INTERVIEW Matt vs. Japan vs. Pitch Accent vs. Tones vs. Stu Jay Raj 日本語 中文 ไทย How to Learn Language

In this collaboration, ‪@mattvsjapan‬ and I discuss how to approach learning Pitch Accent languages like Japanese and Tonal languages like Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese - and examine what they have in common and what might be different. We also discuss the often controversial topic of whether or not new learners of a language should even speak at all - and try and balance Krashen's theories with our own experiences.
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#japanese #chinese #pitchaccent #tonallanguages #thai #languagelearning
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[@mattvsjapan]

This was so fun! Thanks for having me on!! 💪

[@fynriel2678]

Your comment about the difference between language and dialect in linguistics really struck a chord with me. I've had two classes so far in a course I'm taking on English phonetics/phonology and all we've been talking about is how one ought to determine which dialect is the "Standard". It seemed fairly innocuous but your remark is making me reflect and reconsider everything we've been talking about so far. Any chance you could share your thoughts on the subject somewhere in the future?

[@sasino]

I believe pitch accent in Japanese is almost as important as tones in Chinese. In both languages, if you speak with the wrong pitch you'll probably get understood most of the time through context, but simply put, you're just not speaking the language right. I believe that right or almost right pronunciation should be one of the main goals in language learning

[@lucapennazzi]

Thanks for all the content you post. I’m a fan of your work and look forward to engaging with it more.

[@LinguistStory]

Stuart, I'm also fluent in Japanese and learned prosody naturally while studying in Japan without being aware of it. I also speak Mandarin and Thai and live in Bangkok. I'm about to dive into Korean now. Maybe we can have coffee in Bangkok sometime. Thanks~

[@LinguistStory]

And my name is also Matt lol

[@StuartJayRaj]

that'd be cool. message me on discord

[@andrewdunbar828]

This is really interesting. Especially so far the part about how foreigners mix up intonation patterns and pitch accent. I hadn't thought of this before. I'm so glad Matt also goes into the different pitch accents in other regions besides Tokyo, especially Kansai. I was hoping for a bit on the topic but not actually expecting it (-:

[@robertchoate5380]

What makes tones so interesting is that they were developed over time. Chinese used to have many consonant clusters, and as they were dropped, the relative pitch of the vowels later developed into those tones. In English, looking at the words 'back' and 'bag', the word 'back' has a higher pitch, while 'bag' has a lower pitch. If we were to take off the the final consonant sounds we are left with a higher pitch and lower pitch. This is essentially how Chinese developed tones. The words are treated as the consonants were still there, but since they aren't, the tone is like the place holder of those lost consonants. I think this highlights why tones are important. Saying a different tone is like saying 'bag' instead of 'back'.

[@sasino]

Interesting stuff I didn't know

[@lucapennazzi]

Wait holy crap that’s amazing. Also it’s intuitive and easy to remember

[@ThaiIsland]

Thank you for this discussion gentlemen! The comparison between tone and pitch was very fascinating. Truly insightful. 👍🏽🙏🏼

[@andrewdunbar828]

When Matt talks about people assimilating into the target culture this reminds me of an amazing guy from Okinawa called Byron Fija. He's a hafu who grew up monolingual Japanese but looking western and had an identity crisis as a young man. In the end he decided he's not Japanese or western but he's Okinawan and he fully embraced it to the point of becoming a self-taught field linguist and preeminent expert on the, sadly dying, Okinawan language. He interviewed many old people whose first language was Okinawan but had stopped using it. He doesn't speak English. I would be fascinated to see Matt and him do a KZbin collab. He has some old stuff on the internet but nothing new in some years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Fija

[@bobboberson8297]

You're a really good interviewer

[@ching-huanwang6019]

12:26 It's interesting to know that the music lines of Thai songs also follow the tone contour of words. This phenomenon is very common in Taiwanese/Hokkien songs.

[@CHOCOLATIONZ]

Yes, Thai songs usually follow the tone of the original words. And whenever they don't follow the tone, the word will sound very odd.

