Strategies for Acquiring Pitch Accent in Japanese

[@JustTeaThankYouVeryMuch]

It is so weird being able to hear the differences between two exampels but not being able to point out which is the correct one

[@ManOfPlace]

Brother we desire more of this fabulous content

[@DFlaminberry]

I hope he's ok

[@ody1212]

@@DFlaminberry He's fine, haha. Just busy with work and life.

[@usodayo3935]

Thanks for the video. I’m an example of someone who has learnt Japanese for a long time who needs to go back and work on pitch accent. In defense of people like me, when I started learning Japanese there wasn’t so much native spoken material available as there is now. I think the reason pitch accent is popular now is precisely because of the ubiquity of spoken Japanese media. Regarding why accent, including pitch accent, is important, I think it helps build a mental representation of an object or action. The more clearly I can hold the word いぬ, for example, in my mind the easier I find I can work with that object mentality. If the accent is ambiguous then the object itself also becomes a little unclear. So I want to learn pitch accent to improve my clarity of thought when I speak Japanese, rather than to be able to sound Japanese (though that’s also pretty cool).

[@eli_toiv]

Thanks for this guide!

[@Wazhai]

Great video, thanks so much for making it! I'm glad to hear that I've reached similar conclusions on how to go about acquiring pitch accent. I'm still only at a low intermediate level, but I've seen good results from doing pitch recognition practice on Kotu along with over 200 hours of Teppei's intermediate podcast as my main source of listening practice so far. My approach is to try to keep an ear out for pitch while listening and when looking up words in a dictionary, but not overdo it, and instead let my brain process and acquire it naturally, without digging into any rules at this stage or forcing myself to remember each one perfectly.

[@djahandarie]

You’re welcome! I do consider it to be necessary to get some corrections at some point though, otherwise you will never notice any of your mistakes and build up more and more over time when you otherwise would have been able to squash them early on.

[@Wazhai]

@@djahandarie Living outside of Japan and with my main goal being to understand Japanese media, I'm almost completely ignoring output right now, only outputting in one-off situations here and there when needed. So I'm currently aiming to get better at Japanese comprehension and reading first, because I can only invest so much time into this hobby at the moment. Then whenever I start outputting seriously, I will definitely follow your suggestion to do live sessions of text reading correction ;)

[@Sashin9000]

@@djahandarie What do you think of having a silent period or "input only" period at the beginning of language learning? Or going through a period of this? Would that neatly prevent you from building up mistakes and having them ingrained into your memory? Or does the voice in your head also make mistakes that can build up over time (as in when you are reading etc)

[@ganqqwerty]

fellow Teppei fan! Do you continue?

[@Wazhai]

@@ganqqwerty Yeah, I still listen to Teppei now and then. But I can understand him nearly 100% now so I've mostly moved on to native content I'm interested in.

[@rokucon4218]

brilliant video, very succinct and informative... especially for your first, on this channel anyway.

[@Sashin9000]

Oh no, you haven't gotten around to putting out that video on problems people run into with kotu. I'm currently struggling with kotu and migaku pitch trainer. I've been doing the exercises every day but seem to not be improving.

[@DougalBayer]

Great suggestions, thank you so much. 7:45: Although timing is mora 拍 based, it is my understanding that accent nuclei are syllable-based. Pitch drop can only occur after the nuclear vowel, and cannot occur after a heavy 2拍 syllable coda (ー、ン) . So a two syllable word like こうじょう can only be accented 🟢コー.ジョ＼ー .はor 🟢コ＼ー.ジョー .は ❌コー＼.ジョー .はor ❌コー.ジョー ＼.は Likewise, 🟢ゲ＼ン.イン.は 🟢ゲン.イ＼ン.は ❌ゲン＼.イン.は ❌ゲン.イン＼.は

[@Mango_9934]

make more vids please

[@myeyesrgreen]

Please make more videos man

[@vicmantiri6782]

Any recommendations for places to get corrections on my pitch other than iTalki? Great video btw, you've earned a sub.

[@matty6878]

the site you mentioned is like the best kept secret. im doing matt vs japan's project uproot and the anki cards he provides can only do so much to build my confidence in pitch. the site shows the correct and incorrect answers so after about 20mins. i was already seeing my own errors in my own speech. good stuff, thanks!

[@djahandarie]

Glad to hear it helps! Though note that the perception tests won’t teach you the pitch of words: both options are real words, they are just often different words, and it doesn’t tell you which one is which (i.e., it doesn’t show you the kanji). So you can only use it for improving your ear. (There are also recall tests on the site which you could use for testing your recall though.)

