I’ve been doing kotu and migaku pitch trainer every day for a long time now, and I don’t seem to be getting better.
I can’t seem to be able to the difference between a rise in pitch or a fall. Only with spoken Japanese, I can distinguish them clearly with music notes.
I feel like I could keep at daily kotu and migaku for weeks or months without improving and that there has to be *something else* I can do.
At the moment, I can’t distinguish the patterns when hearing no matter how many times I listen to the audio. I get around 20/30 when training with migaku and 70/100 with kotu. Both these scores seem to be stabilised and not getting higher despite daily practice.
5 comments
Keep doing it until you have it
“I can’t distinguish the patterns when hearing no matter how many times I listen to the audio.” This seems to be at odds with your score? You’re able to reliably distinguish pitch accents for more than 2/3s of the examples you listen too. Do you want 100%?
In my opinion, you don’t need to fill up this progress bar as a means of telling your level. In pragmatic terms you’re already there, because realistically pitch accents will deviate from standard Tokyo dialect region to region. If this difference exists then having 70% recognition of standard pitch accent is feels like it would be good enough (IMO).
Further more, have you heard how people actually speak? Emotional inflection will often take precedence over the correct pitch. When people get excited or when they want to express a specific emotion that pitch goes out the window. A good example is 惜しい（お↓し↑い↓）but given the context of when this is often used, most (at least it appears this way to me) want to pitch it upwards into oblivion because it sounds so much better that way. Following the pitch accent makes it feel like they aren’t invested in what’s happening.
Check my pronunciation/pitch accent guide that I made for The Moe Way: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ReBf08JFK4n0PXdOxThAfWuiK9UWVZEWWzeKSECWTQo/edit
Pitch Accent becomes much easier to “hear” when you start memorizing the accent of words.
Kotu.io i let’s you compare all of the audio files if you get it wrong. Try this out and notice the difference in pronunciation.
For example
学生
The correct accent is [0] (flat).
Hear it pronounced as [1] (drop on “ga”), [2] (drop on “ku”), and [3] (drop on “se”) and you should be able to tell the difference quite clearly. Then just learn the correct version.
Unpopular opinion: For most adults who grew up with a nontonal language, it is impossible. My background is from learning the Thai language where tones are considered important and are drilled from day one. Most people still can’t get them, except the rising tone which is used for questions in European languages. Yet, it’s amazing how communication still works. The only word pair that can’t usually be distinguished from context is near/far, and you get past that one by rephrasing using short/long distance or something like that.
Think about it: How many adult immigrants to your own country does not have a noticeable accent? Not too many, right? But communication still works most of the time.
i mean, thats a pretty good score. what is this skill of recognizing pitch accent 100% of the time even good for
If you’re at 20/30 now, how was your score when you started out?