**TL;DR: Would you recommend Dogen’s patreon pitch accent series for learning pitch accent, and for me in my situation, having just returned to studying and sitting at almost N3 grammar but maybe only N5 speaking ability, should I try to improve my speaking with italki lessons first or is it worth learning pitch accent at the same time?**
I feel this would be worth making a post about, instead of just putting it in the question megathread. I am returning to Japanese after beginning studying it I believe 7 years ago now (time really does fly!) I was at somewhere in the low-intermediate level, or in terms of grammar and vocab, with some practice I probably could have passed the N3 though not sure if that’s considered intermediate or if intermediate starts after you pass N3. I started by going through my hundreds of core 5k reviews and the deck I have has native audio for the sentences, and I’ve tried to copy the pronunciation whenever I do the review.
Back when I was studying before university (2-3 years ago at this point) my friend shared with me some of Dogen’s pitch accent content he had paid for on Patreon (though I don’t have access to it anymore) and I remember the videos being pretty informative. They helped me gain awareness that pitch accent was even a thing, and certain patterns like “2-kanji chinese loan words tend to be heiban/flat pitch” were good to learn. Seeing the snippets he’s made public on Youtube are a good preview into the series I am guessing, and the fact he has over 100 videos available on Patreon is quite promising.
What do you guys think of his Patreon course? For me in my situation, I am essentially a beginner at speaking, probably only able to have N5-level short conversations because I haven’t got much of the grammar down into muscle memory when speaking. It wouldn’t take me hugely long though I think. I am going to use some of my newly-gained income as an adult (vs when I learned before I was a broke school student) to get conversation practice with teachers online, and I’m wondering if I should do this first before trying to perfect pitch accent, or if I should start both at the same time in order to not learn any mispronunciations.
4 comments
it’s basically just much more in depth of what he has on his public youtube. if you like that go for it. Also, if you have trouble accurately perceiving pitch accent, I found the migaku trainer extremely helpful
Pitch accent should come much later. If you are N5 there is little to no point in learning it. Work on vocabulary and making sentences first.
It’s very good. His release pace is quite slow, so if you want, you can binge on the existing material now, unsubscribe, and check back later for updates. On the other hand, I don’t know that you have to religiously learn _all_ of the material, but it’s definitely good to get a feel for at least some of the core concepts and have an awareness of some of the complications in this topic.
One of the more useful things that he does in the series is that he doesn’t _just_ present the materials that he cites, but also gives his own opinion on the most practical way about going about learning the information. When sources disagree, he provides his own original syntheses of the material to try to present a useful rule that leads to at least one acceptable pronunciation. He also notes when extremely common things simply have to be memorized by rote and when there are useful shortcuts.
I found this interesting article while searching for Dogen’s course:
Practicing pitch-accent is on the rise among Japanese learners : [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2021/12/03/language/pitch-accent-japanese-study-dogen-intonation/](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2021/12/03/language/pitch-accent-japanese-study-dogen-intonation/)