I have noticed that whenever individuals come about asking for instruction on Pitch Accent, it almost inevitably turns into a multi-dozen Comment debate thread between the “factions” that vehemently argue against learning anything pitch (or just trying to “absorb” it by listening), and their opponents who are equally committed to the opposite perspective
…And when the dust settles, the question never even gets answered, really.
I understand why some people might hate learning this aspect of the Language, but for many learners, they still view it as an important part of the learning process that is crucial to helping their Japanese sound more natural.
Kanji seems to be *nearly* equally disliked, but nowhere near as controversial, so why is Pitch Accent different?
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If I were to guess, it’s due to the different goals that people have.
Listening comprehension – not controversial because mostly everyone wants to be able to hear Japanese and understand it
Kanji – semi controversial because there are some people who only care about listening comprehension while not caring about reading comprehension
Pitch accent – the most controversial because even less people will be attempting to output Japanese and attempting to sound like a native. But for those who do want to do this, it’s very important to them.
Personally, I think I wasted my time studying pitch accent for the first week since I have no intention of speaking anytime soon, if at all. And when I do speak, it will be in a very limited context.
I think people get distracted by learning pitch accent and then ignore much more relevant areas like kanji/vocab and just general outputting. Its easy to focus on a specific area than to struggle through the language as a whole.
Even if your pitch accent isnt perfect youre more than likely going to be understood if you have a good grasp of vocabulary and grammar.
Good to be aware of it but not an area that needs dedicated focus in my opinion.
Because some people have a goal to be practically “native” level whereas others want to just be able to speak Japanese to a “good enough” degree.
The former cannot understand why one would half ass it whereas the latter can’t understand why you would sink so much into what is essentially fine tuning.
That’s it, socially incompetent weirdos who don’t understand that people have different goals.
pitch accent is a really high level thing, where it just adds more stuff to learn that wont really be used irl. Unless you plan to be a translator or using japanese in a professional setting, words with different meanings from pitch will make sense in context and will be said too fast to even catch the fact that its one of the hundreds of words with a slightly different sound. If your like fluent in japanese id say thats when pitch will come into play. Also most japanese speakers will understand through context, especially when actually in japan
I don’t find it controversial, but it is annoying. The conversation about pitch accent seems to be a huge distraction from studying Japanese, but maybe I’m projecting my own feelings right now (I feel like I spend so much time watching videos and discussing the meta of *how* to study Japanese, and that time would be better spent just studying).
When I took Japanese classes in college, our professor never once brought up pitch accent as a thing that exists. Nothing in our textbooks either. It only seems to be relatively recent that people are pushing to study it, before it was just something they expected you to pick up “naturally” by listening.
Majority of the people who start learning Japanese will stop before even learning about the existence of pitch accent.
And most of the people who keep at it will have no use for it for a long time if ever.
N4 here, I think they’re important but I also think that the pitch accent of a words isn’t as important to learn as the reading, kana, kanji etc.
I didn’t know about the pitch accent when I was in Japan and I was working in a Japanese speaking environment (healthcare).
Now I know about it, I’m starting to realise it so I do think it’s worth being aware of it but don’t study it.
For new learners I’d recommend watching *some* of Dogen’s lessons in order to recognize different types of pitch accent of new vocab. Maybe add pitch indicator to your favorite learning tools. Anything else is overkill imo.
Japanese tends to have relatively flat affect. As long as you’re not projecting a very non-Japanese highly varying pitch, it’s going to be 99% good enough to communicate with natives and has no effect whatsoever on reading or writing, or all but the highest level of listening skills. So it’s essentially an 80/20 thing, there’s really no point unless you’re super interested in it for it’s own sake. It’s even less useful and memorizing 5000 kanji up front or 20000 low usage vocab words. Those might get used more. So if you want to, hey go for it, but it’s a very low ROI activity compared to literally every other aspect of the language study in all but the very highest fluency levels.
Historically, traditional classroom instruction eschews the explicit teaching of pitch accent in favour of simply allowing learners to acquire it “naturally” through unconsciously mirroring native speakers. Usually at most this kind of instruction focuses on teaching students to speak in a universal “flat” tone, the point of which is to have them shed their native language accent.
Lots of people assume that this means that Japanese has no accent, or that accent is not “important”…and while it is true that a native speaker will likely understand you if you speak in this “flat” accent, or even if you’re all over the place with your weird native language stress accent or whatever, it’s certainly not a “neutral” or “good” way of speaking. The truth is that it’s just not worth wasting classroom time or increasing the load on beginning learners when the attrition rate for Japanese learners is so high. That being said, a good teacher should still try to guide students towards “better-sounding” speech, even if they aren’t going to sit there and drill them on pitch accent constantly.
