Do Native Japanese speakers think that incorrect pitch accent by non-natives is annoying?

2 comments

1. They may find it annoying or humorous, just like how English native speakers can react to foreign accents in a variety of ways.

2. First, please understand that there is no way to definitively answer this question. “Annoyance” is a very subjective thing, and there is no degree to which *all* (or even *most*) Japanese natives find foreign accents (let alone *specific* *aspects or possible quirks* of a particular foreign accent) “annoying” or not.

   Speaking in a general sense, I would say there are certain things that will *definitely* mark your Japanese as more obviously foreign than simply messing up the pitch accent of individual words here and there.

   These could include:

   – Obviously “foreign” pronunciation of Japanese consonant (not just the infamous らりるれろ but even things like し, は行 etc. are different from English “she”, “he”, etc.) and vowel sounds

   – Weird rhythm of long vowels, small っ, etc. (i.e. failing to properly distinguish between 主張 and 出張, 京都 and 教頭, etc.)

   – Ignorance of pitch accent in the first place / using English-style stress accent in place of pitch accent (“wahTAHHHHshi”, “temPUUUra”, “KiYOHHHto” instead of わたし, てんぷら, きょうと, etc.)

   If these and other fundamental aspects of your pronunciation are rock solid, your Japanese is not going to immediately turn into grating gaijin-speak just because you flub the pitch accent of an individual word every so often. (Hell, pitch accent even has some variance between different dialects of Japanese; mess up the pitch accent of 先生 a certain way and people might just think you picked it up in Kansai, or whatever.)

   The aspects bullet listed above, however, are things that basically *no* native speaker is ever going to pronounce “wrong”, so not getting those right is going to much more readily reveal your speech as “foreign” to Japanese ears.

   *(edited to add the following)*

   All this isn’t to say you can/should just ignore pitch accent altogether, of course. Just that I’d suggest thinking of it as one aspect of Japanese pronunciation worth working on, rather than obsessing over it as if it’s the be-all and end-all of everything. Honestly, just being *aware* of pitch accent and making an effort to imitate natives and get it right will go a long way, especially if you’re doing all the above stuff correctly as well.