Not currently but I will think about it.
Thanks for the links.
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In the time that you have been arguing in this thread, I just re-watched the native Japanese person’s introduction to word-level pitch accent patterns (both parts). He gives SO many examples of ways pitch affects which word you are saying. You will probably focus on the parts where he says “don’t worry, they would still be able to guess what you meant.” But also do note that he did not make the argument, which I made, that there will be cases where you use a different word unknowingly and come up with a valid sentence and a reasonable context, which can make you just straight up be misunderstood. This is made pretty clear by the fact that there are just sooo many examples where the pitch entirely changes which word you are saying.
And as a reminder, even if you don’t care about production at all (at least for now), those videos pretty clearly corroborate my idea that pitch is greatly beneficial in aiding comprehension of what was said.
So yeah, in the time you spend arguing this, you could just spare the 20 mins (if you play faster than 1x speed) and see for yourself.
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Pitch accent is just kind of accent. When speaking about not tonal language I mean stress.
I am pretty confident wrong stress would not make you much difference, and stress is as important in European languages as pitch in Japanese.
What is important is pronunciation. stress/pitch is not. In chinese pitch is part of pronunciation since it make it impossible to understand anything without it. And that’s why it is very very strong pitch by comparison to Japanese.
People with different pitch in Japanese have no problem speaking to each others. It is not the case in Chinese.
I watched it. It is nothing new to me. I follow that channel for long time.
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Which European languages? In French there is no stress (except for the stress due to the current pandemia…). This is one common reason why we french people have difficulties to pronounce English correctly (be it BBC English, Texas English or else) and be understood.
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I took some french class and they were teaching us your language accent. At least trying to teach in my case…
Totally different case… that’s about emphasis/intonation. And that doesn’t affect what word is being communicated.
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It does to the same degree as Japanese. Stress is there to make it clear what sentence structure is in speech. If I remember correctly a lot of fancy conjugation in written french are spoken the same. Stress give a hint to what constitute thematic group and so on.
You’re just wrong on this. Pitch is not just emphasis in Japanese. If you properly take note of the examples in the two videos you claimed to watch, you’ll see this.
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…
I would be wrong if I would claim that.
OK, then why are you comparing French stress for emphasis with Japanese pitch accent, which is not for emphasis?
EDIT: Used the wrong word: “stress.” Still, the question stands: the article is talking about ways to change the emphasis. In Japanese, pitch accent has nothing to do with emphasis.
I am pointing out that both language share a very common feature of having an accent. And in both cases there is some theoretically crucial function to it. And in both cases it happen to be not important in practice since in both cases accent is not regular and it does not create any problems at all.
It is analogy.
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I think I’ve already thoroughly addressed your point, so I won’t bother repeating myself. But I didn’t realize you were sending the link to MZa rather than in general. Sorry about that.
Quoting from your link ‘In French, each syllable of a word and each word is pronounced with the same emphasis, except for the final syllable of each rhythmic group.’ So there is no stress in French… You can put emphasis on a syllabe to insist on it but it is a possibility (to express anger, surprise, importance,…) but it is by no means a feature of the language in itself like stress in English.
Accent is not stress or pitch only. In you link, for instance acute accent is not about the emphasis (stress) but about the sound itself (the mouth is less open, but it is not necessary to speak louder so it is not stress).
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Tonal languages: changes in tone may change the meaning of the words. Some researchers coined the term toneme or tonal phoneme for that reason. (phoneme = smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language)
Accent (in a narrow sense): changes in tones do not change the meaning of the words but it may give off where you are from.
By definition, Japanese is partially a tonal language just not as extensive as Chinese or Vietnamese.
Personally my approach would be:
- Gain some meta-knowledge about pitch accent
- Put recording side by side until you are able to hear and distinguish the differences confidently. The key to distinguish おばさん and おばあさん is actually in the tone of the san for example. There are countless examples like that where the meaning changes based on pitch accent change.
- Try to produce the differences yourself, make a recording if you need.
- Be mindful of pitch accent when you watch native content. This is actually harder than it sounds because now you don’t have a textbook telling you the pattern beforehand.
- Shadowing is probably the best method for speaking when you get a good grasp of the basics.
And if you speak Chinese or Vietnamese, you can skip step 2 and 3 completely. It’s extremely easy for them to hear and produce the differences, but they still have to learn the patterns and its usecase scenarios. Vice versa, Japanese can distinguish 90% of Mandarin tones without no training whatsoever in a research.
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Even before pitch I’d say I’ve come across a surprising number of people who make youtube videos etc and have apparently been learning for a long time, maybe even live in japan, who have seemingly put no work at all into their accent. People who still pronounce る as if it were a full blown R sound from english or have no discernable difference between す and つ and whose sound lengths are too long (すみ sounds like sue me).
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Has anyone followed the paid version of Dogen’s Pitch accent course, and is it worth it?
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Sorry for being so laconic yesterday but I got sleeping problem recently so I did not feel like trying to force myself to make something long and precise.
I will try to wrap up my thoughts during a day and give you more interesting answer. For now you can have a look at this:
What is interesting for this subject from this video is his advice what to do if you can’t say っ ( not つ) properly. Just add pause to make sure nobody will take 待って as 待て, and it will be enough. And っ is very very important to Japanese phonology. Without it you cut number of possible sounds in half and there is already not that many of them.
I’m curious about this as well — he is super funny, but is the $1 / month level enough to get what we need for pitch accents?
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