おもしろい!

ちょっと、日本人の経験は解るようになりました。

アキコさん、面白いコメントを登校してありがとう！
僕はケベック州出身なので、アキコさんの気持ちがよく分かると思います。ケベック系フランス語と標準語のフランス語の違いは関西弁と標準語の違いに近いと思います。

お願いがありますけど、Steveさんのビデオを観るように時間があれば、高低アクセントに関する限りでは、評価してくれませんか？

(Translation: Akiko, thanks for posting this interesting comment! I come from Québec so I think I understand how you feel. I think the difference between Québec French and Standard French is close to the difference between Kansai and Tokyo dialects. If you have time to watch Steve's video, would you be able to give us an evaluation as far as pitch accent is concerned?)

@Akiko,

Thanks very much for your thoughts. You made it pretty clear that 高低アクセント is a prominent feature of Japanese. I've heard similar comments from other people when they move to Tokyo from Kansai. They all of a sudden feel like their Japanese sticks out. I would personally be very interested to hear a Tokyo actor speaking 大阪弁 badly. I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but if someone pointed it out to me, I could listen to it carefully and try and hear their mistakes. Then again, maybe Japanese people in Tokyo can't tell the difference either :-)

While 高低アクセント may be really clear to Japanese people, I don't think it's clear to me. When I listen to Japanese people, I can hear that their speaking has something that foreigners are usually missing. And I think that's probably pitch-accent. When Japanese people speak Japanese, there's a certain melodiousness to their voices that non-native speakers don't have. I think that I can recognize the presence or absence of pitch-accent, but I don't think I can easily tell the difference between different accents. Sometimes, when Japanese people correct their pitch, I have a hard time telling the difference. I wonder if I can somehow train myself to be more aware of pitch-accent. For now, I'm just going to concentrate on trying to listen for it and see what happens.

We've spoken together in Japanese before, so I think you know that I don't have correct 高低アクセント。 Actually, I probably don't really have any 高低アクセント at all. I'm not sure that it's possible for learners to develop really natural pitch-accent unless they have good ears and spend a very long time in immersion, like Peter Barakan.

@Bortrun -- In this interesting movie, you can hear Kagoshimaben really clearly. Listen at 43 min on for instance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aF8Judzuco
In many places, the language is the same as it would be in Tokyo, except for pitch.

はじめまして。ちょっと込み入った話なので，日本語でコメントします。

Are Japanese people aware of pitch?

日頃は意識していません。当たり前です。日本人が日本語の文法を意識していないのと同じで，普段いちいち発音を意識することはありません。自分でしゃべったり他人の話を聞くときも，話の中身に集中していれば意識しません。母語ですから，アクセントのパターンも意識しないで自然に使っています。

しかし，自分と違う地方の人のしゃべりを聞けばすぐに分かります。方言の違いの大きな要素が高低アクセントの違いです。子供の場合は，引っ越してアクセントの違いを理由にいじめられることもありますが，大人の間では分かっていても指摘することはあまりありません。一種の地方差別ですからね。

アクセントが「楽譜のようだ」という表現は全くその通りで，いい喩えだと思います。文部省唱歌と呼ばれる明治時代に作曲された小学校用の歌では，共通語（標準語）のアクセントからあまり逸脱しないように歌詞がつけられています。歌の歌詞がアクセントの高低とあまりにもかけ離れていると違和感があるからです。

Do most learners who have ignored pitch but lived and studied hard in Japan have a noticeably foreign accent as a result?

日本国内のアクセントは地域によって非常に多様で，北関東にはアクセントのない地方もあります（いわゆる，「つぶやきシロー」のしゃべり方）。ですから，外国人が非標準のアクセントでしゃべっても，直すべき「foreign accent」とは認識されないと思います。共通語（標準語，東京方言）とは異なる「訛りの一種」のように聞こえているでしょう。

日本人同士は国内のいろいろなアクセントに慣れているので，アクセントが標準的でない人と会話してもほとんどコミュニケーションに支障はないと思います。しかし，実際，東京の会社や大学には全国から人が集まってきますが，まれにアクセントの違いによってうまく言葉が聞き取れない問題が起きることがあります。

Do learners of Japanese who learn to pronounce all the sounds well necessarily also get pitch right or do some people get all the sounds right, yet still get the pitch wrong?

