I just finished some lessons from Dogan which discuss how の can change the pitch accent of words when used in の phrases.
I typed some of the examples he gave into resources like
– [prosody](https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/phrasing/index)
– [easypronunciation.com](easypronunciation.com)
And both websites gave the wrong answers for various phrases (sometimes one was right and the other was wrong, and vice versa).
**Question:** Is there an authorative reference online which one can manually look up how (e.g.) の-phrases are properly pitched? Or is the only way to know purely to ask a native?
If there aren’t authorative references, are there any other tools out there besides the ones above which can help identify sentence or phrase level pitch? Or do people have a sense of which of these tools tends to be most accurate?
3 comments
AFAIK, no online site is yet trustworthy with phrase-level pitch accent. Your best bet is to consult the sources that Dogen cites (most of which are not available online). The 新明解日本語アクセント辞典 is probably the most comprehensive overall if you had to pick one, though the NHK日本語発音アクセント新辞典 is also very good, especially with compound words and counters.
Do note that the situation is complicated by the fact that speaker variation exists, and that there isn’t perfect agreement in academic sources as to what some of the rules are. (In fact, in his syntheses, Dogen sometimes relies on experience in talking to individual native speakers as well as on written sources.)
When I was first studying Japanese back in the day around the late 2000s/early 2010s , nobody talked about pitch accent. Getting back into it now it’s funny how everyone seems to place so much importance on it now. Call me old fashioned but the amount of non-natives who can consistently speak grammatically correct, natural Japanese – pitch accent aside – is in my experience close to zero, so I honestly think that there are much more important things to focus on. Like I think pitch accent is the least of our worries.
The Appendix in the NHK dictionary on iOS / Mac has extensive information, but not something you can just enter a phrase into.
Just asking people to post a recording on HiNative or HelloTalk should be the easiest and most accurate way to go about it, given their from an area that speaks the variety of Japanese you’re learning.
The YouTube channel Yudai Sensei is by far the best resoure on pitch accent I’ve seen. Far more comprehensive and useful than anything I’ve seen from Dogen. (And I feel that Dogen’s resources are absolutely wonderful and that they go way beyond the rest.)