[@pathologicpicnic]

Can you tell me more about project uproot? What do you actually receive if you buy it and how much is it?

[@artum1s_550]

Please make more videos on higher level pitch accent stuff I beg lol

[@flutterin4595]

Why genki textbooks don't show the pitch?

[@kleine8218]

Very cool video and all man appreciate it big time but when am I getting the continuation of that sweat steak asmr??

[@Vincent89297]

Thoughts on using colour to differentiate patterns? I use Migaku which gives words a colour according to their pitch accent pattern. I've personally found it pretty helpful for remembering it.

[@djahandarie]

I'm a bit conflicted on it. I can definitely see how it would be helpful in the short-term to quickly build a connection. But long-term it seems like it'd be a bit of a crutch that could cause degradation in ability to make connections when there are no colors available. Out of everyone I've seen who got to a high level, none of them relied on colors (just anecdata of course). I think it's probably better to use the techniques I mention in this video (especially corrected reading) to ensure pitch is just a critical part of every word you know that isn't really possible to forget without forgetting the entire word.

[@adriangrana1239]

@@djahandarie I am by no means good at pitch (yet) as I am still mainly focusing on vocab and understanding Japanese, but I also have pitch accent colourings in my Anki deck and I can remember almost all the pitch patterns of the words in my deck without any issue WITHOUT pitch being a grading criterion on wheter I pass or fail the card, it's just so damn efficient and easy because our brain is so good at encoding imagery and colours. The only downside is that for なかだか I will only remember it being なかだか and not what mora it actually falls at, but still better than nothing. Let me give you a few exemaples of random words which just come to mind (and you will have to trust me I haven't looked up those words): 元気 頭高 弟子 おだか 己 平板 元結 中高 頼り 頭高 端末 平板 敷物 平板 惑わす 中高 絆 平板 皮肉 頭高 Some of these words I have not seen for months or years in my Anki reviews, so I wouldn't call it "short term connection", also I can recall the colours (which encode the pitch) on the spot for most words when reading without having colours in my reading material. (For the words that are in my Anki deck of course, not literally every word) As a disclaimer, I am NOT saying this alone will get me perfect pitch or anything the like nor am I claiming that you're tips on remembering pitch are not needed or useless, but I do think it is a very great stepping stone.

[@jporfirio_]

As a learner that focus mostly in listening I found this video really interesting. I’m def trying these techniques. During your journey, do you have any techniques you developed to help develop better listening comprehension (besides listening more)?

[@djahandarie]

Can’t say I did anything special for it. I primarily learned via watching anime for the first handful of years, so I was always stronger in listening. After the initial hump it does really just become a matter of knowing the vocabulary though, so techniques which improve your vocabulary pretty much directly improve your listening.

[@pablo12250]

What is the best way to go back and re-learn proper pitch after you have reached upper=intermediate level. Not helpful to say "you should have started earlier".

[@sp3ctum]

Really happy to have come across this. Thanks! I'm lower intermediate level (whatever that means) and have been trying to pay attention to pitch. I can see some gains here and there but I don't output at all so I'll see what that is like when I get there. I agree with what you said about remembering the pitch of words. It's somehow easy to associate to the word when learning a new one, it's like it doesn't occupy any extra space in my head.

[@djahandarie]

Glad you found the video interesting! I think one of the things that makes pitch hard is that it's difficult to figure out exactly how well you are progressing compared to other more noticeable facets of pronunciation like vowels and consonants where most people can at least tell vaguely how good they are. This means that people have no internal feedback loop for realizing they need to put in more effort to get a satisfying outcome. This is why getting external corrections on your reading is a very powerful method, because it also provides some critical level-setting for yourself to understand how much more effort you'd need to put in to get a result that you are happy with.

[@sp3ctum]

@@djahandarie yeah, exactly. I hope that with a somewhat decent internal model of pitch accent as well as shadowing it's possible for me to get started later on. I think you said you had something to say about shadowing too; would be really interested to hear your thoughts. Also subbed 🙂

[@redoxide1955]

Thanks for the video it was really good.

[@FrezleFedora]

By any chance would you talk about improving output ability, not just pronunciation and pitch accent?

[@djahandarie]

I’ll do a video on this!

[@FrezleFedora]

@@djahandarie Thank you

[@jinjurbreadman]

make more!

[@gs4207]

100th like !