I recently learned about the existence of pitch in Japanese. The point is, I have no idea what to do with this information and how to apply it to my studies. I hope to reach a decent accent one day, but I don’t know how to approach this subject. Do you have any suggestions?
I’m certainly not an expert on pitch accent, but I do have a few suggestions.
- At a minimum you need to pay attention to pitch accent. Listen for how natives say words when you hear them, whether that’s in person, on TV show, etc.
- When in doubt, look up the pitch accent of a word. I hear Apple computers have a dictionary with pitch accent built in, but if you don’t have access to that you can use http://weblio.jp.
- Check out Dogen’s YouTube channel. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s an American who’s been living in Japan for a while now and is well regarded as having a near-native accent. He also has a Patreon, and if you support him there you get access to dozens of lessons he makes about accent, pitch, and pronunciation in general. As I haven’t been focusing on speaking much, I haven’t bothered paying to watch the lessons (yet), but from what I have seen from him I’m sure they’re great.
(Also, his YouTube comedy sketches are hilarious.) - Lastly, if you really want to get a good accent, I think you need to work on speaking with a native who is willing to actually correct your accent/pitch mistakes. To that end, you might want to consider getting a personal tutor who is willing and able to do that.
Going to second @seanblue’s Dogen recommendation. I’m currently going through his phonics program and he goes into great detail over rules, but more importantly (in my opinion) the first few videos break down what pitch accent is and how to listen for it and improve it. I think the first few are actually free. I’ll link some of his recommended resources at the end of my comment.
I’ll also recommend Pimsleur audiobooks. I used them when I first started learning Japanese, and while they are far from a perfect resource, I credit my pronunciation ability to them. There are other, much cheaper, methods out there, so really you just need to find one that works for you.
I’d say you’ve already taken the most important step in realizing that it exists. From here you’ll be aware of it, and can start to listen for it and improve it.
Japanese intonation is quite an interesting topic - and a challenging one. For me, intonation lessons were the most tiring of all because of purely a technical problem: you either need to have a good sense for music and imitate subconsciously or you need to gave a good sense for music again and a control over your voice.
It is like singing a song in a way.
There are a few rules but the actual sound alters depending on the surroundings, so it becomes not so straightforward.
What I did to train in this area:
- (Ok, that’s the best alright) speak or read and ask a native to control you. In my school we had such lessons every two weeks, it does wonders
- Take some native text+audio material, with narration pace preferably slower than your normal listening comprehension. Take the text, listen and mark the intonation flow - just to start paying attention. Read that aloud and record. Compare. Repeat.
- There are also a few textbooks on that, if it suits you. I knew I found the right thing when while flipping the pages located the difference in pronunciation between the 二羽鳥 and 鶏. Something like 橋、端 and 箸 is may be a well-known example of this type.
To be honest, Japanese is complicated as it is already but nothing else made me go mad but the intonation training.
Do you have any suggestions on that?
You can use this site to see/hear the pitch accent for words/sentences you give it:
Type something in the field, hit “Analyze” to see the pitch accent, then “Generate” underneath that to hear it out loud. My 4th-year teacher has a PhD in Japanese, and is/was researching pitch accent, so I’d say if this site’s accurate enough for him, it’s good enough for us, too
For audio+text material it can be whatever, since the intonation is always there. I used the Japanese Graded Readers from Ask (since they are with audio tracks) and also 日本の文化を読む. Both - beginner levels.
For the textbooks my personal preference is コミュニケーションための日本語発音レッスン
Basically it is a book on anything about prononciation - starting from sounds and ending with gender-depending intonation variability.
Ow, this one was recommended by our teacher too. She pointed out some flaws in it and recommended to use that for single words more than phrases or sentences, since the result for those is sometimes not correct. She acknowledged as well that it is quite difficult to come to a level where one would notice that though
This completely changed my study focus! Dogen is awesome!
If you prefer a structured course that deals with pitch and intonation edX offers a free Japanese pronunciation course from WASEDA University. https://www.edx.org/course/japanese-pronunciation-for-communication-2