@alexandrec What are you suggesting is going to happen?

They would grow long noses and start speaking katakana Japanese.
That would make things much easier for unfortunate gaijin.
Americans should send another Perry with some 黒船, it would be enough to convince the Japanese people not to use pitch accent any more.

I don't hear the difference between 昨日 and 機能 as pitch, even though it may well be. It's actually more like stress, in the sense that when listening or speaking I am not conscious of how stress manifests itself, just that it's there. Pitch varies with stress as well, but I can't say I'm deliberately raising or lowering my tone when I speak English. So, probably the same as you're finding.

The course did help with my pronunciation. In fact a number of people commented on it whilst I was doing the course. I think I've lost it a bit since then. I really need to practise more, though. I think that's the key.

The course did teach pitch, but not to use the dictionary as a guide for speaking words in a sentence. The tutor said it was a waste of time memorising these. One example he gave was 雪, which is LH when said in isolation, such as あっ、雪 when looking out of the window and seeing snow, becomes a slow falling pitch in 雪が降っています. ユ is mid high, キ is mid, ガ is low.

Even if you don't agree with this, the fact is that pitches of individual words change in a sentence compared to when spoken individually. It even explains this in Japanese wikipedia.
http://tinyurl.com/6wqbmve

On there it talks about the downstep in phrases. On the course I did the emphasis was more on how the pitch fell, rather on whether it fell or not. It's not black and white.

Therefore, learning the pitch of individual words is of limited use when aiming for natural sentence intonation. The sharpest changes in intonation occur to indicate word breaks, rather than to distinguish between minimal pairs.

"Even if you don't agree with this, the fact is that pitch of individual words change in a sentence compared to when spoken individually. It even explains this in Japanese wikipedia. "

I certainly agree with this. When I looked at pitch-accent academically, I didn't really look at how it interacted with sentence-level intonation. Without that intonation, it would be gentle rises followed by steep drops, but in real life it's much more complicated. I was talking with my gf and she was saying that she doesn't even really think of pitch as being divided into two levels of height (ie, high and low) , but rather 3.

And I'm a complete idiot for not even thinking to read the articles on this topic in the Japanese wikipedia :-) I think I've got some new content to import into LingQ!

When I say 雪が降っています to myself, it seems like my 雪が is either flat or slightly falling. But I don't know if that's because I read your description beforehand. I think I'm going to have to record myself and then get someone to objectively analyze my accent. Maybe that school you used could do that over the internet.

In the end, I find that I don't have communication problems due to pronunciation. If I run into trouble, it's usually because I've tried to say something complicated, and I've gotten a bit tangled up in grammar.

My friends say that I have good pronunciation and intonation, but I don't believe them because they're my friends:-) It also might be tough for a stranger to say "Your accent/intonation is not good." If a language exchange partner were asked that, it might be difficult to be so direct as to say it isn't good. I suppose someone really objective is needed.

Likewise, my accent has never been a problem for communication. However, accent is one way that people judge your language ability, even though it isn't necessarily related. Therefore, I do want to improve my accent if only because it makes that good impression. My wife says that my accent isn't bad, and she would definitely tell me otherwise. She always makes fun of my pronunciation of しゃもじ, although lately I think I've cracked that one.

The tutor only complimented me when I got it exactly right. He didn't really give an objective appraisal of my normal speech. That wasn't really the point.

Japanese is relatively easy to pronounce clearly, but very difficult to get exactly right. But then I think it's difficult to speak any language with a good accent when learning as an adult. I have met a few people who can speak with an English accent almost like a native, but they are exceptional.

When I described the accent falling on 雪が, what I was trying to get across is that it's an arc, although it's not a huge drop in absolute pitch.

Actually, thinking about when I realised I could distinguish pitch in Japanese, I remember years ago being with some friends making fun of this bloke from Maebashi in Gunma. There the pitch rises on the last morae of Maebashi and ichigo. Anyway, I remember being struck how different the pronunciations sounded.

Roan wrote:
"I don't hear the difference between 昨日 and 機能 as pitch, even though it may well be. It's actually more like stress, in the sense that when listening or speaking I am not conscious of how stress manifests itself, just that it's there."

Some learners of Swedish (even natives) also identify pitch as stress, e.g. two-syllable words with stress on either the first or second syllable. That's only part of the truth - some words with pitch#2 usually DO have the stress on the second syllable, others don't (maybe they can, depending on regional accent).