[@sasino]

I heard this is not very common in Mandarin instead, and in fact native people may misunderstand some songs, some examples were shown in a YT video and it was really funny to know what people commonly understood 😂

[@amagpie8239]

非常好的影片啊！我從來沒有以為您要請到了MattVsJapan為討論語言的事！

[@chsinskyy]

Very interesting conversation, I fully agree with assimilating the target culture in order to achieve our language goal in that language as I have experienced this with Spanish and Korean 👏😌

[@sobirateljp2087]

In Japanese, only in the right context pitch accent is not needed, but in such situation you really just can use body language. When the context is less defined, both pitch accent and intonation are very important. I used to say "oishii" with a falling intonation, which implies a sarcastic tone, that's like saying "Yeah right, very delicious...", and nobody corrected me for like a month or so, but since I was mostly speaking with my friedns and collegues at the time, they understood what I meant, but since I already was very fluent speaking Japanese, such mistakes could be percieved as an intentional sarcastic jab.

[@sasino]

That's really interesting, that's why in my personal opinion there's no difference between Chinese tones and Japanese pitch accent and Japanese could be defined a tonal language but linguists don't agree for some reason

[@1519Cortes]

giving a Like already now, but will watch tomorrow. Looks cool

[@Blacky-NZ]

Awesome and inspiring conversation thank you

[@thinksie]

Stuart it is very funny to see you blink, I enjoy your videos ;D

[@lobna9170]

now i can't unnotice it ☺

[@thinksie]

@@lobna9170 When he stops talking he starts to blink rapidly khaha

[@theskoomacat7849]

In my opinion, another great unsung part of Japanese is how nasal the language generally is. I kindly ask everyone who hasn't looked into this to listen to Japanese speech and look for nasal sounds, and I think they will be impressed.

[@boi7506]

I have an something for 2 of the indonesian abugidas for the people who dont know modern indonesian and want to study the old language ,javanese and balinese, even though both these abugidas are still used throughout parts of indonesia ( my country ) it is not an official language of a ethnic group, the actual official language is an alphabet with actual words, so, dont confuse the javanese, balinese, sundanese and many more using their unofficial ethnic group language, people who speak any indonesian abugida language are hard to find, also dont use any gender pronouns because the indonesian language is gender neutral, i am trying to learn an abugida so, please help me ( P.s i am indonesian but im in the percentage of indonesians that speak english, i understand indonesian, i just know some words to make a story in indonesian)

[@WeiShiQiang]

On Matt's point about aligning yourself with the target language identity I don't think is possible or desirable for everyone, partly because especially for some cultures you will simply never become Japanese or Chinese etc if you look foreign. But also because you might be quite happy with your own national identity and not wanting to pretend to be something you're not. My way around this however is to simply choose a different way to think about it, with Cantonese my aim isn't to become 'Chinese' or 'Cantonese' but I aim to become a 'Hong Konger', which I feel is a more open identity and so I can be both ethnically English / British and a Hong Konger at the same time. Perhaps it would be better to focus on identifying with a city rather than an entire culture, say Tokyo, Bangkok or Rio De Janeiro?

[@StuartJayRaj]

yes - it's an interesting one. I have found that with each language I speak, my mannerisms, voice quality, expressions will change accordingly, but they are all just different ways of rendering me. I don't change 'me'. I just learn to render me within a culture. Within every culture you have unique personalities and not everyone has the same opinions, however you find common 'protocols' that ensure that at least the door isn't slammed shut and all can communicate on the same field. I think identifying ad a Hong Konger is a good example, and in Hong Kong, there is leeway for that. In choosing a 'box' however, there's also accepting that people will interact with you with all the filters, biases and stereotypes associated with what they perceive that box to be.

[@WeiShiQiang]

@@StuartJayRaj Very true! I certainly try my best to 'render' myself to the local culture with either Mandarin or Cantonese and the way I act (or try to act) speaking those languages is more in line with native speakers but inevitably as I look different I will always be considered as a foreigner (at least by strangers) and so I have long made peace with the fact that I'm an Englishman who can also traverse these other cultures. I think there might be a danger in trying to deeply identify with another culture only to be hit in the face with reality when interacting with native speakers (reminds me a bit of plastic paddies). Anywho thanks for the reply I'll check out your discord as it looks like you're doing some interesting things there!

