo" and especially place names, I sometimes prefer to pronounce them " à l'originale". This is a conscious choice, just as a French speaker may choose not to pronounce French origin words in English " à l'anglaise".

@ This is a conscious choice, just as a French speaker may choose not to pronounce French origin words in English " à l'anglaise".

That makes sense. :-)
As a non-native speaker in both English and Japanese, I sometimes get into trouble with garaigo. A few years ago at Narita airport someone asked me where I was going. I wanted to say "Detroit", then Montreal, but I had never heard "Detroit" in Japanese. I was clueless about the proper Japanese pronunciation, so I tried in English (with my Quebecer’s accent) but it didn’t work. A few minutes later another Japanese asked me the same question. I just said... "Chicago". :D

Allow me to write in Japanese ;)
ちょっと話が本題から逸れているかもしれませんが、お許しくださいね。

アレックスさん、こんにちは。私はアキコです。関西出身で１年ちょっと前から横浜に住んでいます。
アレックスさんのYoutubeビデオを見ました。とてもおもしろかったです。なぜかというと、横浜に引っ越してきてから、私にとって高低アクセントのことを考えない日はないからです。
私はこてこての関西人で、関西弁を話します。でも、がんばれば東京アクセントで話すこともできます。（多分）
でも、ここ横浜で大きな声で関西弁で話しているととても目立つので、（特に子供を叱ってる時！）、ちょっと関西弁を和らげて、こちらの東京風の話し方に変えようかしら？と時々思います。
でも、子供たちがそれを許してくれません。私が標準語を話すと「なんか気持ち悪い！ママは大阪弁じゃないとダメ！」と言います。
そういう子供たちは家では関西弁、学校では標準語（横浜弁？！）の完璧なバイリンガルです。
関西弁がびっくりするほど早く抜けました。多分普段見るテレビ番組などで標準語をたくさん聞いているからでしょう。
逆に関東の人が関西に引っ越しても、なかなか関西弁にはならないのではないかと思います。

このごろは私も、家族がいない時には標準語で話したりもするのですが、なんだか人格が変わるみたいな気がして、やっぱり関西弁を貫くべきかしら？と、ちょっとした自己葛藤があります。

何が言いたかったかと言うと、それほどまでに高低アクセントは日本語に明らかに存在するということです。楽譜にできるくらいです。
しかもそれは方言によって大きく異なります。

テレビドラマを見ていて、それが大阪が舞台だったりすると、俳優さんたちは大阪弁を話すのですが、ある俳優は関西出身じゃないのに完璧な関西アクセントを話す一方で、他の俳優は、もうどうしようもないほどおかしな大阪弁を話す。
おかしな大阪弁は聞いていてほんと気持ち悪いです！
真似がうまいか、下手かの違いなのでしょうね。

でも、日本語が母国語じゃない人、外国出身の人が高低アクセントを少々間違っていても、気持ち悪いとは思わないかな。個性的でおもしろいと思います。
高低アクセントが違っても、だいたい文脈で意味はわかると思います。

今回、このトピックがこんなに活発な議論になったことにびっくりしました。
日本語の言葉を覚える時、文字を読むことから覚える場合は仕方ないとしても、耳で聴いた言葉を覚える場合は、高低アクセントの情報とともに覚えることが常識だと思っていたからです。日本人は無意識にそうしていると思います。
そういえば、中国人で日本語を学んでいる友人が以前、「日本語の辞書にも、中国語の四声のような印がついていればいいのに！」と言っていました。そういえば、国語辞典にはそんな記号はありませんものね。
（あ、でも標準語に関してはそういう辞書もある、とKenさんが上に書かれていましたね...）

思いつくまま書きました。まとまりのない文章でごめんなさい。
最後に、アレックスさんの日本語の発音はとても良かったですよ(*^_^*)