Please don't send @theimmersionguy any negativity-almost us RUclipsrs are guilty of leaning too hard into thumbnails and titles for views, myself included, and he's addressed these points in the top comment. He brings up a lot of great points in this video, and I would encourage everyone to watch any follow-up he makes on this topic, as I'm sure he'll make good arguments against my blind spots on this topic, the same way that he did here. 皆さん冷静に
I learned Japanese for 10 years before studying pitch accent. It undoubtedly helped my pronunciation and perception of Japanese. After studying pitch accent I began getting compliments from natives about intonation and been told "you don't have an American accent." Before studying pitch accent, I didn't really get those.
I’ve had the same experience, I would imagine every other learner who’s seriously studied it has as well. The improvements to your speaking are tangible and the feedback is surprisingly direct, ie people telling you there’s no ‘American’ (or whatever you’re from) accent where before they said nothing of the sort
Japanese people talk/joke/mock/ each other's "intonation" of certain words all the time. You can see this often on their variety shows on tv. They just misused the word "intonation" for "pitch". So pitch is very much a part of Japanese language, just no one puts into the basic textbooks. It's the same with the English language's requirement for constantly vibrating your vocal cords. Every native speaker does it, but no one puts into our textbooks. So us Asians end up speak English in a very "choppy" manner, because in our language, vocal cords stop vibrating between words or sounds.
well obviously... when you learn and practice pronounciation / accent you get the accent, and when you don't practice you don't get the accent of the language but keep your own It's like if you say "I practiced maths and I got better in math!! I'm so surprised, even my math teacher said I'm good at math!!
@@_capu the distinction here is, studying pitch accent specifically rather than trying to pick it up by osmosis. Judging by the premise of the vid you are commenting on, the efficacy of pitch accent study isn’t obvious to everyone, which is why I chimed in…
Accents are important in English, but if Japanese is spoken with a strong accent, it's hard to understand as well. When people from English-speaking countries say "Tokyo," it basically sounds like "patent."
Native speakers don't just randomly fluctuate between different regional accents - they either have a consistently mixed accent, or they have acquired multiple accents that they use in different scenarios. But no native speaker will pronounce e.g. 日本語 with two different pitch patters in two consecutive sentences, whereas non native speakers who don't hear pitch will do this all the time. It's this sort of inconsistency that's specific to learners which results in being hard to understand.
One difference with English is since it's an international language people are much more used to hearing non-native speakers of English and dealing with weird accents than Japanese speakers are.
Also the fact that English just has so many technically native accents. When people hear my accent in English they usually assume I’m a “native speaker from somewhere else”. The Americans guess that I’m Canadian, Canadians think I’ve spent some time in Britain and so on forth. Now yes Japanese also has dialects but it’s still one geographically small country, there will be less options for “native from somewhere else”. In English everyone truly has an accent, there is always a “native from somewhere else” option where as in Japanese it’s basically either that you sound Japanese or you don’t
I was once trying to tell a Japanese person I like salmon and she thought I meant alcoholic beverages so that alone tells me Dōgen might be onto something
"Despite my fluent Japanese, Japanese ppl often respond in English or prefer to speak with less fluent Asians": There're comedy videos on RUclips about this. They don't know Eng-speakers’ Japanese accent is intense, sounding as if words are broken into 3 parts. This is more pronounced than Asian speakers. Pitch accent matters a lot.
Half an hour into Dogen‘s response and I’m ready to sign up for his Patreon pitch accent thing - not necessarily to learn pitch accent in itself but especially because I LOVE learning and the degree of differentiation, sensory & intellectual granularity with which he approaches and presents this (and other) topics. Just so stimulating to my brain and ears, and it puts me in touch with “Japan” and its lovely people. Ready to sign up with me? Anyway, let’s keep learning languages fun. In recent years, information is around in exponential abundance, and almost everything has become hyper-teachable. Still we have to do the work, in any way that works. No shortcut there ;)
Thank you for the kind words Saraha! Really appreciate it. I took a lot of time creating the series and am proud with how it turned out, so that means a lot. Best of luck with your Japanese studies, pitch-accent and otherwise! 頑張ってね！
A drive-by comment by a japanese-english person. Intonation is the first thing you immediately notice if done poorly (assuming decent vocab/grammar). For example, in western films, you can almost immediately tell who is non-native/not fluent in japanese by how they speak, not what they say.
41:59 Teaching someone anything, especially a subtle repeating pattern like pitch accent, that they were ignorant of unlocks an enhanced awareness of it. What was ignored as background noise suddenly becomes prominent. It's kind of like when someone you know gets a new car, you start to notice that model everywhere. Learning pitch accent earlier will help your brain to look out for it and encode it into memory subconsciously, especially when you're learning new words. Earlier awareness also means less unlearning of incorrect pitch. Telling someone to ignore pitch accent is just going to extend that unlearning period. That doesn't mean one should overwhelm or obsess over pitch accent.
I know a Japanese woman that moved to Norway as an adult and she speaks Norwegian incredibly fluently because not only is the phonology almost identical, but both languages use pitch accent. That is to say, knowing pitch accent (even from a different language) is clearly a major advantage in sounding native. Almost no adult immigrants sound anywhere close to that native.
Just to speak to your point at 36:52 about how you won't get corrected until your PA is already getting better: I'm in a primarily JP-EN language exchange Discord, and I've gotten to know dozens of Japanese people there who're interested in learning English. We have a practice in the server that you can add an emote to your name to show that you want people to correct your language mistakes. On paper, this sounds like it would lead to a lot of back and forth where people are consistently correcting each other - and corrections do happen. But largely, even when users with this emote make mistakes, they don't get corrected, and I've chalked that up to two reasons. 1. Basically what you say - even if someone is inviting you to correct them, if they're making a wide variety of mistakes, constantly (more than once per sentence), you lose the motivation to correct them. It's counterproductive to correct them every single time, because that would take too long, and they wouldn't be able to absorb all of it. But more importantly... 2. You're just trying to talk to them - you're not their teacher, you're their friend. Correcting them breaks the flow of a conversation that you're trying to have, and breaking that flow is fine every now and then, but if you correct someone's mistakes every time they open their mouth, you won't actually be able to hold the conversation you're trying to have to begin with. In the end, the people who I find myself correcting the most are the friends who I feel have the BEST English, because they make mistakes the least often, and they're the easiest to explain to, since they have the highest capacity to comprehend what I'm trying to teach them.
"There are other factors, things like your actual pronunciation". THIS. This is what also tells me that they do not understand Japanese phonology AT ALL. Pitch IS part of the pronunciation. Again, it's not a decisive feature in English, but it is in Japanese. It's as important as long-short vowel distinction, but native speakers might not consciously value it as much because it doesn't have an equivalent in writing. It doesn't mean that they don't notice and it doesn't mean that it can't alter their perception of your Japanese. It makes me wonder if this person's pitch accent is *so bad* that natives don't even bother bringing it up, as you mentioned in your example earlier.