Any English speaker is able to play with statement or question intonation but I think that most would still say that a word like "coffee" has its stress on the first syllable regardless of intonation.

Any thoughts?

"When I described the accent falling on 雪が, what I was trying to get across is that it's an arc, although it's not a huge drop in absolute pitch."

Yeah, I got that.

"Actually, thinking about when I realised I could distinguish pitch in Japanese, I remember years ago being with some friends making fun of this bloke from Maebashi in Gunma. There the pitch rises on the last morae of Maebashi and ichigo. Anyway, I remember being struck how different the pronunciations sounded."

I remember when I was up in Utsunomiya, people were talking about that as "Tochigi-ben", the idea that words/phrases go up in intonation at the end so that everything kind of sounds like a question. I didn't notice a big difference though :-)

"Any English speaker is able to play with statement or question intonation but I think that most would still say that a word like "coffee" has its stress on the first syllable regardless of intonation.

Any thoughts?"

Yes, I think this is correct. Intonation doesn't really affect word stress. Intonation will never result in a native speaker saying "coFFEE" as opposed to "COffee".

Although I find that when I try to speak in a monotone (robot voice!), much of the stress disappears from my voice. It feels very unnatural to try and stress syllables while not changing my pitch - or, rather, the unstressed syllables don't disappear as much. Perhaps that's why monotone-voiced 1960s robots all talk the way they do with equally-weighted syllables. Interesting.

"Likewise, my accent has never been a problem for communication. However, accent is one way that people judge your language ability, even though it isn't necessarily related. Therefore, I do want to improve my accent if only because it makes that good impression. "

I understand this desire and it's a good one. If there was something concrete I could do to improve my accent, I'd do it.

By the way, what do you mean by しゃもじ？

しゃもじ, otherwise known as しゃくし, the spatula thing for serving rice. It was one thing that my wife picked up on my pronunciation, and I'm still not really sure what I was getting wrong.

Ah, you were talking about that. I thought it must have had another meaning. And you had trouble pronouncing that? Maybe it's the pitch-accent :-)

It was the pitch, but it wasn't just a high low thing. I asked the tutor at the school and he said my pronunciation wasn't that off. Just my wife being obtuse.

Pitch is important in Japanese, and there's clearly a case for knowing about it and understanding the concepts. But it's far more complicated than the simple low/high model that is presented in dictionaries, so learning pronunciation in this way is of limited use. Most of the time words are in sentences and not uttered in isolation.

I had a letter from the pronunciation school yesterday to say that they've started to charge by the lesson, so I'm going to start going again.

Yeah. I was having a discussion about this the other day, and apparently the 音声学 books for Japanese people now also say that the whole high-low thing was an easy-to-understand, but not really accurate, way of describing pitch-accent in Japanese. It's a useful simplification, but not really all that accurate when you start really getting into it.

Just want to say that this thread is one of the best I have seen on these forums. Thanks for setting it up Alex. I know it is a lot of work to make those videos. 後苦労様

Thanks dooo.

I initially felt that it was mostly a lack of information that led people to disregard pitch. But I can’t now see that even when you do try to inform people, they remain skeptical and look at it as superfluous information. Kind of like reading technical data on a DVD player, as opposed to just using it. At this point, I’m not sure making the other videos would be worth the time investment.

Personally, my opinion hasn't changed -- I will continue to listen for pitch and try to speak with correct pitch and I know I will eventually get pretty close to native-like --, but if others fail to be convinced, it's not a serious enough issue to invest more time in.

'I will continue to listen for pitch and try to speak with correct pitch'

Exactly! Listen for pitch and try to imitate it. Pitch IS important, but following the LH pitch marked in dictionaries, as you seemed to be advocating, does not lead to natural intonation in a sentence. I think that it is an aspect of Japanese that is often overlooked, but when it is taught it isn't explained in context. It isn't like tone in Chinese, and explaining that a word is LHHH doesn't mean much when it isn't pronounced like that most of the time. In the worst case a student will ignore what they hear and follow what they learnt from a dictionary. Marking a sentence as LHHHLHHLHHLLLHH or whatever doesn't make any sense, because the rise and fall of the pitch is as much about the relationships between words as the words themselves, and is far from being bi-tonal

I'm sorry that you don't think it worthwhile producing any more videos, because pronunciation in Japanese is not covered well at all. I have seen numerous resources claim that Japanese should be spoken in a monotone, which is so far off the mark even at beginner level. It's a melodious language that sounds quite beautiful when spoken well.

