I realised that Japanese tends to be pronounced slightly differently depending on gender. does it matter which pronunciation I learn when trying to improve my own? like are there words that must be pronounced in a certain way if you are a certain gender (does pitch accent change depending on gender)?
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As far as I know, and I’m not a pitch accent expert so take what I say with a grain of salt, pitch accent is not gender specific. What can be, however, are some of the words and ending particles used.
For example, some Japanese girls say あたし instead of わたし to sound cute. Another example is ending sentences with だろう sounds more rough, though it is used by both sexes, while かしら, which means the same (“I wonder”), sounds softer and thus used more often by women, etc.
HTH!
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From the Human Japanese extra credit chapter on male/female speech differences:
Aside from the use of mostly-male pronouns like 僕 and 俺, there aren’t many things that make a sentence sound unmistakably masculine. Men simply tend to be less polite, a little rougher-around-the-edges, than women in informal situations. In contrast, there are a few speech habits that make a sentence feel distinctly feminine. Those are: 1) use of feminine sentence-ending words like わ and かしら; 2) dropping だ directly before よ or ね; and to a lesser extent 3) using lots of sentence-final no, which men do too but not nearly as frequently as women.
The biggest one to watch out for is definitely the bolded number 2, dropping だ before よ and ね
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If you’re referring to the speakers here on Bunpro, I wonder if it’s just…the way the speakers speak? I feel like one of the female speakers in particular has this vaguely staccato way of speaking that sometimes makes it a bit trickier to understand (like, she sorta “swallows” the vowels between consonents). But, this maybe is just a speach pattern, and is just a personal thing (not a gender thing).
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