I would actually wager it's quite good if he studied pitch accent in the past and also did a mostly immersion based approach! I think his frustrations come more from the perceived 'hype' surrounding pitch accent, if that makes sense. Appreciate the comment!
As a native speaker of Swedish, that has pitch accent, getting the prosody, i.e. the pitch accent, is MORE important than making the correct sounds of the different vowels and consonants. The rhythm of the words are essential to native speakers when we parse what someone is saying. As for Japanese, the basic vowels and consonants are fairly easy (since god did not bless them with 14 different vowel sounds), so why would someone focus on that?
20 yr resident of Japan, 34 yrs studying Japanese, and I just discovered the pitch accent about a year or 2 ago. Before that, I was baffled that some Japanese didn't understand me. Since I started trying to improve my pitch accent, this happens less often. Learn pitch accent early. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Why not give yourself every advantage by learning pitch accent?
For the average person it's a scam, you've lived and worked there for 20 years, the average person just starting out or who will only ever go to Japan on holiday it's a waste of time.
Haven’t heard all 3h yet, but love this so far! You respectfully present your points. Loved the point around 35:35, that Jpn native speakers recognize improved fluency, which to me (when I lived in Japan) meant hearing “Nihongo jōzu” less and less! Great video Dogen!!!
It's a very good point to be honest. It's like natives subconsciously go from "This person is a learner, it's normal for them to make mistakes, I'll just whitenoise them" to "Wait no, this person is *good* at Japanese, it makes no sense for them to make this mistake, raise the alarms". Even as a language teacher, there's nuanced mistakes that you wouldn't correct in, say, an A2 course, but you would in a C1 course, because the bar isn't set at the same height in each case.
As a linguistic nerd, I'm not obsessed with "sounding native" but I still study pitch accent because I think it's a very interesting feature of Japanese. Knowing pitch accent not only makes your Japanese more understandable but also makes Japanese more understandable to you. It's not about vanity, it's about comprehension.
Having a broken dialect due to moving is actually a good point. When I lived in North Carolina, I lived in Tarboro. Outsiders might pronounce the town's name as "Tar-boh-roh," but people there pronounce it as "Tah-bruh." I often went to another town called Greenville. (We often joked that this town is so small, you'll blink and drive right past it.) Some might pronounce "green-veel," but we pronounced it as "green-vuhl." Meanwhile, on the other side of North Carolina, there's a lighthouse called "Bodie Island." I and everyone I knew, including my parents, say "Boh-dee," but people from there call it "Bah-tee." When I moved to New Jersey, I could not understand anyone. They talked way faster and used different terms to describe things. (Someone from North Carolina might say, "crank up the car, cut that light on, cut out the light," while someone from New Jersey might say, "start the car, turn on the light, turn off the light." I also got a lot of place names wrong. Raritan is "Ray-rih-tuhn," not "Rah-rih-tuhn." Hoboken is "HO-bo-ken," not "ho-BO-ken." Newark is "Nohrk," not "New-ark." Hamilton is "HA-milton," not "ha-MIL-ton." Trenton is "Tren'n," not "Tren-ton." McDonald's is "mehk-donalds," not "maek-donalds." Absecon Lighthouse is "AB-secon," in not "abSEcon." Secaucus is "seh-KAH-kuhs," not "SAE-kah-suhs." I still have to listen very carefully when speaking with someone from New Jersey. When I moved to Pennsylvania, I often got corrected on street names. Schoenersville Rd is "Shay-nerz-veel" and not "Skoh-nerz-veel." Interestingly, video games also shaped my dialect. For years, I pronounced "schedule" as "SHEH-ju-ahl" rather than the American way to pronounce it, "SKEH-ju-ahl," because I played a train simulator from Australia.
@@n8pls543 that's exactly where it comes from yeah. A lot of German taken into English this way, the umlauted vowel unrounds. Same if it's from Pa Dutch, which likewise unrounds front rounded vowels. What's left is something like an eh or ay sound Pronouncing ö as 'er' is more of a American accent in German type thing, which is more likely to pop up in individual accents rather than place names which tend to be either more thoroughly anglicized or dialectal in origin
I was a bit wary checking out this video, because your comedic persona is a bit arrogant, so I thought it might be something you based on a real trait, but you quickly put my worries to rest by being fair, humble and open in. Thank you for your video. I glad I watched it
why do english-speaking people on yt argue so much over this? It is a feature of the languge. If you want to speak it well you should pay attention to it, preferably as early as possible. End of the story.
Its also a part of the language saying the correct conjugation for example but i dont care if foreigners or immigrants saying them wrong. If i understood them, why should i point them out for their mistakes when literally every non native speakers make them on regular basis?
The argument is, that you might not need to learn it deliberately, because you acquire it with replicating a lot of input. So it's the argument over methodology, prioritisation and efficiency. As Dogen mentioned you can arrive at the same place with different paths, but you can do this once per language, so it's hard to compare with your own experience
I think the idea that foreigners mistakes would ever sound like a native's mix of dialects is kind of absurd. As for tonal patterns, they are often different, but they are consistent. A second language speaker who do not understand them will not sound like a native mixing dialect, but like a foreign accent. Swedish has pitch accent, and the pitches are different in different regions - but they're almost always consistent over the patterns. So, if you make a word dialectal, you must still use the same pattern but different accent on the syllables. This is the same as different dialectal variations, and this is the reason we very quickly can adapt and understand speakers from other places, because we quickly adapt to the correct patterns. If the patterns are wrong, it is going to be meh. Also, I am not sure for Japan, but in Sweden, most people speaking Swedish have no idea we have a pitch accent. Unless given a minimal pair, the concept is entirely foreign to most native speakers. It is not marked in our writing, and it is not taught in school. Thus, a lot of people would be able to say they do not care for the accent. However, I have never heard a Swedish speaker make an error when it comes to pitch accent in a grammatical form or a word they know. It's notoriously hard to sound native like in Swedish as well, and this is because the accents are hard unless you have them in your own language.
Some of my family moved to Österbotten where the Swedish dialects have lost the pitch accent. It's not like I can't understand the locals when I visit, but there's a certain friction to comprehension that requires that bit more extra effort. Though as you point out, since they're internally consistent within their accent, it is still somewhat different from second language speakers.
