Hi. I want to learn pitch accent at some point in the near future. However, I don’t really know how to approach it. With grammar and vocabulary I have flashcard systems which I’ve optimized to have a good, sustainable everyday study volume. I also have resources for these two which I find suitably in-depth for my needs. So basically grammar and vocab are sorted. But with pitch accent, I get the following problems:
– I can’t seem to find any free (cos I’m stingy), English, official/academic resources that I can study pitch accent from. I don’t mean just datasets with pitch accent info, I mean explanatory texts with rules and stuff. Does anyone know any such resources? As a last resort I could go with Dogens stuff but 1) it’s not free and 2) it’s his personal content. I’d prefer some official text.
– I don’t really know how I would fit pitch accent into my routine. Would it be enough to just memorize pitch accent patterns along with vocabulary after just a couple of hours memorizing rules, or would I have to study significantly more to memorize rules and stuff like a full grammar. Alternatively, would it be better to give vocab and grammar a rest for a couple of weeks/months to focus on learning pitch accent grammar and then to continue as before but also learning accent patterns. All of this depends on how much content there is to pitch accent, which I’m not aware of (because of the previous point). What are your thoughts?
Also slightly unrelated note: does anyone know some similar Japanese phonology resources?
3 comments
I know this isn’t going to be a popular opinion, but the vast majority of learners that get to near native levels (a very small amount) do not study pitch accents ‘officially’ with learning materials but are acclimatised through immersion etc. this is naturally why these materials don’t really exist (I’ve checked as well) because the people that benefit from it are so few-and-far between
If you’re at a high speaking level already I would suggest having conversations with native speakers and asking for feedback on what words sound unnatural. Any native speaker can do this for you and it’ll cost you nothing
Best of luck
You could use the sources that Dogen cites. Not sure if all the of them are free but you can probably find some of them on sci-hub
[https://www.patreon.com/posts/17345632](https://www.patreon.com/posts/17345632)
But I would have to agree with what ImoTaikaku said, they’re probably not going to be useful to anyone interested in learning pitch accent, more so those who are studying linguistics.
Here’s a video on pitch accent acquisition which might be more worth your time.
https://youtu.be/I-dRbTnLmBY
Kanshudo. Kanshudo does. And it’s really good, too. Every word has the pitch accent marked out, and they have a page just called “The Kanshudo definitive guide to Japanese pitch accents”: [https://www.kanshudo.com/howto/pitch](https://www.kanshudo.com/howto/pitch)
Good luck!
(Sometimes there is A LOT of importance to get the pitch accent right. Sometimes, less so. But if you don’t have the kanji, only the letters “s a k e”, well, there’s at least three different things it could be and it would probably be possible to mistake it out of context.
The article deals with that, too.)