みなさんご存知かとは思いますが，日本語には政府の制定した公式な標準というのはありません。書き言葉に関しては東京方言に基づく書き方が事実上の標準になっていますが，アクセントに関してはもっともっと緩やかです。ですから，厳密には何が「wrong」とは言えませんし，普通の日本語学習者には「necessarily」ではないと思います。

Do Japanese people think it is important for foreigners to learn pitch? If they learn correct pitch, will they notice?

個人的には，外国人が苦労して「NHKのアクセント」まで身につけるのは重要とは思いません。日本のテレビ局のアナウンサーになりたい外国人や，日本のドラマで日本人の役をやりたい外国人はいないでしょうしね。でも，日本語をたくさん聞くうちに自然に獲得していく分には，獲得したほうがいいとは思います。

そして，日本人がアクセントの違いを「notice」するかしないかといえば，先に述べたように「notice」します。実際のところほとんどの日本人はNHKのアナウンサーのようにはしゃべっていないので，皆が「correct」だと思うかどうかは分かりません。しかし，より流暢だいう印象を与えるとは思います。

To what extent do non-native speakers of Japanese acquire the regional pitch accent patterns of the regions in which they live?

「ダニエル・カール」のような人ですか。現実にどうなのか調査した人がいるのか，私は知りません。高校時代までに地方に長く住んだことがある外国人なら，地方のアクセントを身につけている可能性は高いと思います（学校生活で必要）。関西弁を上手にしゃべれる外国人はかなりいるという話は聞いたことがあります。

もし，「foreigners」としてではなくて，日本国籍を取って一生日本に暮らしたいというぐらいのことならば，（「NHKのアクセント」ではなく）その地方のアクセントを獲得したほうがいいでしょうね。そのほうが，より地域社会の一員として歓迎されるでしょう。「お国言葉」をしゃべったほうが生活しやすくなるはずです。

日本語でnative speakerからのご意見はたいへん\貴重で,役に立ちます。Thank you!

As a Japanese native speaker, I'd also like to post a comment.
My overall comment on this issue is mostly the same as others. We usually do not pay attention to "pitch accent" when we speak or listen to others. However, when I took a Japanese Language Teaching Competency Test (long time ago!), questions relating to "pitch accent" was included in the test. After listening to a recorded voice, we had to choose the correct pitch pattern from three to four options. It became easy after a few minute practice, but at first it was very difficult for me.

> I wonder if I can somehow train myself to be more aware of pitch-accent.
I guess this matter is similar to whether we, Japanese, can recognize the difference between "r" and "l" sounds. It may be difficult, but nothing is impossible! Good luck to you! (^_-)-☆

@Alexandre, I've got friends from Kagoshima, so I've heard them speak. Kagoshima-ben is a really particular accent - it's got different features other than just pitch-accent. And that actress isn't even from Kagoshima. How convincing is her accent? Is it convincing to people from Kagoshima? If it's not, would a foreigner be able to tell the difference? It almost sounded like "movie countryside accent" to me. A lot of times in TV/movies when people are from the "countryside", they seem to me to have a similar "countryside" accent. I wonder how accurate it is.

At any rate, I think anyone (even people who don't speak Japanese) can listen to that clip at 43min and identify that the accent is different than in Tokyo. That's not the problem. When I say that I can't identify pitch, I mean that I can't consciously follow it. If you asked me to write down the pitch pattern from a sentence, I wouldn't be able to do it. I hear the overall effect on a person's speaking. But when a bit of their native accent creeps into their standard Japanese, I often don't notice. I watched a drama with a character who was from the countryside and was struggling because her Japanese was still a little accented. I had a hard time hearing the difference when she corrected herself. But Japanese people can hear those little slips clearly.

@Alex, also thanks for putting up an interesting movie. I'm always eager to get new Japanese movies. I just wish it were easier to find them online with Japanese subtitles. That's a major disadvantage of being outside of Japan.

Mandarin and Cantonese are obviously tonal languages. If you get the tones wrong, it may still be possible to understand from the context, but it sounds quite bad to a native speaker. With Mandarin I learned the tones with each word, and try to note the tone when I look something up here at LingQ for example. I have no idea if I remember these tones. I do know that my tones only improved when I started doing a lot of repetitive listening to certain material (XiangSheng). It is very difficult to speak naturally and think of the individual tones of words. With Cantonese I have no idea what the tones are, and just try to imitate what I hear. My tones in Mandarin are better than my tones in Cantonese, but then I have spoken and listened to hundred times more Mandarin than Cantonese. If I get into a conversation in Cantonese, with a bit of rhythm, I think my tones are not bad.