You never know how intelligible do you sound to a native speaker! My example comes from Swedish, which is a Germanic language, but with a pitch accent. From my experience of learning the language, it was extremely frustrating when I would learn a word, pronounce all the syllables "just fine" (as I thought), but even my Swedish partner would not understand me, despite being used to my Slavic accent in English. After 5-7 failed attempts to pronounce the word at him, he would finally get it, and pronounce it back with a slight pronunciation twist that was apparently making all the difference between being unintelligible and understood. After learning and practicing Swedish for a couple of years, I haven't had any problems with getting people to understand me as of recently, but some days I can hear my own accent, and it pisses me off terribly. I can hear that I sound out of whack, but just can't tune it back in! Long story short, stay humble and don't think you're easy to understand. People might just be really polite and good at guessing things from the context. On top of that, don't underestimate the compound effect that small errors make when they snowball. One fumbled word in a sentence is usually easy to understand, but half a sentence pronounced slightly wrong is just so difficult to make sense of! I must also say that I am annoyed at the argument of "git good and your pitch accent will fall into place", as if getting fluent is a walk in the park. How about using different tools to get fluent, such as both immersion and pitch accent? Not everyone in the learning community picks up and is able to reproduce nuance just from the listening practice, and approaching language learning from different angles is always a good idea. I don't like how OOP is dunking on the "pitch accent cult" while promoting a different "holy grail" approach. Again, from my personal experience with Swedish, I got a huge boost in understanding other people when I started to speak myself, as some things finally "clicked". But then to get better at speaking, I had to both practice speaking, acquire input (that I was finally able to understand better), and review some more formal rules to fine-tune the intuitive understanding that I got. There's zero conflict between formally studying pitch accept and using immersion. Although, if you just want to watch anime and get bored by more formal study forms, then just leave it at that and don't hate on other people providing unique teaching materials. Just letting things happen and hoping that your brain will act like a lint roller is all fun, until that doesn't work out as planned. Work hard where it's due, accept your flaws, and don't get worked up if someone cares about something you don't. I still pronounce consonants too hard for Swedish, so people most often identify my accent as Finnish. If I were to choose to not care, I wouldn't have the moral right to belittle people who work on fixing this flaw in their speech. Especially using all those snarky comments and weird labels that OOP chose for the pitch accent learning community. Anyway, I'm off to submit a petition to make you all say イケア instead of Aykeea, have a good day!
Why would you avoid output for the first years of study? Besides one studious PhD in a bar in Thailand, is there any evidence that this has benefits? What benefits?
Something else that these people probably don't know is that there is a lot of correspondance among the different Japanese accents. What I mean is that it is often possible to predict where the accent will fall in the Kansai accent if you know where it falls in the Tokyo one. Some Japanese are also used to hearing other regional accents, of course. So, to say that "if you have the wrong accent but everything else is great, you'll just sound like you're from another region" is plainly wrong. When foreigners have the wrong pitch, it's all over the place, it doesn't follow a "logic" like it would in Kansai-ben and so on.
People think "English has prosody and it's not a big deal, so Japanese must work the same way". That's just wrong. English obviously has pitch, but it's not a phonological difference. It cannot alter the meaning of words. It is a separate phonemic difference in Japanese, so it can create confusion and make natives misunderstand words, just like L and R in English.
Thank you for answering a lot of questions I had about the value of learning pitch accent and reasonably responding to those with somewhat contrary views.
I kind of get where he is coming from. When you listen to people teaching pitch accent, you get the impression, that if your pronunciation (including accent) is not perfect, you are bad at Japanese. Witch is not true. I usually tell my students, that they need to get basics right, so their Japanese is easy to listen to, and from that point, it is more beneficial to focus on other stuff. Native Japanese teachers who I spoke to about it, all agreed.
@@honeybunbadger I feel you. This is so sad and funny at the same time.
9 дней назад+1
I just got done watching a segment of this video on stream (it seemed apposite because I'd been meaning to look at it and a beginning Japanese learner in my chat asked what the deal with pitch accent was), and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how you approach this. My association with the Japanese language goes back to the late 80s, and I had already been working for roughly 20 years as a translator and occasional interpreter in Japanese, and getting mistaken (mostly) on the phone for a native speaker before I'd even heard of the concept of pitch accent. My awareness of it was limited to noticing differences before I assumed a word I had only seen in writing was pronounced and how I heard people actually pronouncing it (one early example was -gaoka place names); I overwhelmingly picked it up by hearing the emphasis of certain syllables without actually having a name for the thing I was hearing. I'd basically never heard any theory on the phonology of the language until watching your videos, from which I've learnt quite a lot. It seems to me that what is taken as an 'obsession' with pitch accent is actually just a neglected aspect of Japanese pronunciation actually getting its due for the first time; naturally, there is a massive spike in the attention paid to something that previously had barely been acknowledged. My main problem with The Immersion Guy's take is that a lot of vague terms end up doing a lot of work. What is 'sounding good', for example? Surely, that's an extremely subjective standard. If someone's idea of 'sounding good' does not include reliably accurate pitch accent (or other syllable emphasis patterns depending on language), then obviously it is by definition possible to 'sound good' without acquiring them. That does not, however, mean that acquiring them in one way or another (my recommendation in this case is a combination of conscious awareness of pitch accent and what it sounds like with just listening to people and modelling one's speech on them) is pointless.
As a Texan, what you likely heard was the Southern accent, but among just us, most of us have a more specific texas accent, and its likely that you didn't hear it specifically because you spoke with the west coast accent, which is how we speak in school, even in texas. A few years ago, my wife at the time (she was Hawaiian) noticed when i finally started speaking in my texas accent at home, and she she said it felt like i was finally letting my guard down. Love your content, specifically the knowledgeable humility you approach everything with
Thanks Dogen 🙏 …for skillfully sharing your linguistic understanding… but I think even more for meeting this critique with so much clarity and focus, inspite of the many snide notes in said critique.
Regardless of what "The Immersion Guy" was actually trying to say, I found his tone and delivery off-putting and inflammatory. He claims he didn't mean to instigate, yet denigrates "phonetics nerds" and "pitch propagandists" at length, as if his approach was the one true way to do things. Even the title of his video is hyperbole and clickbait; can he really claim pitch accent is "useless?" The irony is that "The Immersion Guy" is the one acting like a propagandist (in a ploy to get more subscribers), no one else. I can't imagine how people who are interested about studying phonetics and pitch accent, much less those who teach it and have studied it intensively, wouldn't be offended by his harsh tone. He also seems to like the word "naughty" for some strange reason.
I think you and Yuda's point at the 1:02:00 mark about Kyoto is *similar* to some things in English, too. For example, if I were to say "I need to go out and buy tiiiiiires..." it would sound like I'm beginning to list out a set of items I need to buy, but if I'm just saying tires in that different way, I could throw the listener off if they were expecting a list and I really just meant, "I need to go out and buy tires." I think a good argument for pitch accent is simply asking how well do you want to communicate and be understood by others, because it doesn't just make you sound "more native" (with the goal of having your ego stroked), but rather how much effort do you wish to put forward to help other Japanese in understanding you and feeling comfortable listening to you. It's making it easier for people to converse with you, i.e. for their benefit.
