Misunderstandings Caused by Pitch Accent

10 comments

1. There could be many reasons but I think most people don’t live in Japan so if they speak Japanese it’s usually to someone who lives overseas and is used to hearing nonsensical Japanese.

   Also, I know a lot of people realize how bad their Japanese is but some people think they are fluent and speak perfectly even though they making a mistake pronouncing literally every single work. If a Japanese person doesn’t understand a learners Japanese they don’t want to hurt them to they will just nod their head and go うんうん！日本上手ですね！

2. It’s like putting the emphásis on the wrong sylláble.

   It’s perfectly understandable, but sounds a bit off.

3. When you realize the go-to example for pitch accent, 箸 vs 橋, is inverted in Kansai-ben compared to Tokyo-ben, it makes a lot more sense.

4. Hard to accurately judge “never being misunderstood” when, you know, the speaker isn’t the one who’s be committing the misunderstanding.
   It doesn’t help that a garbled word (instead of misunderstanding as in, being understood as some other word) here and there doesn’t *critically* break down the overall comprehension, and may end up as “perfectly understood”.

   Pitch accent is a more an icing on the cake; it’s certainly doable without, but having a good understanding on the matter will help immensely with a genuine 日本語上手.

5. The answer is easy and simple: context resolves the vast majority of ambiguity caused by bad pitch accent.

6. >Is it a level thing? Maybe if you’re a beginner or an intermediate, people are already trying so hard to parse your Japanese that pitch accent isn’t really an issue.

   I think it’s partly because Japanese people don’t tend to be very in-your-face with their corrections. Imagine a situation like this:

   **Learner:** *pronounces word wrong.*

   **Japanese person:** *is confused for a moment but then figures it out and says* あ、[word with the correct pronunciation], ね？

   Situations like these are pretty common, but a learner who is not aware of pitch accent might not even realize they were corrected or that their pronunciation had caused confusion.

7. We can usually decipher pitch accent mistakes when the word is part of a sentence but the nature of Japanese being a language that intentionally omits a lot of explicit context will cause misunderstandings with some frequency if you are talking to everyday non-English speaking Japanese people on a regular basis. Ones just of the top of my head:

   Pretty much always have to double check if people are talking about 柿 or 牡蠣 as they are both foods.

   Had a conversation recently where there was one non-native speaker and he was trying to say 乱暴 but for a full 5 minutes we thought he was talking about the movie ランボー Rambo.

   People often say that there is no ‘correct’ pitch accent because of dialects and that’s true but I’d say for the average Japanese person who is not used to hearing foreign people speak Japanese the problem isn’t that the pitch accent is different from their own but more so that it is inconsistent because English speakers tend to use pitch accent in an attempt to emphasize or emote and that just doesn’t work in Japanese.

   Pitch accent is what it is… people get very heated about it but it’s just a matter of how ‘native’ one wants to sound. The reason they subtitle foreign people in katakana on TV is because that it kind of what it sounds like when pitch accent is inconsistent. Like when we play Pokémon as adults and everything is in hiragana and it’s not hard to read it’s just missing all the indicators that we rely on to gather information quickly. Once you’ve been relying on pitch accent to cover the regular difficulties of talking to people your whole life it can be more jolting than you’d imagine to suddenly not have it.

8. I don’t think people are saying they’re never misunderstood because of accent/mispronouncations, but when those instances do occur, it’s *way* more likely that they’re a result of imprecise vowel pronunciation, vowel length issues, ッ being added or subtracted unnecessarily, etc.

   Basically in the world of accent/pronunciation there are bigger fish to fry than pitch accent and cases where grammar, word choice, and all other aspects of pronunciation were perfect, and purely a mistake in pitch accent resulted in a misunderstanding, are pretty rare. Context can get you quite far. Though as one native speaker pointed out below, there are still some rare cases where it can cause confusion, it’s relatively rare.

9. Oh, it’s happened. Extremely rarely. And only after I moved to Tokyo (and only with people who’ve spent most of their life in the same area).

   Part of the big misunderstanding on this sub regarding pitch accent is that learners talk about ‘the pitch accent for X vocab’, forgetting that this is only ever one variant of pitch accent for a word, in a country which has an *obscene* number of variations of pitch accent.

   This includes the so called ‘non-accent’ ([無アクセント](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%84%A1%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88)), which can be seen throughout the country from Aomori to Tochigi (i.e. right by Tokyo) to Kumamoto, where lexical pitch accent differentiation outright *isn’t a thing*.

   Let me reiterate that; not differentiating words based on lexical pitch accent is a feature prevalent in *several* *native dialects* spread *throughout* Japan. If being able to do this is a requirement for being able to speak ‘native’ Japanese (something I’ve seen several times on this sub), that would require redefining several native dialects as being ‘non-native Japanese’.

   So to get back to the topic at hand; though lexical pitch accent does exist, and can be noticed in extreme cases (e.g. someone from Tokyo absolutely will notice the pitch accent for someone from Osaka), differences in this feature throughout the country, right down to its absence in certain dialects, means that Japanese people very rarely rely explicitly on it, and it is very unlikely to ever cause any massive issues.

   That said, it’s still important to have a basic understanding of pitch, and to avoid using stress as your accent (it’s stress accent, not lack of pitch accent, that gives you away as a foreigner). But at the end of the day, it’s much more useful to understand prosody than to pay attention to lexical pitch.

10. It looks like your mind is made up, but pitch is not important. This is coming from a native speaker. I think also you might be, as well as many other people mistaking normal pronunciation for pitch accent. Pitch accent is where a syllable is emphasized or deemphasized in higher or lower musical pitch. For example “HA”shi vs ha”SHI”. They both sound pretty similar overall, but the stress is accentuated on different parts of the word. But the thing is, when you speak normally or quickly, pitch accent is often times minimized, and so it becomes “Ha”shi vs ha”Shi”, and so the differences become even smaller. Like, even many native speakers I feel don’t always say the correct pitch because of how fast they’re saying these words — all of it becomes “hashi”, with no real discernible emphasis on either part. And so, the pronunciation of the word or your accent is probably the most important. If you say “He”shi instead of “Ha”shi, you might get more confusion. But in general, you’ll also almost always have context. With the context, you can understand non-native speakers, without the correct pitch, and even without the correct pronunciation. Really rarely do you not have any context on the word where you cannot decipher which one you’re talking about, and so basically there’s a billion more useful things to learn first in Japanese before pitch accent. It’s not like Chinese where pitch can create 5 different types of words, in Japanese it’s usually 2 at most, that can be very easily distinguishable with context again. And anybody telling you otherwise is just trying to sell their “secret content” or language learning course to you. The human brain is actually quite amazing at how much it can comprehend.