Hey guys,
I was looking through my old Genki books and saw that in the very beginning they have a small section talking about pitch patterns. They don’t go very in depth but they do have a few examples. They’ll show a word and where it goes up or down in pitch while pronouncing it.
I was wondering if theres an entire book on this. Some kind of resource that I can use. At this point I know thousands of words, but don’t necessarily understand the phonetics completely? A resource on this would be great.
7 comments
The only resource I’ve bookmarked is this:
[https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/pages/home](https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/pages/home)
If you use one of the popular textbooks, might be useful because there is a section where words are organised by textbook as well.
What it doesn’t have are some sort of general rules for intonation. I remember I started looking into this when my teacher corrected how I pronounced 寝室 in class , but concluded maybe there weren’t any rules/guidelines, and I just need to watch more content from native Japanese speakers.
Don’t waste too much time around pitch. Learn how it works then practice with audio. You want the correct accent at the phrase and sentence level and that can’t really be “memorized” but rather practiced IMHO.
My favourite book on pronunciation for foreigners is 初級文型でできる にほんご発音アクティビティ. https://www.ask-books.com/978-4-87217-741-1/
Book starts with words and moves to phrases, sentences. It is pretty easy and shows some tips for practicing with the CD or audio files (e.g. shadowing). With short daily sessions, I finished the book in less than a month and spent another month or two practicing. Several of my Japanese roomates noted that my pronunciation got much better during that period.
It is a fun book IMO.
If you want more resources, there are Anki decks with pith accents for words. And the NHK Pitch accent dictionary. And some classes.
ＮＨＫ日本語発音アクセント辞典 is probably the definitive resource, but it’s written entirely in Japanese.
For individual word lookup, theres jpdb.io, which combines JMdict with pitch accent data. You can also try adding a pitch accent dictionary to the browser extension Yomichan.
Dogen’s YouTube videos and Patreon are a solid resource for pitch accent. The reference books he pulls from are written in Japanese, but he does have an older video in his [playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxMXdmBM9wPvsySiMoBzgh8d68xqKz1YP) listing free resources for English speakers.
Edit: I’m subscribed to his Patreon (have only watched the first several lessons so far), and it’s much more exhaustive than what he shares on YouTube. He’s released a few full lessons publicly, though, so [this one](https://youtu.be/mxLwyrfRxEM) should give you an idea of what the Patreon course is like.
I’ve heard Matt vs Japan and Ken Cannon are selling a course which is only a couple hundred bucks which doesn’t look shady at all.
https://pitch.migaku.io/
I enjoy the android app Akebi, which sources pitch data from [https://github.com/mifunetoshiro/kanjium](https://github.com/mifunetoshiro/kanjium)
(it also has a lot of other great features I appreciate! )