I think this is an excellent analogy to pitch accent for us English speakers. It definitely can throw the listener off … which sucks when you work hard to have grammar and vocab locked down but still get confused Japanese faces
Just as another data point against "immersion will handle everything": I know someone who lived here in Japan for 30+ years, very eloquent and well spoken, even does MCing for local events. His pitch accent is very noticeably foreign. Immersion isn't a cure-all, and you do need to put some work into it.
I'm reminded a bit of a lecture I heard through the JET Program. The speaker was questioning what we define as "native English" giving examples of the differences between the US, England, and India, all of which have English is taught as the official language, but have a great variety of accents, regional dialects, and even vocabulary (e.g. "pants" vs "trousers"). The sort of thesis of the lecture was that "native speaker" is a poor metric to use in education, and that we should encourage variety over the "blonde hair blue eyed foreigners" in the textbooks. I think this perspective makes a lot of sense and is probably close to where immersionguy is coming from. On the flip side, and to Dogen's point, people raised in the same environments (or who start in an environment and then move to a new one) all tend to speak in a similar way and have consistent dialects within their native language, which we could call standard or correct. We could say that Americans who learn Japanese have a consistent and similar "dialect" in Japanese, or that they make similar "mistakes" like over-emphasizing words or using the wrong pitch. I think the key point of contention here is: where is the line between "accent" and "error" when it comes to pronunciation? And I don't know if that question has an objective answer.
As a Japanese, I’m glad to see Japanese learners discuss this kind of deep topic. Until I found Dogenさん, I even didn’t know the word, “pitch accent”, which is I assume difficult for Japanese learners to acquire.
If you listen to a lot of Japanese speech you can start to pick up on pitch accent unintentionally, at least for common phrases. I have a strong musical background so pitch of words has always been something that feels like an important aspect of pronunciation. Studying it directly confirmed a lot of intuition I had but it’s important to understand so you can learn new ones you haven’t heard much!
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate, I've been picking up pitch accents for my earlier studies while continue ahead with my intermediate studies. so i feel like I'm still making progress. but along this road I've been having a consistent issue with picking up pitch accents for any word that has i り い し and so on, I'm having a great amount of trouble telling if the accent is going up or down, and the same goes for n since the word before seems to just go together too well. do you have any tips for getting over this hurdle? this goes to anyone who is studying pitch accents or if its just me. I have noticed that if its しい together most of the time its going down if it isn't already down the likes of your 新しい 悲しい etc tend to look like hei ban but the い in most instances if not all instances i have encounted always goes down, and this may turn into a bad habbit if this rule is untrue.... this may just mean i need to practice and study more but any help would be much appreciated! Many thanks, V
日本人ですけどpitch-accentはやった方がいいと思いますよ。必須化していいぐらい。I think it really makes your Japanese level higher and for me it’s more comfortable to talk with someone who is paying attention to pitch-accent than someone who isn’t. Understanding weird accented Japanese sometimes makes me annoyed, because it usually doesn’t make sense, actually.
I’m also learning Albanian because it’s my husband’s native language. They have a few letters like “l” and “ll” that I can’t really hear the difference (to me it just sounds elongated but I still get it wrong). It annoys the hell out of my husband when I get it wrong because to him it’s obvious! So I can empathize with Japanese speakers not hearing the “l”/“r” difference. I can definitely hear the difference in pitch accent, though, and to me that’s something I value getting right.
Im on chapter 17 on busuu up to negative verbs and use Japanese from zero/genki am i cooking with right stuff? Also pitch accent isnt that complicated ngl basically just emphasis/how long or short word is dragged out is how i see it/visualize it easier. I also speak spanish and some words in Japanese sound the same and even 見て is close af to mira which is look in spanish and when speaking i sound the same high pitched like when i speak spanish
2:27:00 how he analogizes to weightlifting he's absolutely correct. Working on pitch accent took me from having native speakers ask me to repeat something to getting actual compliments on my accent that isn't the dreaded 日本語お上手ですね.
For my Japanese studies currently pitch accent at the very bottom of my list. Only recently have begin to read, speak and keep up somewhat keep up with Japanese speakers with just my knowledge alone. It's thanks to studying kanji, shadowing, and various type of immersion training (Anime included). I still have only have the basic of Grammar down and I WANT to study that more. Should I study pitch accent too with everything else that I'm currently doing?
At the very least I would encourage you to check out the free lessons I have on youtube, as many of them will allow you to pick up on things you might otherwise take a fair bit of time to start noticing. If you find the information useful, then you may want to consider signing up for my course on Patreon, but of course no pressure either way, and think carefully before spending your money. Here's a good place to start: ruclips.net/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/видео.html
Random question: Will you sometime make a pitch accent course for other dialects? Do you speak other dialects or only standard Japanese? I believe you’re living in Kyushu so thought you might pick up the dialect for the prefecture you’re in? Since there’s not a ton of sources on those dialects I think it could be useful too, but maybe pain in the ass to create 😂
This is from my perspective who currently studied Japanese for over 3 years without doing much pitch accent studies. The one thing I found out throughout the year is that if you want to learn pitch accent through a course or through communications. It’ll all depends on the learner themselves. How you want to learn pitch accent depends on you. If you want to sound very native like and learn pitch accent through communications, after enough time of making the same mistakes, you’ll eventually stop making that mistake. Yes you’ll learn it slower than those who are studying pitch accent from the beginning. So in conclusion, how you want to learn pitch accent depends on you. They will all converge to native pitch accent once you spend enough time on it. Some are shorter than others, but you’ll eventually come back to pitch accent in the end. Either through communication or through a course.
1:34:10 I first thought I misheard but then I saw you reacting. I wonder if he mispoke or meant to say atamabaka instead of atamadaka. If it was a honest mistake, it was still funny.
I think perception and personal experience are a big factor. As someone who is haafu and born there, there were a lot of kids who nitpicked everything about me to reinforce that I wasn't really Japanese. I was always gaijin. After spending the majority of my life in the US and not keeping up with my Japanese, I am absolutely gaijin now and I am now more prone to get "jouzu" because I'm good enough to stumble by. But yes. Pitch-accent did matter - if I ever misspoke, I was dogged. But I think it matters more for not being perpetually perceived as a foreigner when you are not a foreigner to begin with. I know Japan has changed a lot though so my opinion is very much based on my experiences in the early 90s.
I started learning pitch accent fairly early into my Japanese journey. In fact, I learned pitch accent as I was starting to immerse in the language after having learned the basics and then continued to learn it and acquire it as I went on. Now 6 years into learning Japanese, I don't really need to think about pitch accent when speaking or reading. Occasionally, maybe I forget the accent of a word I dont use all that much or hear very much but it is rare so what I want to say is this: Yes, at first when you start speaking or reading out loud pitch accent is going to be an extra load on your brain, but with time you will acquire it from listening and practicing output so that it comes naturally to you.
