Pitch Accent: Is It Important?
Hi, Steve Kaufmann here again, and today I'm going to talk about whether pitch accent is important in learning languages like Japanese. Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. So, first of all, I'm back home. All right. Uh, I was in Palm Springs for six weeks.
I went there for a variety of reasons. First of all, our house needed, our house down there needed some work to be done on it. Uh, also, we were doing some work here, so it was very messy, drywall dust and so forth. So we went down there and we also got our second dose of the vaccine. And then Friday night we came back home and I'll go, I'll explain that a little bit later, but pitch accent.
So there's quite a debate about pitch accent, particularly in Japanese. And I will post the link in the description box to a person who speaks flawless Japanese, like a Japanese person. And he is a proponent of studying pitch accent. His name is Dogan, and I will also show you a link to a video by another person whose name escapes me, who says that pitch accent is not worth worrying about.
And I will leave a third link to a description of pitch accent from Wikipedia. So pitch accent is, uh, and it doesn't just exist in Japanese. It's the idea that in languages we have varying intonation. All right. Intonation, that's not necessarily tied to the meaning of a word. So. In Chinese, if you say a Chinese word with the wrong tone, it's a different meaning altogether.
And people can be confused or have difficulty understanding you if you use the wrong tones. That is not the case in Japanese. Other, uh, languages, which according to Wikipedia have this, uh, pitch accent include Swedish, Turkish, Persian, Western Basque. Okay, just Western Basque. Uh, and I can't remember how... ancient Greek a number of languages that, um, according to them, Serbo-Croation have this pitch accent issue.
Now, let me say upfront that I lived in Japan for nine years, I spoke Japanese, Japanese and still do quite comfortably. I met a lot of foreigners who spoke Japanese very well. No one that I was aware of had ever heard of pitch accent. So probably it exists. Maybe it's something that some people want to spend time on, but it is not necessary.
It is not necessary. It's not a unnecessary part of learning the language, of communicating. It's certainly not necessary in so far as comprehension is concerned. Um, in Chinese, on the other hand, if you speak Chinese with very bad tones, people may have difficulty understanding you. And in any case, it sounds quite bad.
It sounds as if you don't speak the language very well, you would have to get those tones up to about 70, 80% accuracy to be taken seriously. In Japanese, that is not the case. I never pay any attention to pitch accent. I just consider, whatever it pitch accent is and I still don't understand it, it's part of imitating the way people speak.
Every language has its own intonation. Even within Japan, the intonation in the Kansai and the Osaka area is different from the intonation. In, um, you know, the Northeast and Tohoku area and the same is true for every language. I mean, if you've ever heard a French Canadian, the Quebecois speak French,
their intonation is very different from the intonation in Paris, which is different from the intonation in Southern France. Uh, if you've ever heard a Swiss person speak, even English very often, they'll have their Swiss intonation. And I can only imagine that their Hochdeutsch, their standard German also sounds
quite different from the intonation of a, of an Austrian or a Bavarian or someone from Hamburg. So the idea that there is intonation in a language, I mean, we have intonation in English. I remember when I, one of the reasons why I decided to learn Cantonese was that having learned Mandarin with its four tones and having all these Cantonese people scare you off saying
cantonese is the most difficult language because it has nine tones. And I said, geez, I mean, I had enough trouble learning four tones, nine tones is just too difficult, but I found this book written by a Chinese person, Cantonese speaker, who, first of all said, you only need six tones for Cantonese. And second of all, pointed out that we have tones in English and you can hear me hear me in my English.
I also have tones. So, is it worthwhile, you know, going into great detail, classifying? I mean, Persian is described or Turkish as a tonal language. I just listened to it and try to imitate it. Um, I think I do. Okay. I don't have enough vocabulary in those languages to speak them well, but it's not my lack of
emphasis on pitch accent that's holding me back. Uh, by the way, just to digress, so my wife and I head back home to Canada, uh, some trepidation about what's going to happen at the border because actually the government heavily discourages you from traveling outside the country. And if you fly into a major airport, you have to quarantine in a hotel that the government dictates and you pay for it.
While waiting for your first test results to come back could be two or three days. We didn't want to do that. So we flew from Palm Springs to Bellingham, which is 20 minutes from the border. The luggage took a while to come out. So it was getting later and later we had trouble getting an Uber. We couldn't get an Uber.
We finally got a Lyft driver to come to the airport. He drove us to the border. Now it's dark. It's close to 10 o'clock. We're dropped off at the Peace Arch Park. We don't know where to go. We wander around in the park. Finally found a sort of a sidewalk, followed it, got to a road. Walked for about a mile, pulling my luggage until we got to the border.