So my question really is, with regard to Japanese pitch accent, is it not better to just try to imitate what we hear, rather than trying to remember the pitch accent for each word. Obviously we are going to be influenced by what we listen to. If we listen to a lot of NHK, or audio books read by professional narrators we will get closer to this form of the language. On the other hand if we are exposed to a variety of regional varieties of Japanese, our pitch may end up becoming less consistent. As with the tones in Chinese, it is also possible that we are better some times than others.

I would still like to hear a native speaker's evaluation of my pitch accent based on the video that I posted here.

I am still waiting for the next of Alexandre's videos. I must admit that I did not realize that pitch accent as such existed, although I could clearly hear the difference between Kansai and Kanto accents, not to mention other regional varieties. I just never related this to "pitch accent". But the question is what to do with this knowledge? Do we try to learn the pitch accent for each word?

My immediate advice would be to learn and apply the accent of the most commonly used words, particularly pronouns, verbs and verb forms and a few very common words like toki, koto, etc. That would already be a nice start, would only require reasonably minimal effort and could be applied to almost all sentences, making it fairly easy to establish as a newly acquired pattern. That's what I did. My pitch is often wrong, but it's also often right on noticeable things like verb phrases.

My next video was going to explain how to look for pitch, and the following, how to make sense of irregular changes, but you shouldn't expect to find a miracle answer in there.

@Alex
But, as was pointed out, if pitch accent varies so much across Japan, can we really talk about it being "right" or "wrong". You can talk about "right" and "wrong" with respect to a particular dialect, but in general? I had actually assumed that the NHK pitches were considered 標準語, but apparently that's not the case according to the comment above. Pitch isn't included in that, although I guess "NHK accent" might be the unofficial standard, much like "BBC English" was/is.

I'm curious, what sources are you using to list your pitches. The NHK dictionary? When I started learning Japanese, I had the electronic version of the Kenkyusha Learner's dictionary. It has pitch-accent markings in it, but I don't know if they came from NHK or some other source. Anyway, all this stuff is mostly related to the Tokyo accent.

My inclination would be to listen to material from all over Japan, and then just see what kind of pitch-accent, if any, evolves. I think that's more or less what Steve did. I'm still curious too to hear someone comment on his pitch-accent.

I'd also like to add that it's just great to be able to read comments of Japanese native speakers on this topic. Thanks for contributing!

Definitely! Now if only a native speaker could comment on Steve's video...

Gradiusさん、意見を書いてくれてありがとう！その明治時代の文部省歌手のアクセントは今のNHKアクセントと違うんですか？現在標準語のアクセントって言ったらそれは東京のアクセントって言う意味ですか？

Slightly off topic, but I always found that, when having difficulty with Japanese communication due to pronunciation, the main issue was my failure to elongate "ou" sounds. For example: 'douga' (movie). To a lesser extent failure to properly stop the air for the small "tsu"

The Japanese pitch accent system also works as separators of words and phrases according to linguists. So, the faster you speak, the more important pitch patterns are. If you want to speak very fast like Japanese comedians on TV shows, you should acquire either Tokyo accent or Kansai accent properly. These two are widely known in Japan and people will more easily understand what you are speaking.

Although there is no government "official" standard in pitch accent, each dialectal system works consistently in the dialect. The diversity of regional accents doesn't mean that it is okay to ignore it at all. It exists and actually is used by Japanese even subconsciously. But I mean, the priority to acquire a proper accent is probably not so high, as long as you speak slower than Japanese do.

> 明治時代の文部省歌手のアクセントは今のNHKアクセントと違うんですか？
It is basically the same. But, you know, languages change.

> 現在標準語のアクセントって言ったらそれは東京のアクセントって言う意味ですか？
Yes. It is considered a de facto standard.
However, Japanese students don't learn the accent in schools.
Japanese textbooks for elementary schools don't contain topics about pronunciation.

I was born and grew up in Yokohama, so I must have almost "correct" Tokyo accent.
But, my parents are both from Nagano, so there might be little influence from them.
I think only NHK announcers having special training have the exact "correct" accent.

Gradius, may we ask you to comment on Steve's video? We've been eagerly awaiting the opinion on a native speaker...

To avoid you the search, I'm reposting here what Steve said earlier:

"I would be very interested in the opinions of native speakers as well, if anyone has the patience to listen to the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNGVKZSkpEA)."

"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."