I'd argue the pitch accent equivalent in english would be like how we put emphasis on certain syllables in words when speaking. Like when we say the word "banana," there is an emphasis in the middle like ba-NA-na. I'd imagine if someone said ba-na-NA enough times, the person they're talking to would eventually ask why they're saying the word "banana" like that. Another example is "waffle." It's usually said like "WA-ffle," and it would sound weird if someone started saying "wa-FFLE." I would imagine that a native english speaker hearing someone say "wa-FFLE" would give them the same weird feeling a japanese person would feel after hearing "ni-HON-go."
Yes. I can confirm this, because I have taught a lot of ESL students who had this type of problem. Other things to add would be intonation, sentence stress, and weak form.
The example I like to use is that you can tell exactly what I mean when I say pre-*zent* (verb) instead of *pre*-zent (completely unrelated noun with two different meanings). No syllabic stress would make this word even more ambiguous.
What you're describing is stress accent. It's equivalent to pitch accent in that it's how English differentiates meaning between words with the same pronunciation. i.e. "dessert" is a treat; "desert" is dry land full of sand.
@@EvaFuji Intonation is variation in pitch to communicate intended nuance/emotion. It has no bearing on the inherent meaning of individual words in a sentence. "You're coming with us," has a flat intonation. "You're coming with us?" has a rising intonation. Japanese is a pitch accent language unlike English, but both use intonation
This was interesting - thank you. The pitch accent mistakes in my Japanese speaking is one of the reasons I gave up studying actively speaking Japanese. As you say - most learners care that they make mistakes and want to avoid making them in the future. For me my pitch accent mistakes were so abundant that despite trying to correct them I lost all motivation and enjoyment to speak Japanese. I've come to think I'm just pitch accent deaf. I still enjoy reading in Japanese, but that's about it. So maybe I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but I largely agree with you, Dogen, on this. Studying pitch accent is valuable in wanting to speak better Japanese, especially if pitch accent is an area you're making a lot of errors in. Using your basketball analogy - if dribbling is your weak area, then I'm sorry, but you're going to have to practise dribbling if you want to improve your basketball game. The hard truth is that Japanese is a pitch accent language - you're kidding yourself if you think you can ignore pitch accent, hand wave it away or pretend it doesn't exist.
Didn't watch yet but one thing comes to my mind: Even while I'm at a very low level when it comes to speaking I get the feeling that when I try to have good pronunciation and pitch-accent Japanese people tend to understand me more easily.
@@diydylana3151 That's right. Even just knowing the 4 patterns makes your immersion a lot more effective. And you can learn about those patterns in half an hour I would say.
Note I'm far from the end of the video while writing this comment, sorry if I say things that have already been said. I've seen native speakers on both sides: some care a lot about pitch, while others don't care at all. Even those who care a lot probably won't criticize Japanese learners, so it's probably okay not to learn pitch. However, I believe that making your speech as clear as possible for your conversation partner is a respectful stance. I can say for sure listening to most skilled strangers in my native language is fatigue-inducing in the long run (at least for me). If all foreigners made the same mistakes, I would be used to those, but it's clearly not the case. They're all inconsistent "by default". The brain is a pattern recognition machine, and it works best with consistency. Each time someone makes a pronunciation/accent mistake, it feels like my brain is auto-fixing the sentence before "I can process the content". Some of my friends don't seem to care at all. The simple fact that I've seen some natives caring about pitch is enough reason for me to put some effort into having an 'okay pitch'.
One thing I've learned about myself is that when I hear people talk about the lack of importance of pitch accent (like the pitch accent is useless video), it takes a weight off my shoulders, whether correctly or not. I think myself and many others perceive the task of learning vocabulary, piecing together sentences, etc., difficult enough already that when someone brings up pitch accent, it feels a bit overwhelming. I think, "Are you telling me many words have patterns in how you're suppose to say them otherwise youre not even going to be understood?!" In the end, I don't want to be delusional and stick my head in the sand and pretend pitch accent isn't important if it is, but for some reason the perceived difficulty of it does pose an obstacle to my motivation of continuing to learn Japanese.
I was not aware that there was a "pitch-accent craze" or people against it, and I really don't care about it now after watching this, but some of the things in this guy's video triggered me sooo much. 😅 Not only in regard to learning Japanese, but any language really. The way he's phrasing things sounds needlessly hostile, despite what he's written in the description and pinned post... For me personally, this attitude of "when you get good overall, your accent/pronunciation will also naturally get better" is such bs... I struggled so much with English, even though my level was quite good and I had no problems using it for listening, reading and writing. But speaking was hell, because my otherwise high level was clashing with my bad pronunciation. I was aware of my strong accent and some of my bad habits, but couldn't exactly pinpoint and fix them, and it was a constant source of embarrassment, especially when communicating with native speakers for work. Did they understand me? Yes. Did they ever correct me or say something about my pronunciation? Of course not; we got our work done and they didn't care about anything else. But it was bothering ME and getting in the way of MY speaking. So I started recording myself and trying to figure out where I was getting things wrong, but it wasn't until I scheduled classes with a proper speech therapist that I fully understood my mistakes and more importantly - how to fix them. After just a couple of lessons, I felt such a boost in my confidence and I could hear significant changes in the way I spoke; it was amazing and I will never regret the time and money spent on these classes. So it really baffles me that there are people out there criticizing or even attacking those who put emphasis and importance on studying pitch accent, when it's an important part of the Japanese language, it's quite different than the stress accent most of us are used to, and not everyone will have the ears or time to acquire it by immersion. If the video was targeted towards the supposed "pitch accent fanatics", this should've been made way clearer. Being told that it's "useless", or will happen "naturally" in time, or that natives "don't give a f*ck" and thus we don't need to do anything about it, can be a pretty d*ck move. Because I've been the "I've watched a lot of anime and my native Japanese teacher praised me for my pronunciation, so it must be really good" person, until - like with English - I started recording myself and playing it back to my utmost horror and embarrassment. It sounded nothing like what I was hearing while speaking and I really wished my teaches had brought it up, instead of trying to "encourage" me with all the jouzus... I'm still not at the point where I've started actively studying pitch accent, but now I am at least aware of it, I make it a point to pay more attention when I'm listening and speaking, and I intend to give it some proper study time eventually. That should've been this guy's argument if he was addressing the people who obsess with pitch accent needlessly - just a simple "don't overthink it, but be aware of it". Instead, he went on a 20-minute rant with a lot of honestly bad "advice" and a mountain of anecdotal evidence, which can be countered with another mountain of anecdotal evidence... Sorry for the long post. Like I said, it really bugged me, but I don't intend to give his video any extra views and comments, so I'm venting here. 😄
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say. People who are downplaying it, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language. Good idea about recording yourself, I am gonna try that too :D Good luck with your journey!
