Does pitch accent matter in comprehension?

13 comments

1. This question is a can of worms some will say yes others will say no

   Both sides equally as passionate about their opinion

2. Unless your native language also has a pitch accent, you probably aren’t conscious of it – at least without training.

   It shouldn’t cause an issue, especially since pitch accents aren’t the same across Japan. No one drinks salmon and candy doesn’t precipitate, so context will clue you in.

3. In most instances, no. Meaning is implied from context.
   In some instances, yes. Context can be ambiguous.

4. If your goal is to be as native sounding as possible, yes it matters, but even if you don’t actively study it, you’ll pick it up over time. But I like how another commenter put it, each side will passionately state why their opinions are the right ones.

5. Define ‘matter’.

   Can it theoretically be used to aid in vocabulary differentiation? Yes.

   Does it serve a function that cannot be just as easily (if not more easily) handled by e.g. context? No.

   Is it mandatory? No.

   Does every native speaker even use it? No.

   A lot of people on this sub make a bit of a fuss over it, but from both personal experience and learning some of the actual linguistics behind it, pitch accent is honestly an entirely optional part of learning Japanese. Especially with just input.

   You *can* learn it just in case, but it’s very low ROI, so if you’re not bothered, you can more or less ignore it.

   So long as you’re just aware that pitch is a thing and (lexical) stress isn’t, you’re good.

6. Pitch accent is one aspect of speech that can be used to segment long streams of phonemes into discrete words, so yes, it can help improve listening comprehension.

7. I asked my tutor (a Japanese man living in Japan) and he said it doesn’t matter that much.

   Since you are talking about input, it does help supposedly, but on the other hand, some people can input a lot of Japanese and don’t have pitch accent-related skills, so it doesn’t seem to be required either.

   Of course on Reddit you will get every possible answer.

   And you know what? It can matter. If you want to do a communications-related thing in Japan for instance, you really need to work on your accent.

   On the other hand if you just want to, say, read books in Japanese, why would your accent being thick matter?

   It’s all about your goals and standards.

8. I became aware of pitch accent for words and phrases a few months after studying Japanese, and that helped my listening comprehension.

   That said, I spent very little time studying pitch accent. Practicing pronunciation is helpful but should not be the centre of a study program. Japanese has too many big, important areas to study.

9. Japanese is understandable without knowing pitch accent.

   Japanese is understandable without being able to hear the difference between single and double vowels

   Japanese is understandable without knowing much grammar, simply knowing words and inferring their meaning from context.

   I knew a Dutch person whose English in writing was no worse than mine, who actually thought that the English words “man’ and “men” were homonyms, and only spelled differently, he could not hear the difference between the two vowels. He also could not hear the difference between a /d/ and a /t/ at the end of words, and this did not impede his ability to understand spoken English at all actually.

   One can understand languages while missing a surprisingly great deal.

10. if you want to speak just like native speakers of Japanese, it does matter a lot. However, people whose mother tongue isn’t a tonal language, for them, it’s almost impossible to master the Japanese pitch accents.

    We, Japanese, understand what you mean if you pronounce a certain word with wrong pitch accents, like あめ, はし, むし、かんじ. Contexts matter.

11. I make a note of when I don’t understand something, and when possible I ask the person speaking to tell me what they meant. Its almost always missing vocabulary actually.
    I think think of ONE time, only, when the pitch tripped me up for understanding, when we were in a typhoon (台風）, eating chicken（タイ風）and yup, I thought there was something like typhoon chicken but it was Thai chicken. But the context lead me astray, I knew it was a typhoon and had no idea it was Thai chicken.

    So, I can tell you it is very rare but it can mess you up.

    My Japanese tutor had a really interesting perspective on accent. He told me last week, that as an english speaker, sometimes i’ll have the start of the word to high pitch, and we work on that a bit. But he said, “Even foreigners who speak really amazing Japanese, like Dave Spector on TV, he does the same thing. So, but if you can be conscious of doing this less, it will help almost all the time, much easier than trying to do every last pitch variation.

12. The answer is obviously yes. Why would native speakers use pitch if it didn’t matter for comprehension?… it does.

    The answer is and always will be yes. This has nothing to do with emotion or passion etc. I think if more people actually got really good at Japanese we’d be able to have a better debate on it. Spoilers: there wouldn’t be a debate lol

    Whether or not that matters to people is a separate conversation that seems to cause confusion amongst the community.

    Does it matter to YOU at your current level? Despite being fluent in Japanese do you think it’s necessary? Maybe not. Maybe yes.

    Do you need it to get to a decent level of fluency or to learn Japanese ? No. Nope. Nien

    That’s what depends on the person. It’s all perspective when it comes to this point but factually speaking, yes lol.

13. Purely input? Not catching any pitch accent would just mean you have to lean more on understanding context of words together, since there’s only so many different syllables and combination of syllables, “no spacing” etc

    I can’t say I’m in the same boat, but that’s the logical answer to your question