To all the pitch accent enthusiasts out there, what handful of rules/patterns would you equip someone with if they were not interested in studying pitch accent in detail but were willing to learn just a bit to improve their accent *on average.* Obviously there are many instances where you simply need to know the pitch accent for whichever word, but I imagine there are some patterns with more far-reaching applications than others. I’d be curious to hear your recommendations!
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The accent doesn’t “like” to fall on devoiced morae, moraic N, small tsu, the second part of a long vowel and the i in “ai”. This significantly cuts down the number of permissible pitches. こうせい goes from 5 accents to just 3 permissible accents.
Verbs and i-adjectives are either heiban or kifuku. If they’re kifuku, it means the accent is on the penultimate mora in the dictionary form (except if that’s impossible because of the above constraint, e.g. in 入る).
2 kanji 2 mora kango are often atamadaka, 2 kanji 4 mora kango are often heiban. Many recent gairaigo are accented on the third-to-last mora.
when you attach the suffix 的 to a word, it becomes heiban (個人 こꜜじん -> 個人的 こじんてき)
in verbs ending in つ, the accent falls on the penultimate mora (たꜜつ, さだꜜつ)
In my opinion if people don’t want to learn pitch specifically, the best is to check your pitch recognition ability and practice to improve it. It doesn’t take so much time and if you can easily hear and recognize how words are supposed to sound, then it becomes natural to replicate. Just think about it, we don’t say something like “accent” with “c” as in “code”, like “akkent”, or we don’t say things like “accENT” with the emphasis on the ending. And it’s not like we focused very much on it’s learning. It’s simply our vocal training, recognition and replication. Sometimes people do mistakes, but like 99% or even more could be done automatically.
The problem is only when you can’t recognize such differences. It’s a foreign language for us, so it’s vocal part can differ significantly, and if we aren’t trained to pay attention to it, we simply do not even recognize there is such thing and that it’s important.
I think the best way to learn a pinch accent is singing music. That is why musicians are so good at learning it.