36:28 Good point and it should be reasonably obvious to anyone in an international environment regardless of specific language. When somebody sounds obviously like a foreigner, you are not going to be an ass and point it out every sentence. You are going to wholeheartedly enjoy that you can communicate at all. But of course you do very clearly notice mistakes in pronunciation of your native language. And you automatically try to classify if the speaker is a foreigner, a native with a strong regional variation, or otherwise is maybe awkward or not good at speaking. Natives commenting they don't care about pronunciation of other natives, well, are probably just being polite.
100% with you on this. I was working with some Japanese coworkers for over a year, and speaking my basic japanese to them when able. And they'd teach me things here and there. Then one time, they taught me a new word which I repeated as i always do. and they laughed REALLY HARD. and I was like wait what was so funny? - I had perfect pitch accent when I said it, randomly. Having never done that before. over 1 year and they never even mentioned it, because of course my accent was wrong.
13 дней назад+1
You can use arrow keys on keyboard to navigate in the video, left and right 🙌
I think one important thing missed in his analysis is that the mistakes of a native Japanese speaker are not the same as those of a native English speaker. When I learned Italian, I mispronounced /l/ as dental-alveolar instead of the correct alveolar pronunciation (it is sometimes dental-alveolar, but it’s a special case). The difference is so small to me that I can barely tell them apart. I actually felt proud that I could properly pronounce the Italian l. The Italians, hearing this mistake, would often not know which word I was trying to say and as a result struggled to understand what I was trying to say. (I corrected this mistake, and I now get compliments in Italy for my “perfect” accent [it is not]) Very small details for language learners can easily become significant issues for comprehension.
If you listen to Japanese 10-20k hours you generally can pick it up or autocorrect your own pronunciation and pitch-accent (cuz Japanese is always flowing through your brain), at least that happened to me over spending half my life with the language. But I have also done a bit on Dogens Patreon course a few years ago and it confirmed that I was already solid enough even though I didn’t know some of the technical terminology (just like Japanese people don’t bother studying pitch accent in isolation unless they are linguists) I might do it on occasions cuz living in America nowadays😅 Usually I get words right from intuition , but I can understand that people without thousands of hours hearing the language might benefit a lot by studying it more in isolation. It saves them time and is more zoned in. I also majored in Japanese 15 years ago and there was one advanced pitch accent course that went through a ton of dialects and some quizzes destroyed me. It was a wake up call because I struggled with it then 😂 I can’t remember multiple accents for several dialects , and just know standard and KansaiBen. Hint of Tohoku dialect too. A part of me wants to master a region that most “foreigners” don’t speak just to develop a more unique character. Nowadays Japanese people are used to me using Kansaiben and it’s not super cool anymore. Before, people thought I was a bit more special lmao 😂
Can you make a video about counting accents? I always heard the difference between them "十三"や"十四"や"十五"や"四十"や"五十"... "一時"や"一時間"..."九円"や"十円"...but didn't know the rules about their accents. I have not seen anyone working on the accent of counting even though it is used a lot in everyday life. especially counting money. Thanks a lot.
Hello! I have about eight different lessons on numbers and money in my Patreon series. Please see lessons 65 through 73 on the index page here to get a preview of exactly what I cover: www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-index-16489306 Numbers are particularly complicated, with a lot of exceptions and speaker variation, but if you think this may be helpful I would encourage you to sign up!
I’ve been learning Japanese for 10 years and understanding Pitch Accent helps me to better differentiate between the Tokyo accent and Osaka accent. Rather than mixing the two, my goal is to separate the two clearly so I am conscious of when I’m speaking in Tokyo accent or Osaka accent, and hope to add on other accent later on in my Japanese learning journey. This is also a goal for my Chinese so I can either use standard mandarin or dialect influenced accents.
I think this is REALLY something like the learning style argument, some people might not need it, but for many people it will be necessary. It's like the immersion argument all over really. I do think for English-speakers, pitch accent is something we need to spend some amount of effort on. Also the "native speaking" use different pitch-accent argument is totally wrong. Japanese people are consistent with how they vary. (And there's a flow to how they vary - people in Tokyo from Aomori all sound the same.)
Many young people watch a lot of comedy on TV that uses Kansai-ben and will switch into a kind of 関西弁風味 when being funny. I tend to switch a lot between Shizuoka-ben, and imitation versions of Tokyo Japanese and Kansai Japanese because I live in Shizuoka but my closest relationships are with people from outside the prefecture. I don't believe that picking up dialectal elements of Japanese first will damage your learning in the long run, as many Japanese people pick up Tokyo Japanese as a kind of adult business voice anyway. As always in language learning the most important thing is to be aware of elements of the language because that's what lets you acquire them.
Idk, I feel like at the end all this immersion guy is saying is that there are many factors to learning a language and if you hyper focus on one at the expense of all the rest, you're not going to get the results you want, and that being comfortable in the language is important. These are both pretty DUH points to be making, but he's framing it in a pretty weird way by saying pitch accent is purely useless. It depends on your goals, weaknesses, strengths.
I agree, but also see merit in questioning whether or not studying pitch-accent is best for everyone. Think he made a good video talking through a lot of his own experiences related to the phenomena.
I found the explanation of "intonation" to be quite off. Intonation isn't about "how far" your pitch goes up and down. It is about the change in pitch on a sentence level, as opposed to word-level (accent). Through intonation, you can indicate a question or what parts in your speech you want to highlight. Note that it's not simply expressed through a higher/lower pitch than usual, but rather through specific intonation patterns. To indicate a question, for example, you'd go up slowly in pitch at the end of the sentence. ５時？ as in "Is it five o'clock?" would have a drop first at ご↓ and go up again after じ↑ (this is called 疑問上昇 = doubtful rise). Another example is the 上昇下降 pattern (rise and fall) which could be used in order to prompt the listener to take a specific action as in 「ちょっとあなた⤴️⤵️。もういい加減に起きてくださいよ。」 This is certainly hard to indicate with just emojis... Anyways, intonation has regional differences too, like in dialects of Nagoya or Kagoshima, where questions are indicated with a falling pitch towards the end. Also, the claim that intonation is somehow much more important than pitch accent to sound native is just an opinion right? I certainly don't believe so, and considering the immersion guy's flawed understanding of the concept of "intonation" suggests that he doesn't really know what he is talking about either.
I agree with this, but didn't point it out because it wasn't really related to the main points of the debate and therefore felt a bit like splitting hairs. Cheers!