[@wataruslanguageroom9075]

I think the reason why the Japanese pitch accent hasn't really been taught since the 1990's, is the fact that the type of Japanese learners has drastically changed since that time. The Japanese government back then started to allow foreign trainees entering and working in Japan for a couple of years. It's called 技能実習制度(technical intern training program)。(Some human right groups criticises it as a modern slavery). Until the 1990's, most Japanese learners were Westerners interested in Japanese cultures. However since 技能実習制度has been introduced in the early 1990's, at first some Brazilians and Peruvians having partial Japanese descent came to Japan, then more and more Chinese, and currently a lot of Vietnamese, Philippinos, Thai, Indonesians, Burmese, Cambodians and others started to do their internships in Japan. Unlike the Westerners in the 1970's/80's who learnt Japanese as a hobby and for passion, those new type of Japanese learners from the developing world consider Japanese as a 'necessary tool to work and survive' in their new country. Their intention is not to reach a native level. They would rather prefer to only learn the strict minimum and moving to Japan as quick as possible to start working there. Learning the Japanese pitch accent has suddenly become a luxury, only demanded by hobby learners and perfectionists. Hence the Japanese textbook publishers and the language schools teaching Japanese have started to shift their clientele to those more pragmatic learners. Well, this is just my speculation, but I think I'm not that far away from the truth.

[@StuartJayRaj]

Fascinating

[@Aznbomb3r]

One mistake, pitches do change the meaning of some words in English, so never say never. "Dessert" and "Desert", "sert" becomes lower in desert. However rare it may be, it still does certainly exist in English. There's probably something about "to" and "too", I believe "too" is a higher pitch. While this can't be found in any dictionary, it certainly happens in speech where people pronounce "too" a little higher.

[@一本のうんち]

That's stress, not pitch. There's no need for pitch change.

[@Aznbomb3r]

@@一本のうんち I am NOT going back on this. I used dictionary dot com, webster, AND oxford. It all sounds like a change in pitch. For the record, a quick search on 'stress' in linguistics shows this, "That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone."

[@samlynas3175]

​@@Aznbomb3rYou're wrong. You're hearing the words in citation form, and yes, in citation form a stressed syllable will have a higher pitch than an unstressed syllable. But that's not crucial, and there are contexts in which the need to alter intonation patterns can result in the unstressed syllable being higher in pitch than the stressed syllable. 'Who was it who said the word 'bacon'?'. Say this to yourself and note that the stressed syllable in 'bacon' is at a lower pitch than the unstressed syllable if you ask the question with a rising intonation pattern. The real difference between 'desert' and 'dessert' is stress and attendant changes in vowel qualities. Can't you hear that the vowels are different? Pitch never creates lexical distinctions in English, it's just not a characteristic of the language.

[@Aznbomb3r]

@@samlynas3175 ​ The way desert and dessert are pronounced in some parts of the world has no difference in the vowel sounds. I know the proper way to say "dessert" is with a long E at the start, but there's a lot of people that pronounce it with a short E, and the only way to tell the difference is clearly through the change in the second syllable.

[@samlynas3175]

@@Aznbomb3r When you write the word 'desert', do you mean the verb 'deSERT', or the noun 'DEsert'? I assumed you were talking about the noun, but maybe you weren't. Either way, no variety of English has phonemic pitch. You are confusing stress with pitch. You are hearing stressed syllables as generally being higher in pitch than unstressed syllables, which they are. But they are not *required* to be, as pitch is not a necessary characteristic of stress in English, just a *common* charateristic.

[@mikehawk8385]

I thought stuart was saying minecraft until 35 minutes in

[@nazzarynnavarronunez9471]

Wait, what? He's not saying Minecraft?

[@davegraham7550]

"mandatory Spanish in the USA schools"...a mammoth prize if it is stream lined, best practice standardised.

