As tone deaf I started learning pitch accent exactly a year ago. Here’s what happened.

So earlier today I dropped by the kotu website and took two of their pitch accent tests along with a friend. We did the same thing together last year but my friend does not study Japanese (anymore), while I do. She didn’t know anything about pitch accent but is constantly exposed to the language through anime. I read a little about it around January 2022 but couldn’t hear it. Here are the results:

**2022 (Feb?)**

*Minimal pairs* \- Me: \~40/100, Friend: \~50/100.

This test gives you (if I’m not mistaken) any type of word and you are provided with 2 options. This means that my friend was exactly 50/50’ing it, but I was somehow even worse than had I selected an option at random without even listening to the recording.

**2023 Jan**

*Words + Particles* \- Me: 50/50, Friend: 25/53.

*2 Mora Words* \- Friend: 33/50.

*Sentences* \- Me: 12/13.

I only listened to each recording once from speakers at medium volume, but my friend really struggled without any restrictions. Then we tried to even out the difference by me listening to sentences and my friend to 2-syllable words (again, as many listens as she likes). Even as an untrained person she was able to get two-thirds of it but as barely above picking at random (there are two options), it’s a long way from being able to catch words, let alone full sentences.

Now, this last part was amusing because for some reason the audio for sentences wasn’t playing, but I got the full 12 sentences right because I already knew what it was supposed to sound like (they write sentences in kanji but the lone words are in hiragana, so you can’t know for sure which word it’s supposed to be and have to use your listening).

I got the word 異性 wrong on the 13th one. The strange thing is that my dictionary says it’s flat (which is what I selected) but the test said the first syllable is accented. I played it on Google Translate and it’s also accented that way (or I’ve gone insane). Maybe both are used, but I’ll stick with Google’s because although I’ve seen many errors (or at least variations) in dictionaries, I cannot recall hearing Google pronounce something wrong, amazingly.

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**My initial level**

We can see from the original test that I couldn’t hear the difference in pitch if my life depended on it. Actually, I used to take singing lessons and I could never tell if I was in tune with the singer. I always depended on my instructor to tell me if I needed to go higher or lower.

I could tell if individual notes she played on the piano were higher or lower than each other, but if she played multiple notes I would get confused. However, the most important point is that the more complicated the ‘instrument’ became, (say, a violin) and eventually when it came to voices, there was too much going on for me to understand.

I would get confused by the timbre of the singer (or ‘quality’), and a syllable stressed always sounded higher to me even if it was only the volume that was increasing, not the pitch. (P.S. I eventually quit singing partly because I felt hopeless).

**How I studied**

I initially studied how I’m *supposed* to accent something, but I quickly realised I couldn’t hear it nonetheless. After I found that test and faced complete defeat, I decided to train my ear there. I started from two syllables, doing around 100 each day. Every time I reached around 95% accuracy, I would go to the next difficulty. I stopped after words with particles because the website is kind of poorly designed for sentences. It probably took me a couple of weeks to get to 90% accuracy on all words (now it’s almost 100% on any sentence).

Alongside that, I started to use the 10ten reader to check the pitch accent of every word I encountered. This made my reading *extremely* slow. I spent about 2 months reading like I didn’t know kanji because it completely bottlenecked my speed. I tried to separate my time reading as general practice vs for pitch accent but I found that I actually couldn’t stand the idea that I was reading something wrong and felt the need to keep looking everything up.

When I could more or less hear the pitch of words and memorised a fair percentage of them, I started to learn the actual rules. If you don’t know, the pitch of words in a sentence is not necessarily the same as when in isolation.

I would often listen to the pitch of words I hear e.g. in anime, try to guess the accent and then check. Sometimes to my delight I would get it right, many times to my dismay I was reminded how long the way ahead still was.

One of my favourite tools was a website that lets you insert any sentence and it uses artificial intelligence to make a graph of the pitch. Its advantage over typing it into Google Translate is that you can learn the accent even if you can’t completely hear it yet. This probably helped me the most in understanding the various rules in sentences.

**Do I still study pitch accent?**

The basic answer is no. I can’t give you an exact date as it was a continuum, but around the second half of 2022 I stopped studying the accent specifically. The main reasons are that,

1. I already know the accent of most words in my vocabulary, so I only really need to look up the accent of new words.
2. If I hear those new words (e.g. in an anime, or talking to a friend) then I almost always catch the accent correctly and don’t need to look it up.
3. I have learned it to the point that even while reading something, I read it with the correct pitch in my head (as demonstrated by that last test).
4. If I say something wrong then hear the correct way, I generally notice and correct myself.

**How I feel about dialects**

My friends that are not from the east still use standard accent so… *shrugs.* That being said, when someone has an accent I immediately recognise the difference. It’s possible to tell someone has a dialect from what they say or their ‘rhythm,’ but I found that just by hearing a single word I can immediately tell from the accent they use on it.

I feel like if I continue hearing dialects long enough I’ll be able to tell where someone is from just from the pitch accent they use.

**Was it worth it?**

Definitely. I find it amusing how I didn’t even know how little I knew before actually learning pitch accent. It has reinforced my appreciation of the language.

Learning it was a little bit like learning kanji. At first, it made everything so slow and I had to break sentences apart and analyze them. But learning the main parts of pitch accent makes it so that I just naturally improve by listening, much like I now don’t really study kanji per se but occasionally learn new ones by just reading. Kanji improved my reading comprehension just like accent my listening comprehension. Of course, learning kanji takes way longer than accent but both involve a lot of frustration and struggle along the way.

Contrary to popular belief, learning the accent isn’t just memorising (and training your ear). Once you learn it to a certain point, you start to get a feel for the *flow* of sentences and it makes speaking and listening much easier and enjoyable. It gives you a sort of consistency in how you speak, and in how you recognise words. I love Japanese even more now. Not to mention the effects it has had on my listening in general, including music.

And yes, it does make learning the Chinese tones that much easier.