@@Dogen I figured so. Thanks for making such a detailed and amicable response to the original video. Not getting hostile and even highlighting some of the good points that are made is certainly the right approach
I don't understand why people try to hard to write off pitch accent. "It's not important", "you don't need to study", etc. The same argument can be done to a lot of other aspects of the language. It's a part of the language, why not study it? Study it! Edit: 75% of the video in, and I have to say that the immersion guy is making a lot of moot points. He is generalizing exceptions. Exceptional people are not the norm. We are not them. Also, he seems to be confusing "accent" and "pitch accent". These are not the same thing. Final edit: Finished the video, and I my feelings were true. The guy is finding justifications for himself. He is a "immersion supremacist", and thinks that you can simply learn everything just by immersion... while the many accounts of advanced japanese language students who didn't aquire pitch accent show that that's not so simple. So what does he do about it? Rethinks his position due to new data and tweeks his study method? No, he looks for justifications as to why this aspect of the language is not important, and makes moral judgement on people who say the contrary. Dougen has been really polite with this guy, but truth is most of this guy's conclusions don't follow from his initial observations. He is just trying to not change his ways, and to pretend to be right while doing that.
For me the case is, When I speak English I know I pronounce the words right and even thou you can tell I have foreign accent it is different to my native one like I use English "r"'s and so on . with Japanese pitch accent it is very different then Polish or English and it has conncepts I am completely unaware off so I feel like it is something that I need to study at least a bit to be at least aware of some general rules and types of accent. It is the same with grammar. Sure you can get grammar just by listening to tons of materials but is it really the most effective? It is a mix of imput and deliberate study. One more point is the fact that I read more then I watch or listen, so at least at the moment If I want to read correctly I need to look up the accent of the word in the dictionary (or find a recording of it which takes more time). Knowing some general rules and being able to understand the pitch accent of looked up words is if not important, at least helpful. And third point is people learn more efectively in different ways. I don't learn well by mimicking and memorizing. I learn the best by understanding. Of course during day to day conversation there is no time to remember every rule and exception and apply them every time, but the most efective way for me to remember a word or phrase is to understand it's structure and logic behind it first. All that being said I bouth access to the videos and find them very helpful, thanks.
I really liked the description of pitch accent as diminishing returns, and its a concept that people should apply to everything. Everyone is going to have a different learning journey and its impossible to make a one size fits all learning program. 100% immersion is going to leave you with gaps, just as 100% textbook courses will. Maybe not equivalent magnitudes of gaps, but gaps nonetheless. But it's important to study a little bit of everything to a certain level. You should make a concerted effort as a learner to at least find your learning curve for each aspect of the language: grammar, vocab, kanji, pitch accent , pronunciation, levels of keigo, etc. That doesn't mean you have to hardline memorize every word or hard memorize every pitch accent, but just that you should understand how to improve yourself. Making a religion out of language learning is how you limit yourself.
I, personally, really disagree with the whole "the reason why your Japanese is bad is because all of it is bad, so there's no point in studying pitch accent" argument. The reason I disagree is partially what you said, but also; If everything of my Japanese is bad, and that's why I shouldn't study this part, then why I should I study other parts because my Japanese is also bad there? Isn't the whole point of learning and improving to, well, learn and improve? That would be like saying, you shouldn't improve your fingerings on a piano because it's just one small aspect and it's going to get better anyway with experience. Sure, it will ... but I could make it better faster and not have to worry about it as much while working on other aspects. On to the hearing of pitch accent part, I am a musician (probably could have guessed with my piano example xD) so the pitch difference is something i've always noticed ... but just because I can hear it doesn't mean I can easily emulate it or remember it just from hearing it alone, especially if it's only a couple times in a blue moon. It's something I would need to actually study to be able to do consistently, even if I can already hear it out the gate. Anyway, just my 2 cents on the matter. A friend recently introduced me to this channel when I mentioned to him that I was in the beginning stages of learning Japanese. I really enjoy your content, and I am going to be joining the pitch accent studies soon tm (when I can get the money to) Keep up the good work! ^^ Edit: typed the wrong word
The generous interpretation is that certain skills aren't appropriate to prioritize at some skill level. You won't see any benefit to your playing by studying voicings for tritone subs if you can barely play your chords in one key. However, I still don't think pitch accent maps too well. You can learn the basics (e.g. it exists) as you learn the basics of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Maybe this guy just thinks people are studying it way too deep compared to the rest of their skills, but with how he talks, it's hard to tell if anything but listening is acceptable.
It honestly depends on your learning style. If you're a gestalt learner where you learn to speak by memorizing and scripting entire phrases, learning pitch accent is vital in order to *hear* the different words in the sentence and how to say them exactly and/or change your tone and pitch according to different social contexts. It's a manual learning process for many people who aren't neurotypical. If you're a gestalt learner even learning English as a native speaker is like learning a foreign language and you never feel fully fluent.
Most people learning another language never learn an accent and I think that’s a travesty in its own right. How is it not a grating experience every time you say something and hear someone native speak? I can’t comprehend it.
About ten years ago I met a guy who had lived in Japan for 25 years. I said "so your Japanese must be great" he then reeled off like 20 seconds of Japanese. And even at the time, I remember thinking "that sounded like English just wholly made of words that I don't understand" Even before I'd started learning Japanese, I could tell his intonation was way off.
My Japanese is not great... However, I remembered that encounter and didn't want to sound like that guy. So I took pitch accent into account right from the beginning. Japanese people don't give me the 日本語上手 instead, they almost always say 発音うまい！ My grammar still sucks, but they notice the fact that my pronunciation is good.
@@キラキラくりくり頭 Nice story. I think it's the same for foreigners using wrong stress on words. We don't judge them, but sometimes it's difficult to understand. I don't want to be hard to listen to, so I work on pronunciation with the same dedication as the other aspects. Good luck on your journey, you are on the right path !
It's true it's not his place to tell what people should care about, but it's good that the guy tries to put anxieties to rest for some people and bring some mundane reality into the mix. Because some people might inflate the stakes based on what they hear online
I wonder if the remark around 1:59:00 about "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is good" would be better understood as "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is clear". If you speak clearly like an audiobook narrator and enunciate well, then you'll probably almost always be understood regardless of pitch, but if you slur and speak fast and mumble and stumble over or approximate some mora like normal native speakers do at native speed, then not having a correct/recognizable pitch contour would probably make you *impossible* to understand.
I never quite understand what people have against pitch accent in Japanese. Like from my perspective, my goal as a language learner is to learn the language as the native speakers speak it. My goal is to ideally sound as close as I can to such a speaker in a way that makes sense If their speech clearly shows evidence of pitch accent, than I'm beholden to learn that, the ins and outs of that, just as any other form of pronunciation. I think of trying my best with that as just being respectful to the language. I'm not going to go out of my way to butcher it, so it doesn't really make sense to me why people might think it's "useless," like I don't think they really have the right to judge it so, that's not their responsibility nor do they have the authority to do so without presumption
I think people who are downplaying pitch accent, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language. You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. We will never sound native, but Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say. Good luck on your journey!