And there, there, there's a very serious looking sign there with a big stop sign stop until you are "motioned forward by an agent". Okay. I stop. So we waited and waited and waited cars every so often a car would come back and the customs official would come along. Customs official would deal with the car.
I thought, how are they ever going to pay attention to us? So finally they came and, um, basically I had registered on a government app or downloaded an app. So I had already sent them ahead all our information. So it went very, very smoothly. They knew who we were, uh, asked us a few questions and then told us that we would have to quarantine for 14 days.
And that the penalty for breaking quarantine could be as high as a million dollars or three years in jail. I don't think they'd ever do that, but that's kind of to scare you, right? And then they said, you're lucky because the self-testing tent hasn't closed yet. So go off to the tent there and the nurse, there will show you how to self test, because we're going to have to self test again in seven days.
So we went ahead, and there were two or three different nurses that couldn't have been kinder, more helpful, more pleasant. Took us through our paces, registered us on a website where we have to report. Then our second test, did the test in our nostrils. One 15 seconds in each nostril, put it in this little container, send it off.
We're going to have to do the same seven days later. Then we went out to find an Uber, uh, walked a ways and then call the Uber. Our Uber driver got lost. ENded up actually having, I think he went across into the United States. He then told us that the border guards had told him that, uh, you know, he had to prove that he was an Uber driver, so he wouldn't have to quarantine on his way back.
Anyway, he was an African immigrant. So I was able to speak some Farsi with him in the car. I have no idea what pitch accent he had and I think it makes no difference. Just a brief aside, I think that the only way we're getting through this, uh, COVID epidemic is through vaccines. Anybody who is not willing to get a vaccine is simply a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
And the same was true with masking before we were vaccinated. That was the only way we could keep a lid on the pandemic. I just don't understand people who in the name of some kind of freedom, refuse to cooperate with everybody else in trying to basically help the whole of society get through this thing.
Anyway, that's, as an aside... I have the freedom to drive through a red light, it's the same idea. Anyway, getting back to pitch accent. So. I think all these languages probably have pitch accent. I think there is a great tendency, it's fine for linguists academic link with, to study different qualities of languages and categorize them.
And this is subject-verb-object, and this is subject-object-verb, and this belongs to this other group and it doesn't matter for the language learner. We simply have to imitate what we hear. We have to get used to the pattern of the language and, um, In my Swedish, there are tones in Swedish. I like to Imitate ...you imitate it.
Yeah, the same is true in Japanese. And if I spend a lot of time with people from Osaka, uh, I end up with more of an Osaka accent. Um, it doesn't affect the meaning. It's not like Chinese tones. But it's something that, uh, again, you know, you talk about tones that compare, uh, compare a Brazilian to someone from Portugal, different area, different people, even native speaker, they're going to have different types of intonation and you will naturally want to imitate the accent and the intonation.
That, that either you like the best, or that is more useful for you in your work or you consider more prestigious or whatever it might be. And I don't think, and the other thing about pitch accent, it is possible that if I put a lot of effort on pitch accent, so I decided, uh, I'm not going to be, I'm not going to allow myself to be influenced by having spent two evenings with people from Osaka, which inevitably makes me speak with more of an Osaka accent.
I'm going to try to, you know, nail down the, the sort of pitch accent of the Japanese national broadcast announcer NHK announcer. So I'm gonna go whole hog with the Dogan program. Uh, and, but the problem is that language is about communication. It's not a performance sport. No one, I I'm not, I don't care if people tell me, well, you're Japanese pronunciation is, sounds a bit this way or that way I don't care.
Uh, people are comfortable communicating with me. I'm comfortable because I understand what people are saying to me in Japanese. Um, I'm not seeking perfection. Uh, you know, it's, it's not a performance it's it's communication. And to that extent people who do want to achieve the NHK announcers, uh, intonation by all means, but to pretend that this is important, uh, it's not as important as increasing your vocabulary.
It's not as important as having a good command of the language and using words appropriately, using words that belong together, being able to express your thoughts. Clearly that's far more important than pursuing the ultimate, you know, in tones. I ha... I mentioned this before, I had a Swiss banker who came in with his sidekick from England, uh, to try and sell something to us.
The Swiss banker had a strong Swiss accent in his English. But he used words so well, he expressed himself so accurately, so elegantly and his English sidekick, maybe he wasn't that well educated, he didn't use the English language as well, but he spoke with a native accent. So if you want to pursue pitch accent by all means do so.
But in my opinion, it's not that important and I certainly pay no attention to it anyway. Uh, and I'm going to leave a couple of videos here to follow up on the subject of pronunciation and seeking to be perfect and so forth. So thank you for listening. Bye for now.