Steveさんのビデオは標準語のアクセントとは結構違うところもありますが，こういうしゃべり方をする人は日本人にもいますから，まったく問題ありません。関西弁に比べれば，ずっと標準語に近いです。（すみません，ここに最初の書いたのは違うビデオでした）

Steveさんの日本語.... 良いですねぇ。

Steveさんと日本語でお話する機会が今までに何度かありましたが、Steveさんが言ってる事が理解できなくて「え、何ですか？」と聞き返したことは一度もなかったような気がします。
改めてSteveさんが日本語で話すビデオを見ましたが、良いですね。
高低アクセントに関してもとても良いと思います。確かに、細部に分けてみると、この言葉の高低アクセントは不自然だ、というような部分もあります。
でも、全体的にすごく自然なので、細部は誰も気にしないと思います。
小学５年生の息子にビデオを見せたら、びっくりして笑って、「すげ～」って言ってました。

全くの余談なんですが、スティーブさんのビデオの語彙に関して一つ微笑ましく感じたことがあります。
私の個人的な感想なんですが、日本語能力試験は必要ですか？というビデオで、スティーブさんが、（英語の能力試験を試験委員会が）こしらえる、という言い方をしました。
若い人はほどんと使わない言葉なので、あぁ、スティーブさんの知り合いの材木関係の日本人のおじさんなんかが使ってたのかなぁ～、なんて思いを馳せていました。

ビデオを注意して聞き直してみました。
下記の言葉が標準アクセントと異なって聞こえます。

こないだ，名前，誤解（2回目はOK，その後も揺れてます），七つの，言葉，上で，文法，聞いたり，使い方とか，思います，時間，子供，恐れない，どこにいるか，普段の，子供には子供の，子供は，興味のある，大きく見れば，何を，どこから，日本人の話してる，中国語は，おいては，あなたには，恋人，理想的な，ということはない

低高型の言葉と助詞への接続のところが多いと思います。

あと，私がちょっと気になったのは，自分に対して「ご自分」と言ってしまっているところです。日本人のしゃべりに近くなればなるほど，こういうところが気になってきてしまうんですよね。

高低アクセントは英語のstressと同じような現象で間違えれば聞き手にちょっと違和感を与えるかもしれませんが、単語の発音より、発言全体のイントネーションがおかしくなると誤解を招く場合が多いと思います。
例えば、「はなの香りがいい」といえば、「はな」のアクセントをどこにおいても理解できます。同様に「象の花が長い」と書くとちょっと面白いでしょう。

しかし、イントネーションによって聞き手が受けるイメージが大分変わります。発言が質問になったり、命令になったりしますが、それよりも、高低アクセントが所々めちゃくちゃになっても自然なイントネーションで話すと話が乗りやすくなるじゃないですか。高低アクセントにかかわらず不自然なイントネーションが聞き手を疲らせてしまうかもしれません。

個人的な意見ですが、高低アクセントを意識していいけど、日本人の普通のしゃべり方を真似しようとすれば十分だと思います。単語を覚えながらピッチを気にすれば効率が下がっちゃって語彙がなかなか増えなくなります。時間の無駄でしょう。

@Bortrun -- sorry I missed your question. To find pitch, I usually use an electronic dictionary, or else an online one, or the people I speak to. I do realize that sometimes, this will differ from actual use in Tokyo, but in the vast majority of cases, it's pretty accurate. There is no other way to do it, anyway.

Thanks for the comments and for listening to my video. I will comment in English in response to the interesting Japanese language comments from Angie, Gradius and roan.

My conclusion from all of this is that generally imitating the sounds and intonation of Japanese is a practical approach for most learners. Alexandre suggests that we can work on mastering the pitch of certain words, but as can be seen from the long list of words where I was "off-pitch", this may not have much impact on the overall impression. Nor is the overall impression of my video all that bad, in terms of comprehension or any potential negative reaction from native speakers. I suspect that my success ratio in reproducing the correct pitch will vary from time to time, and probably exceeds 50% of more of the words used, but that is just a guess.

I share roan's concern that focusing on the pitch of individual words will actually slow down one's learning and make the non-native speaker more hesitant in speaking, sort of like the proverbial centipede who was asked wether he started with his left of right foot and then couldn't walk.

As for my ご自分 error, this is an interesting phenomenon. It is a bit like Chinese people who sometimes say my husband, she. When we reach certain level of fluency in a language, the language just comes out, and it is hard to control what comes out. These are not necessarily mistakes that are made consistently, but they occur. When the mistake is pointed out, of course, we know that this usage is not correct. That is no guarantee what we won't make the same mistake again.