I agree with dooo, that this has been an excellent thread.

When you know how Japanese sounds and how pitch works, knowing where the accent falls is all you need to know to derive the rest of the phrase. L and H is a sufficient guide, even if it's technically more complex than that.

I agree with dooo. This is the kind of thread that I would like to see more of here. Thank you Alexandre.

@roan Just to get back to your earlier post:

"I don't hear the difference between 昨日 and 機能 as pitch, even though it may well be. It's actually more like stress, in the sense that when listening or speaking I am not conscious of how stress manifests itself, just that it's there. Pitch varies with stress as well, but I can't say I'm deliberately raising or lowering my tone when I speak English. So, probably the same as you're finding."

It is indeed a difference in pitch and in pitch only:
昨日 LHL
機能 HLL

I'm one of the few people who do care about pronunciation in my languages.
Strange as it may seem, I do need explicit explanations with recordings of minimal pairs and a transcription.

I think that there's already enough info about Japanese pitch accent out there for anyone really interested.

One of the good sources is an old book where all sentences are marked and everything is recorded by native speakers.
'Beginning Japanese' by Harz-Jorden
http://i49.tinypic.com/24qk65g.jpg

NHK
http://i47.tinypic.com/nywcb5.jpg
http://www.nhk.or.jp/strl/open2002/tenji/id34/3...

"It is indeed a difference in pitch and in pitch only:
昨日 LHL
機能 HLL"

In Tokyo, yes. Not in other places. And not necessarily when spoken in a sentence.

You said earlier that the LH dynamic was adequate to describe pitch accent. I'm just not sure that's the case. The interactions between all these factors are complicated. Even in books written for Japanese people about the standard accent, they don't advise (as far as I know) trying to memorize all these pitch patterns discreetly. 高低アクセント is just one of the factors involved in sentence-level intonation.

However, we should all obviously listen carefully to the pitch and intonation of the voices that we are listening to. I suspect that the most decisive factor in a person's pronunciation is how much time they have spent really deeply listening.

Alex,

99.99% of the time, no one convinces anyone of anything in life. I think the percentage is somewhat higher in the LingQ forums. I still think the discussion is worthwhile.

@alexandrec
It is indeed a difference in pitch and in pitch only:
昨日 LHL
機能 HLL

Yes, but as with many other aspects of pronunciation, I am not concious of it being pitch. For example, I was devoicing vowels long before I knew that this occurred in Japanese, but even now if somebody asked 'how do you devoice vowels' I couldn't explain it without demonstrating. When I heard the explanation for it, though, it all made sense, because it fitted in with what I had picked up.

Despite hearing the explanation of pitch, it wasn't until I went to the school I mentioned before that I had an 'aha!' moment. The normal 高低 explanation just didn't fit in with my experience; although I could concede that words did differ by pitch, the difference between 昨日 and 機能 in normal speech didn't fit exactly with the LHL and HLL explanation.

Now, my Japanese accent is not perfect by a long way, and I'm by no means native level in any case, so I can only judge from my experience as a foreign learner of the language.

However, whilst it is important to note that pitch is a vital part of correct Japanese pronunciation, I don't believe that the bi-tonal 高低アクセント model is accurate enough. A Japanese person may see the pitch pattern and from that infer the correct pronunciation in other contexts. A foreign learner does not have that knowledge and needs to hear how the change in pitch really manifests itself, particularly as part of a sentence.

はじめまして。Hiiroです。僕は数年間日本語を勉強してきましたけど、あまり話しませんでした。不自然な、または間違った日本語があれば訂正してください。

僕は他の外人と違って完璧なアクセントで日本語を話せるようになりたいです。全ての語の高さの切れ目を覚えていって、アナウンサーのように話すことに決意しました。苦労はするけど、ぜったいあきらめはしません。すでに成果が出てきたと思いますがどうでしょう。僕のビデオはこちら：http://youtu.be/XpvX03dniBY

僕のアクセントとイントネーションはどう変えれば日本人のアナウンサーに聞こえますか。具体的に教えてくださいませんか。

Oops. Double posted.