As a very tone death person lol, pitch accent has never been a worry for me… It wasn’t even a thing when I started to study Japanese 
lol 
When I go to Japan, people understand me just fine… Considering that different areas of Japan have their own dialects…
I do see the value of it … its just that I don’t put it high in my priorities lol
Studying more vocab, kanji, reading and speaking as much as possible seem more important (to me)?
for me pitch is important and i just memorised the rules and do them in my head when reading (low pitch of particles after certain pitch of words etc)
People who don’t know pitch do sound quite off imo but if you are just consuming content it doesn’t matter I guess. (I dont even want to speak, but am still learning pitch to sound better lol)
This topic reminded me of something I had read earlier about pitch accent that I found very interesting, so I went back to the book to not misquote the author.
These quotes are by the Japanese linguist 窪薗晴夫 from the book ‘Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology’, it’s specifically regarding the Tokyo dialect.
“…while there are many pairs of segmentally homophonous words that are distinguished by word accent, there are also many pairs that cannot be distinguished by word accent. These words are homophonous in the strict sense of the term.”.
“Surprisingly, this type of absolute homophones outnumbers homophones that
can be distinguished by word accent: according to the statistical work by Sibata and Shibata (1990), only 14% of segmental homophones in Tokyo Japanese are distinguished by word accent, while the remaining 86% are completely homophonous. This suggests that the distinctive function is not the primary function of word accent in this dialect.”.
Very interesting quote and statistics.
I think I would disagree with this conclusion on the face of it.
From “there are way more strict homophones than words that can be distinguished by accent” it does not logically follow that “distinctive function is not the primary function of accent”. If anything, you could say that “accent is not the primary way to distinguish homophones (including non-strict)”.
It could turn out that the only (and primary) function of accent is to distinguish those 14% of words, and at the same time there are other ways (context) to distinguish the rest.
But of course the statistic supports the idea that correct accent is far from critical.
Overall the author does write about the subject in an objective manner. I took the last part as him, as a professional in linguistics, presenting a hypothesis. I don’t think he’s trying to give a definitive answer.
Personally I like to read about the linguistic aspect of Japanese, but I find the big general interest in specifically studying pitch accent to be a bit odd. Since the pitch patterns can vary so greatly depending of region of Japan.
If a Japanese learner lives in Japan they will interact with Japanese people and with time naturally adopt the pitch accent for the region they are residing in, no? And if they aren’t living in Japan, is there a need to specifically study a certain accent? Feels like putting the cart before the horse.
Just my personal opinion, with an admitted bias that my opinion is also influenced by me having observed many foreigners coming to Sweden and learning the Swedish pitch accent, not by specifically studying it, but just as a natural result of simply speaking with native Swedes.
Hate to double dip in here, but Dogen and Matt vs Japan really did create a problem that really didn’t need to be one just to sell courses. Virtually nobody talked about pitch accent in Japanese learning until they came on to the scene. This type of thing really does feed on perfectionists, and discourages interaction until a certain level of competency which is unclear by design.
Again, I’m not saying that it’s not important. The first time I ever heard it mentioned was in a language school I was in when I was studying in Japan. And even then it was a very small part of the course, and we were taught to be more mindful of it more than anything.
On a personal level, I can hear when someone gets pitch accent wrong and do correct them if I am tutoring them or am in a study environment. I didn’t study pitch accent, I just mimicked the way Japanese people sounded over the course of several years. Otherwise, I’m not gonna judge somebody over such a small thing.
The best advice I can give. Stop caring even a little bit about pitch accent and just put yourself out there and talk to Japanese people. Nobody cares about pitch accent nor will they be a grammar nut and correct you. Nihongo Con Teppei, Bite Sized Japanese (Layla) say pitch accent is never something you should worry about unless you are basically native level and have nothing left to study.
I’d hesitate to say pitch accent isn’t important at all, since I’ve had native speakers not understand what I’m saying because I didn’t know pitch accent existed until relatively recently. But even so, I think studying every individual word’s pitch accent is a recipe for a headache.
What I do is copy-paste sentences (usually from Bunpro, as it happens!) into OJAD and practice reciting those sentences. I don’t think pitch accent in Japanese is so important that it needs to become a time-sink at a low level, but I figure I’ll likely subconsciously develop the patterns I need if I just recite a lot of real sentences.
I absolutely agree with this. Indeed, when I studied Japanese in college in the aughts, I never heard a thing about pitch accent. Studying Japanese is difficult enough for a non-native without finding new ways to make the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s also one of those things where just knowing it exists is enough to listen for it, like resyllabification in Spanish or Korean.
I think this as well. If you pay attention and get good enough at shadowing and mimicking you’re likely copying the pitch fairly well anyway without going out of your way. I think the key is whether you’re enjoying going the extra mile. If so, that’s fantastic, keep it up! If it’s getting you down and you feel crap because it’s hard, it’s not worth the anxiety.
