Question for people who can talk comfortably in Japanese. Did you study pitch accent?

15 comments

1. >it sounds like there is pitch accent and more than one stress syllable in each word, does Japanese have stress syllables?

   As far as I know, Japanese has flat pronunciation aside from pitch accents, so no stress syllables.

2. No, never really studied that. I just imitate the Japanese speakers around me.

3. Dogen’s patreon has great pitch videos

4. I’m probably a boring person to reply since I learned Japanese by living in Japan so my answer is no and no. But when you learn something by memorising what people around you are saying I guess in the end it’s the same as learning the pitch of words individually. Once you hear a word enough times by a fluent speaker you will remember the pronunciation.

5. never studied pitch accent, just watched a lot of anime and movies and try my best to sound like them.
   I am able to make myself understood, but i know my accent is not very good. Sometimes after speaking out a sentence I can tell my pitch was off, and how it should have sounded 😄

6. I really recommend watching [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-dRbTnLmBY) for a general level-headed take overview from someone who’s fluent in Japanese (don’t take my word for it, native speakers said so). He addresses most of your questions there.

   EDIT: I’m actually very interested to see all the people in this thread saying they just “picked it up naturally” and “I just listen to how Japanese people say it and repeat it” take a perception test like [this one](https://kotu.io/tests/pitchAccent/minimalPairs). In my personal experience (as one of those people that used to say “I just imitate how natives do it and I have no problems” in the past), it turns out I was missing **a lot** of things and I couldn’t properly hear pitch until I actually took a qualitative test to see how much pitch I could **actually** hear. So always take with a grain of salt when people (who don’t come from pitch-accented native languages) say their pitch is okay by just immersing and imitating. It definitely doesn’t work for a lot of them.

7. I treat pitch accent the way I do music theory. I know why they’re good to know so I’m not completely oblivious to them, though at the same time, as long as I don’t completely butcher it, I don’t particularly care for further active studies other than active listening at the end of the day.

   For the most part, I imitate what I hear. Although I can read kanji just fine, I never came to terms with reading sheet music while playing due to poor vision, so I learned everything by ear. I’d like to think some of that experience carried over.

   It would have been great if I was made fully and explicitly aware of pitch accent from the beginning since I got my start in a classroom setting, but I’m glad my teachers didn’t really stress pitch accent at all. I probably would have gotten hung up on it at that stage.

8. I studied a little bit (just the commonly mispronounced words) and left it at that. If you speak to a Japanese person, they know that you’re a foreigner and aren’t expecting you to speak flawlessly. I have no problem communicating to people here and I live in Japan. Also don’t forget that the pitch and words change as you go to different prefectures etc.

9. Pitch accent is like coronavirus.
   It’s a real thing and you should get vaxxed or pay attention to pronouncing things correctly but if don’t let it run your life or use it to judge others.

10. During my active study days (uni/language school) we didn’t learn it other than for certain words like rain/candy, bridge/chopsticks etc.

    I have started paying more attention to it in recent years since I live in Japan but I believe it’s more of a polish thing and there are other elements of pronunciation that will take you most of the way there and are more important as a beginner.

11. The problem with pitch accent is that it varies by region, and the hyojun pitch accent makes me sound like a newsreader.

12. I didn’t particularly study it but I consume a lot of native content for fun like j dramas, variety shows, radio programs. Eventually I realized that I could tell the difference between similar sounding words. It made a huge difference in my speaking because I was able to catch myself pronouncing something incorrectly and slowly work on fixing it.

    For me it was just something that eventually clicked after consuming lots and lots of content daily for a little over a decade now. But if you want quicker and more efficient results, you might want to study pitch accent.

13. I study pitch accent while learning words by listening to natives speak, I also was an exchange student and would copy the way my friends spoke. As long as you k ow of the concept you should be fine without studying it extensively

14. Just remember how it’s been said and use it with the same energy in the proper context.

15. Pitch accent is ABSOLUTELY crucial if you want to sound like a native. I know many foreigners who can speak “fluent” Japanese (and Chinese) but disregard pitch and thus you can immediately tell they are not native. I’ve asked my tutors and SO who are all natives and they agree that pitch accent is really important. But again, the question is, is your goal fluency or sounding like a native?

    If you want to learn pitch accent for the first time, an exercise I did really helped me to pick it up:

    I used Anki cards with audio and played the audio while speaking aloud until I perfectly match the pitch. The key here is to treat the exercise almost as a musical exercise where you are trying to sing the exact same pitches as the speaker. Then you can translate this into your natural register. As you do this more, it will train your ear to hear the differences, and once you’ve fully learned a few phrases and words, you’ll be able to hear the differences in conversation and start to pick things up without the flash cards.

    If you want to learn the basics of pitch accent, [Dogen on YouTube](https://youtu.be/O6AoilGEers) is excellent