[@davegraham7550]

and English in Mexico

[@purittamaneki7221]

Pitch accent is not that important. As he explained, pitch accents can be quite different from region to region. There are even regions in Japan that have no accented dialects. What is more important is the mora. A common mistake made by foreigners whose mother tongue is a stress accent like English is often due to the fact that they have not mastered this mora timing. Kite (come) is 2 mora, kitte (stamp) is 3 mora, obasan (aunt) is 4 mora, obasan (grandmother) is 5 mora. Since kite is a verb and kitte is a noun, the meaning of the sentence is likely to be understood even if it is mispronounced. However, since obasan and obaasan are both nouns, mispronouncing them may interfere with your relationships.

[@john-raphaellacas8107]

I agree with Matt on "You have to stop thinking you're not like the person that speaks the language you wanna learn". This might be the first number one game-changer in language learning. Good video. Thank you. 弟の発音はまだまだロボットの様な感じするけどねマットさん。(^_~)いっぱん的なアメリカ人に比べると凄く上手けどね☆

[@mattvsjapan]

Glad you liked the video! If you listen to native recordings of heiban/odaka words pronounced in isolation, that's actually often how they sound. Also, 上手 is a na-adjective, so "上手けど" is grammatically incorrect; needs to be "上手だけど"

[@john-raphaellacas8107]

@@mattvsjapan I'm leaving in Japan for 17 years Matt. You can say also 上手んだけどね、languages are not like the textbook you know. But grammatically speaking you are absolutely correct. Also as a polyglot どうして日本語で話すビデオはほとんどないですか？自己紹介レベルのしか見付からなかったなー。 Did you know that 全然 should be followed by a negative but we actually use it like : 全然大丈夫。(^^)") They are so many ways to talk like a native. Also in Anime the voice are not really natural and the acting is over the top. Even if it could be a good way for beginners to learn. Movies could be a better way to get a more natural way to speak. 下手じゃないけどねWWW (^_~) But again, your accent is good, I just said it was a little robotic. Please do not misunderstand me, you are doing a great job. Don't forget I'm your sempai too okay? (^_~) IF you wanna do a video when we only speak in Japanese I'll be glad to teach you one or two things. And you can correct some of my grammatical native mistakes. Have a great day Matt. PS: Again, as an English speaker you are one of the most talented with the pitch accent that I know. And you are right to want perfection. We are on the same team here. (^^)b

[@mattvsjapan]

@@john-raphaellacas8107 There are many videos of me speaking Japanese on the KZbin. For example, search "日本語ペッラペラな🇺🇸人と本当に自然な英語を身につける方法語った" for a 20+ minute conversation I had in Japanese with another KZbinr. Btw, you said "日本語で話すビデオ" but Japanese people don't use the word "ビデオ" in this context; they would use "動画".

[@jvu2ilj26]

@@mattvsjapan Is this dude serious? He's gotta be a troll or something. He's gonna teach you "a thing or too" ... ? BY THE WAY, 上手んだけど is also wrong. If you wanna say うまい, you should have said 上手いんだけど... And it's got nothing to do with "textbook" Japanese. If you really lived in Japan for 17 years and you speak (write) like that, you really shouldn't even say you lived in Japan so long. And what exactly is the point of inserting a sentence in Japanese here and there?

[@john-raphaellacas8107]

@@mattvsjapan ご返事誠に有難う御座います「固い喋り方の方がいいかな」 ビデオ使うよ、"動画"はさ、ちょっとかたいけどそれも使うね。 "日本語ペッラペラな🇺🇸人と本当に自然な英語を身につける方法語った" 見ました、やっぱ上手だね。まだ感情的な表現は・・・It is a little lineal. 凄く発音を丁寧に喋ろうとすると自然さがちょっと無くなるのかなーと。それでも日本語を学びたい人にはマットを聞いて勉強になると思いますよ。 ところで・・・どうして英語で返事してるの？(^_~) You are doing great Matt, and you are still young, so don't be afraid by a simple piece of advice. 「玉磨かざれば光なし」