Like others have said; you will get better with time.
What I love to do is repeat what people say in anime and J-Drama/series. Just be a small kid, repeating what your parents are saying! This is the way I got some pitch-accent down. If anything, Japanese people say my pitch-accent is good. Without the 上手 part. So I give that as evidence that what I am doing works.
Yeah, people are trying to sell a product, for sure. At the end of the day, Japanese is a context based language, not a tonal one. So, you will get away with having a flat pitch accent. But I do have to say, like with my previous comment, it feels nice having a proper one, at least
Well, I don’t even know.
I just make cards anki cards with audio and pitch and trying to get it right every time 
Also if I read I lookup word’s pitch when I’m not sure.
Isn’t missing pitch like missing accent in other languages? For example saying “tomato” with accent on the first o instead of a?
Plugging in Mei-san from Campanas de Japanese for pitch accent guide by a male native speaker and Fumi-san from Speak Japanese Naturally for pitch accent guide by a female native speaker.
I haven’t gone deep in this yet because I’m still scrambling over basics in grammar and having basic conversations smoothly with Sensei. I have a perticularly hard time with flat pitch (heiban) because my native language pitch accent goes up, down and up again a lot.
Sometimes I also enjoy hearing Sensei having a slight hard time with several Tokyo pitch accent because he’s from Hiroshima 
Huh… Somehow it seems I am picking up pitch accent well . I never focused on practicing that, but I was aware that it existed right at the start of my Japanese journey, which I guess helps. I always try to listen closely to how vocab is pronounced (and listen to the playback audio often).
Maybe my first language is helping here (Portuguese)? We do have stress syllables and teachers will often teach this to children by telling them to imagine yelling to call someone (or something) from far away. Not sure if it can apply to Japanese.
Just wanna give this a +1. Words that would be homophones if it weren’t for pitch accent are brought up a lot in these kind of debates but there are a gigantic amount of true homophones in Japanese, mostly words made up of two kanji and are read using onyomi. These words can be disambiguated in speech by explaining what kanji are used although 99.9% of the time it is clear from context. Pitch accent isn’t used for the sake of disambiguation, at least not primarily.
Pitch accent helps show what role a word is playing in a sentence and to set word boundaries (compounded words will only have one accent rather than maintaining the original accented points of the words that have been compounded, etc). I could go on here about this point but won’t as it is not my area of expertise.
On the main topic that OP has brought up, I would like to suggest that it is important to differentiate between being able to hear pitch accent and being able to pronounce words with a good command of pitch accent.
In the case of hearing, it is probably useful to consider that there are levels. It isn’t black and white. It comes with time, as others have said. The hearing side is much easier to get a grasp of than the speaking side. When speaking there is generally too much going on to be monitoring the intonation of every word you say (and it likely is counter-productive to do so in most scenarios). You tend to have more control during listening practice. Just being aware of it is a good start as a beginner.
In the case of speaking, most learners probably are more hindered by other issues in their pronunciation. Wobbly pitch accent is a hallmark of foreign accents in Japanese however using stress accent whilst speaking Japanese is a far bigger issue for most learners (in terms of how foreign they sound). I tend to believe that most times people think they’ve been misunderstood due to pitch accent issues it is actually due to inserting stress into words were it doesn’t exist and, the partner issue that comes along with this, elongating vowel sounds when they shouldn’t. I have seen this happen in real life many times: “I said the correct word so why didn’t they understand me?”
Essentially, my advice on this topic is to consider what your goals actually are and consider what you actually enjoy studying and then let that guide you. People do have quite strong opinions on this particular topic though 
I think I’ve identified my problem - I can detect a change of pitch, but can’t seem to tell whether the pitch is going up or down.
This is why my heiban result is so bad - heiban rises slightly and I keep thinking it’s atamadaka because I detected the change of pitch.
I can tell on a piano whether the pitch is going up/down. But not when it’s in Japanese. Probably a problem of training/practicing.
This brings me back to music class in school. The teacher used to play a variety of scales and we’d have to figure out the patterns…I couldn’t manage it for the life of me 
So let that comfort you. Some people struggle to hear it even on an instrument, let alone in words!
I tried really hard to learn pitch accent in the beginning, but then I got frustrated and stopped studying it completely. When I returned to pitch accent study a few years later after I had gotten better at the language, I found it wayyy easier. (Not that you need to wait years before returning to pitch accent study—I just took a lot of breaks.) The most important thing is knowing that pitch accent exists. As you listen to more Japanese you’ll develop an ear for it. I used コツ and found it helpful for noticing the differences better, but listening to more Japanese is what really did it for me.
Also, make sure you have a yomitan dictionary with pitch accent installed. Being able to play the audio for a word at any moment and also see what pitch accent it is helps with connecting the two.