Similarly, people often twist certain facts about pitch accent to try to argue that it simply doesn’t matter: for example, “different dialects have different pitch accents but are still mutually intelligible,” “native speakers have to learn proper pitch accent when they want to have jobs in broadcasting, so even native speakers don’t all know or use proper pitch accent”, etc…
Furthermore, in online autodidact communities, there are many learners who express no interest in learning how to speak Japanese, so they don’t believe it’s necessary at all to care about pitch accent. But also, since the online autodidact communities are full of idiots who know fuckall about language learning, many of them think that the only way to learn pitch accent is to memorise it for every single word, so you’re also going to find people who think it’s fucking impossible and nobody should ever even try.
Personally I’m rather sympathetic to the orthodox pedagogy position. There are often-unspoken pragmatic concerns that go into shaping it, namely that Japanese people will not expect you to be that good at Japanese, but the more native you *sound* the higher their expectations will be. So it actually could harm a non-native speaker in Japan if they have a good accent but are lacking elsewhere; people will be more likely to speak quickly or use complex vocabulary if you sound like you know the language, while if you sound like “someone still learning the language” they are more likely to be more forgiving and helpful (this is the same thing as the “nihongo jouzu” phenomenon, where you will receive the “complement” less and be expected to know more the more natural your Japanese sounds to people).
Pitch accent is important and I do think you should learn it, but it’s something that naturally comes with speaking practice too. I don’t think it’s something that needs to be studied intensively like vocab, kanji, and grammar. To me it’s just a part of speaking practice.
It’s basically accent reduction. If you want less of an accent that’s a thing you can do.
I don’t care if I have an accent. For some people it matters though. For instance if you are dealing with Japanese customers as part of your job, it will make it easier for them if you work on your accent a bit. Or if you want to go into something on TV or in movies or in voice acting or something.
It can be controversial for reasons like this:
* people who don’t know kana get hung up on it
* some people actually need it and other people actually don’t need it. Therefore, people do not see that it isn’t a “yes or no” thing, and that different people have different needs
* some people either did or did not learn it, and they think everyone else has to do it the way they did
* most Japanese say, it doesn’t matter! It’s mostly foreigners arguing about if you need it.
* sensational inflammatory videos by certain youtuber who’s name rhymes with “bratt” make everyone argue
As someone who has been learning Japanese for over 20 years (I consider myself fairly proficient now) I have never really devoted anytime to pitch accent nor really thought much about it. I have used Japanese in advanced business and academic settings and it has never hindered my ability to communicate. I have also taught Japanese at university level and it has never really been an issue.
My wife will occasionally correct me on my pitch, but it so rarely comes up.
On the list of learning priorities, pitch accent is going to be very low. It’s the kind of thing I could focus on if I wanted to at this stage in my journey. However, it does depend on what your learning objectives are. Even if your objective is to become a fluent speaker, mastering pitch accent is going to come very late in the piece when aiming for fluency.
>Kanji seems […] nowhere near as controversial
Oh yea? Why don’t you make a post and ask if doing individual kanji study is worth the effort and if people prefer RTK, Kodansha, or Wanikani 😉
Ironically since I have a good sense of musical pitch, Japanese pitch isn’t hard to me it’s thinking in reverse that is.
It might be because Japanese has a habit of using assumption of topic and other things that even if someone gets a pitch accent wrong, it seems kind of acceptable to use the wrong pitch because the listener will assume you’re talking about the correct meaning even though the wrong pitch was used.
So, there will be learners or teachers who feel it’s too hard and will fight for those who don’t have the time or motivation. As a way so they don’t feel inadequate for not trying, etc. I mean this as a way to explain why the topic is so highly debated. It’s not like this level of controversy exists for any other type of language skill. Many don’t know how to write kanji, but if you’re not in Japan it doesn’t matter. Nobody seems to contest this, despite the fact that it’s a very clear skill that’s missing.
Kinda weird to me how pitch accent is basically ignored even though it is a feature of the language present in every aspect. Is it the most important? No but there’ no harm and actual benefit in learning at least the basics of it in the beginning and trying to listen for it. Focusing all your attention on it to the exclusion of other aspects of the language would be silly, but so is completely ignoring it, imo. It’s be like learning about stress accent as an English learner or something
I’d say the first issue, for me, is that there are 4 major pitch accents in Japan. Which one is correct? If I can say a word or sentence in a perfect Osaka accent (possibly without using words that are in Osakan dialect), is it necessarily wrong?
