I just like to think of it as unlike English and other languages, Japanese words can have more than one accented syllable.
So, like we can say REcord or reCORD in English we could say REko or reKO in Japanese.
Some people, like Steve Kaufmann, claim that it doesn’t matter because apart from a few words like REcord/reCORD in English ( HASHI (chopsticks/bridge) or AME (rain/candy)) there are not a lot of Japanese words where accent differentiates the word.
But you will still sound funNY to a naTIVE speakER if you put the wrong emPHAsis on the inCOrrect sylLABLE as this can get quite annoyING afTER SEveral senTENces. I can unDERstand evERything you are saYING but you sound like a roBOT.
So in Japanese, there can be accent on MORE than one syllable per “word”. This is easier to understand that those up and down pitch marks. And with more than one accented slyable to get wrong per word, you can sound even funnier than the English sentence above.
The word for “I” is not WÁ-ta-shi or even wa-TÁ-shi but wa-TÁ-SHÍ (two accented syllables). And once it goes up, it stays up if you add any particles: wa-TÁ-SHÍ-WÁ not wa-TÁ-SHÍ-wa.
Of course there is more to it, because you can have other patterns, such as accent at the start, then down and then back up:
Made up word ( ÉL-la-VÁ-TÓR-WÁ) and there are other patterns and the accent can shift, but the general idea to get you started is:
Multiple syllable words (including the connected particles and verb endings) can have more than one accented syllable.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31d0b\_swAAk&t=273s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31d0b_swAAk&t=273s)
Note: This is just a quick way and simplified way to get started and later you can fine tune your understanding. I only post this because for a long time it was all very confusing.
9 comments
Well, you outlined what it is, but you didn’t really explain why it’s simple. If you’re not coming from a language where pitch is phonemic, that’s a good chance it won’t come easy to you.
I think its a bit of gatekeeping from idiots who think you need to be 100% on the money to speak another language, and if you don’t do everything right, you should stop and walk away in shame. Can’t get your が and は right? WEEB CARD REVOKED.
Do you actually have an intuition for how it works, or failing that consciously know anything about it? Can you accurately tell where downsteps are when presented with minimal pairs like 箸・橋・端 or 機能 and the two variants of 昨日? What if those words are said in an ambiguous sentence, can you tell them apart?
Pitch accent is really nothing like stress accent. If you just assume that high pitch mora in Japanese = stressed syllable in English and pronounce them accordingly you’ll sound terrible. Stress accent includes several other elements besides pitch, especially in English where vowels also change depending on stress. In comparison pitch accent is extremely subtle and very difficult to perceive for native speakers of stress accent languages unless they’ve specifically worked on it. Even if you have you’ll probably still struggle with recognizing downsteps (or lack thereof) outside of controlled environments for quite a while, at least in my personal experience
That’s not to mention that the way pitch accent works on the sentence level is also totally different from English stress accent, especially once intonation and other factors that can change or override the accent come into play
Thinking of all of the “high” mora as being analogous to “stressed” is a pretty unusual way of looking at it. The more conventional way is to think of mora before the downstep as the one that is “accented” (this is how most Japanese people tend to view it which is why 平板 words are perceived as “unaccented” even though on their own they rise in pitch) and if you look at it this way, Japanese words (well depending on what you count as a word) also only have one accented mora which makes pitch accent even more similar to stress accent than your way of looking at it.
However, this doesn’t really make it “simple.” Anyone who has spent 5 minutes reading about accent understands that words are only supposed to have only one downstep but actually learning to hear pitch accent properly, internalizing the rules, and getting to the point where you can say everything properly doesn’t become “easy” just because you observe that pitch accent is kind of analogous to English stress accent.
One of my favorite videos on pitch accent: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-dRbTnLmBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-dRbTnLmBY)
I’ll echo what a few others say in that I don’t think it’s necessarily simple, but it is another part of the language that I want to be familiar with!
I’ll make it simple for everyone learning Japanese. Don’t learn it. People will understand you even without having pitch accent. Improve your vocabulary and don’t miss a syllable while speaking.
It’s not too hard to have 70 or 80 percent accuracy. Definitely challenging to get close to 100 percent though especially if you’re using a wider variety of words and sentence structures. That’s my impression at least so far.
It’s not too hard to have 70 or 80 percent accuracy. Definitely challenging to get close to 100 percent though especially if you’re using a wider variety of words and sentence structures. That’s my impression at least so far. Native speakers make mistakes too unlike in English where I can’t really think of any times where I’d get the stress accent “wrong.”
> Pitch accent is so simple
Someone who has never had to learn pitch accent for a dozen counter words from 1–100