Of all the problems people have when learning japanese, such as kanji or grammar, my biggest challenge when it comes to learning any language will always be pronunciation. And although many features of japanese phonology are hard to grasp, such as the voiceless vowels or some sound qualities unkown to linguists themselves, pitch accent is the one thing that seems hard but should actually be very easy.
Tokyo japanese pitch accent is basically a feature of vowels(sonorants) in the japanese language, where vowels will sometimes be pronounced higher(somewhat “feminine” or “young”) and sometimes lower(somewhat “masculine” and “old”).
After looking at a few transcrÃptions of japanese pitch accent, it seems to me the “low” pitch is actually the “default” pitch among japanese vowels, while the “high” pitch seems to be the “accent”, somewhat alike to english stress accent.
What is your take on this interpretation?
3 comments
Not necessarily an answer to your question, but this comment from another user should be taken seriously IMO:
«OK, slight gripe, please stop obsessing over pitch accent. You don’t need to learn it, and you don’t gain anything from learning it.
Seriously. Pitch accent isn’t consistent across Japan. It’s barely consistent within Kanto, which is supposed to have heavy influence from Tokyo. You can spend all the time learning ‘standard’ pitch accent, only to either go to Tochigi and discover everyone there doesn’t use pitch accent, meaning that it’s utterly useless as a distinguishing tool, or go to Osaka, where half the pitches are upside down, and that’s before you discover they have tone on top.
There’s this weird belief that pitch accent is somehow a fundamental part of how Japanese works. I’ve even seen it described as ‘critical for understanding’. This is not true. Pitch accent is just that; an accent. Pitch exists, make no mistake, but the accent varies across the country just like any other accent, meaning that if you really want a good pitch accent, pick a place, live in it, and learn the accent there.
Pitch accent is only useful (never mandatory, only useful) if it’s relevant to where you live. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time, and if you spend the effort solidifying a particular form now, that’s only more effort that you’ll have to spend breaking that habit so that you can actually obtain the relevant accent.
‘But you at least need some form of accent to sound natural’ no. You don’t. Some Japanese dialects actually lack pitch accent entirely, meaning that Japanese with an absence of pitch accent is a native feature.
Sorry for the long comment, but every now and again I see people talking about pitch accent like it’s something that every learner must expend considerable effort mastering, when in reality there’s no need for that. Pitch accent is very subtle and very finicky, meaning it can be very frustrating for what is in reality very little benefit, so I want to spare learners that frustration. /rant»
The “accent” is actually the drop in pitch, which is why heiban words are considered “flat”, they don’t have a drop.
Dogen has the first view videos from his Patreon series on pitch and pronunciation uploaded on his Youtube channel, he explains the basics in those.
Personally.. Word-level pitch accent isn’t all that important. What isn’t talked about enough is how pitch accent at the SENTENCE level and the word level are actually different. Most of the time, you will not be saying words in complete isolation. If you pay attention to how the pitch in a sentence flows, you will be much better off.
On top of this, pitch accent changes depending on the city you are in. As long as people don’t have a hard time understanding you, it’s not something to stress over. If you have to choose between sinking time into pitch accent and something else… I’d pick something else.