Secondly, coming from a more multi-ethnic country, I don’t think perfect pronunciation is absolutely necessary. You can understand people with accents.
It seems to be popular amongst some YouTubers at the moment. And whilst I think it’s useful to put in your toolbox, it’s far from essential for speaking and being understood.
I mean the vast majority of people who study English don’t care about “accent training” in order to sound native, but even if they did, they’d need to be familiar with all the slang etc to pass off as native.
So if you want to do it and it doesn’t feel like a burden, then go for it, if not, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
There’s a lot of lines of advice on this subreddit that are just continually passed around as truth until the original meaning is lost.
Don’t study pitch accent, don’t study kanji, don’t study grammar, don’t study textbooks, don’t use graded readers. If you keep taking everything here at face value, you won’t be doing anything except anki and immersion and Netflix with subtitles.
The reality is that you definitely should do almost all of those things people tell you not to do, but at a certain point, diminishing returns apply and that curve is different for everyone. But certainly that curve is not at 0.
for ANyONE WHO say THIS IS not imporTANT read THIS sentENCE OUT loud. where YOU EMphaSIZE words IS imporTANT and to SAY OTHerWISE is dumb AF REgardLESS OF languAGE.
I think some people that reach fluency and only then care about pitch accent may feel frustrated having to “unlearn” a bunch of pronunciations that have become a habit. I suspect that might be the perspective of channel creators like Dougen.
I think some people are scared of falling into that trap and just want to learn to say words correctly from the get go. I can appreciate this perspective even if it’s not mine.
I think some people start looking at the pitch accent from the beginning and feel frustrated at the difficulty of it, and this is where the vitriol against it comes from. How can you memorize nuances in accent for each word when you haven’t even mastered more basic things like mora and the japanese “r” sound?
Also – my personal perspective on it… If you think of people you’ve spoken to who speak English as a second language, a light accent is very pleasant and colorful to listen to, it adds character. But a heavy enough accent becomes hard to process. So it depends on your goals, but I definitely don’t think improving your accent is a waste of time.
I think you probably do need to train your ear before your tongue, so it’s a good thing to be aware of and listen for from the get go, but not something to obsess over.
Because it frustrates people which makes them emotional. The usefulness/importance of kanji is relatively undisputed because acquisition can be assessed by oneself- you either know the character or you don’t which makes it a simple matter of study. Pitch accent, where we are at technologically, is very difficult to train without consistent access to native speakers who will go out of their way to correct you. Inaccessibility to many breeds elitism which sours many learners on the topic of pitch accent at large. Many of the foreign speakers online who claim to have very good pitch accent are filming videos line by line checking as they go and could not speak on the fly that well.
As a Japanese person, pitch accent is even controversial in Japan between native speakers. Elderly people will literally call into television stations and complain about newscasters using ‘incorrect’ pitch accent- which usually means standardized pitch accent. This is an arbitrary standard of pitch accent used in Japan that no Japanese person who doesn’t devote a pointless amount of time to mastering it is capable of keeping. The conversation goes on like this forever. Accents in general are a cesspool of classism and prejudice in any language and Japanese is no exception.
I try to tell my foreign friends that pitch accent is kind of like table manners. There is a bare minimum that needs to be/ought to be recognized for people to exist harmoniously, but how far you want to take that is really up to you. Some people don’t care if your elbows are on the table or you wear a hat while you’re eating. Other people wouldn’t be caught dead using the wrong fork for the wrong dish. Some Japanese people will argue about how young people’s pitch accent has changed and sounds ‘trashy’ whereas some Japanese people can’t even tell the difference. The question can never be answered because everyone’s answer is different. Language is not math. That’s why it’s interesting though, I like to think.
Here’s why pitch accent is so controversial: it’s not even consistent inside Japan yet they all seem to be able to understand each other anyways. So while sure, you might sound like a yokel from the inaka and be as grating on a native Japanese speakers ears as a non-native English speaker putting the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylAble, you will generally be able to be understood.
So a lot of people take the stance that they just want to be able to communicate and they don’t see the point in wasting a ton of time on accents when they can put that time towards grammar and vocab. Conversely a lot of people want to sound as native as possible and think people who don’t spend their time studying and practicing pitch are doing it wrong.
I came in here asking for a specific pitch accent resource and was aggressively downvoted. In the comments, people pointed me to exactly what I was looking for including the renshuu app which is adorable and a total game-changer. So thank you muchly to my pitch accent friends 🙂