When trying to find the pitch of a word, is it true to say that finding the pitch in a Japanese word is finding which mora in the word has a sharp and punchy emphasis?
Like in these pair of words:
火事 かじ emphasis on じ
家事 かじ emphasis on か
橋 はし emphasis on は
箸 はし emphasis on し
Did I get it correct?
This is the hardest part for me to understand because my native language is English. Although I have also studied music a bit and studied Spanish in school as a kid, I have a disability that makes recognizing intonations more challenging requires me to work extra hard to start getting it.
3 comments
Usually it’s more or less just memorizing how the word is spoken. Usually you memorize this through frequented use of said word, and then once you say it after a few times, you naturally say the word in its correct tone. More often than not, you would notice that the word said sounds a bit wrong in a sentence when it is used in its incorrect pitch order. One thing I could tell you for certain though, is that after a high pitch is used once, the word is continued through a low pitch forever.
For example: あ↑り↓がとう (a-RI-gatou) notice how it only goes up once and never again
*However*, this varies from accent to accent. The example above is given through Tokyo dialect.
Nagoya: ari-GA-tou
Osaka: ariga-TO-u
It will be hard at first, but once you familiarize yourself with the language, I’m sure you’ll be just fine. The majority (a little over half) of Japanese is spoken through what we call 平板, where the tone goes high after the first kana. Good luck!
I would not worry too much about it, but yes, it’s a lot like accent in English. Like how it’s “AWEsome”, not “aweSOME”. In English. But people generally don’t focus on learning that specifically. It’s just that there are more homophones in Japanese (but often with different stresses) that kind of makes it more important to know, but even if you put the stress on the wrong syllable/mora, people will generally understand you. It’s not like Chinese tones.
By the way, this dictionary lists the pitch accents for each word:
https://jpdb.io/
火事 and 家事 is pitched the same way at least in Kanto dialect aka the Standard Japanese. Meanwhile the way 箸 and 橋 is differentiated flips in between Kanto and Kansai dialects, so we can confuse each other depending on the combination of dialects.
Being Japanese, this is just a memorizing game. Sometimes I get corrected for new word that I’ve only seen as text, because the pitch isn’t implied in text. (Maybe sometimes?)
I’m not trying to discourage you from learning this, but I’d say that, while being spoken to in perfect pitch scent does improve the chance for me to pick it up, it’s never the biggest issue. That is to say that there are many things which learners can improve on pronunciation that is actually consistent, such as double vowel and whatnot. And I think you’ll rather naturally pick up on pitch when you immerse yourself in the situations where you need to speak in the language.