@@kingofthejungle2894 Potentially yeah. There's a tendency for learners of one language to downplay the importance of features that aren't shared in their native language, or and in my thinking this is probably the main one in this context, is to downplay the importance of features with a relatively low functional load. Functional load is essentially how much a particular thing linguistically speaking impacts meaning. As an example the difference between initial P and B in English has a fairly high functional load as it distinguishes many words like pat and bat, and this is a quite common distinction However with initial Th, where there's a similar voicing distinction as between P and B, there isn't a high functional load as there are relatively few words that're distinguished only by voicing starting with Th (this is actually usually considered the phonemic distinction with the lowest functional load) Thus a non native learner whose native language doesn't have Th sounds may not necessarily see the importance between them and go with whichever is easiest at the moment, which will result in a distinctive accent. If they're trying and that's just what they got to work with then that's fine and valid, but it's a different matter altogether if people start trying to actively downplay the importance of th voicing as something not important to care about _to other learners_ since it spreads bad habits. A similar thing I think is happening with pitch accent here in Japanese Actually a personal example, or semi-personal more accurately, as I've just got to the section about L and R getting confused by Japanese speakers being akin to pitch accent mistakes; Pa Dutch a language I speak a bit of has this sound /β˕/ spelt with a W that's half way between English W /w/ and English V /v/ and in Pa Dutch accents of English Or more accurately non native speakers of English whose native language is Pa Dutch and aren't Amish (the conservative anabaptist sects like the Amish learn English very thoroughly from about the age of 7 or so onwards) who are nowadays very rare or even extinct historically would often pronounce their W's *and* their V's with this /β˕/ sound. But what's interesting is what happened in the early 20th century. See that's when many Pa Dutch parents stopped teaching their children the language and started using English exclusively, but they were using this dialectal form of English influenced by their original language And this /β˕/ sound didn't make it into Pa Dutch English, instead they adopt the usual /w/ and /v/ of English buuut they put them in non standard positions. Essentially Pa Dutch speakers who could pronounce the /w/ vs /v/ distinction in English often couldn't do so consistently and these inconsistencies got 'set' so to speak when they passed it on to their kids, becoming lexically coded (i.e. individual speakers at that point were no longer mixing up W and V but rather words were set with one or the other but in nonstandard positions)
some people can't notice a chord having one note with +- 10 cent deviation. these people are extremely unlikely to ever pick up pitch accent through input alone. Their brain is just literally not wired to care so much about pitch on the whole, for these the only way to improve pitch accent is deliberate practice, not just the patterns, but rather the ability to even tell the differences. for those who can tell a 10 cent deviation they might be fine with just immersion/input, and those to whom such a deviation is simply grating input alone is very likely enough. of course, this is all predicated on how much the learner cares about sounding good. but we are on a dogen video. we care. additionally i think it needs to be stated that yes there is possibly undue attention given to pitch accent, but we have to keep in mind this is a /very/ recent phenomenon. these days /because/ pitch accent is so hyped a new learner to japanese is likely to discover that it exists, and as such, at least be somewhat aware that it's something to pay attention to. before this occurred not only were there /very/ few resources to study it there was also no collective awareness that it was something to pay any attention to at all. and so japanese learners will do better on average. this is in part thanks to mattvsjapan and dogen being such vocal advocates for it.
Bro pronounced that RUclipsr name like 5 times in a row around 49:00 and even after rewatching I still didn't catch it. Maybe I should go back to studying English before I continue with Japanese 😅
As you all know German natives have usually a strong accent when we speak English. It is not that we couldnt speak it better, but rather we are early on disincentivized by our peers in class and even teachers. If you speak in a perfect correct American accent you get kind of bullied. They will say things like "Are you trying to be cool?" or "Do you think you are an American now?" Also in Switzerland where Swiss-German is spoken we find it kind of awful if foreigners try to speak Swiss-German. We prefer they speak German instead, otherwise we feel they are imitating our identity. This is also the reason I do not pay too much attention to Japanese pitch accent since it feels I try to pretend someones identity I am not. I know this might sound strange to you, but this is how I personally feel. It feels like I am insulting their identity if I speak 100% pitch accent correct Japanese.
Wait they dont like foreigners trying to speak Swiss-German? That's the first I ever heard of that because I mostly hear from other Swiss people that they think its great for foreigners to speak Swiss-German and appreciate foreigners trying to integrate as long as it's not bastardized/half-assing the dialect. Ik there are different local dialects and it probably is frustrating hearing a foreigner mix those dialects(especially mixing it with standard german) but I usually see the distain pointed at Germans trying to speak the local dialect. If you're comfortable going in-depth, why is it insulting to hear foreigners speak Swiss-German?
@@MegaLokoLolo Sorry, I was not very precise with my comment, actually I was not precise at all. It is true - as you said - that this applies usually only to Germans. If a Portuguese, Thai or Iranian immigrant tries to speak it, it is usually fine - they will never nail it, but the effort is usually appreciated and it sounds kind of cute and even if it is a mix of German and half broken Swiss German it is fine. Our national identity is very strong and our dialect is the biggest part of this identity. Almost every little village has a distinguishable dialect and indicates your origin. So you kind of could argue if Germans speak Swiss-german that it is kind of cultural appropriation especially since there is not one single dialect. I cant really explain it. But I just watched a documentary about this topic and half of the Swiss think it is okay if Germans speak Swiss German and the other half thinks it is not.
It's sad when you don't even hear the difference in PA, even when someone tries to explain it to you. Doesn't help that in my native language phonetic stress is instead represented with volume/length rather than pitch. Then again I don't distinguish similar pitch in music either.
great to come from a non-phonemic (stress) language, so neither the stress accent examples nor the pitch accent examples make any intuitive sense to me. Like both of the "tomorrow" examples sound pretty much the same to me, or at least i wouldn't be able to say which one is correct, so it's not a hypothetical example in that sense. But hey at least we have the same concept of consonant and vowel length.
Развлечения
Please don't send @theimmersionguy any negativity-almost us RUclipsrs are guilty of leaning too hard into thumbnails and titles for views, myself included, and he's addressed these points in the top comment. He brings up a lot of great points in this video, and I would encourage everyone to watch any follow-up he makes on this topic, as I'm sure he'll make good arguments against my blind spots on this topic, the same way that he did here. 皆さん冷静に
"Success is a matter of INtensity, never EXtensity." You were right to specialize.
I learned Japanese for 10 years before studying pitch accent. It undoubtedly helped my pronunciation and perception of Japanese. After studying pitch accent I began getting compliments from natives about intonation and been told "you don't have an American accent." Before studying pitch accent, I didn't really get those.
I’ve had the same experience, I would imagine every other learner who’s seriously studied it has as well. The improvements to your speaking are tangible and the feedback is surprisingly direct, ie people telling you there’s no ‘American’ (or whatever you’re from) accent where before they said nothing of the sort
Japanese people talk/joke/mock/ each other's "intonation" of certain words all the time. You can see this often on their variety shows on tv. They just misused the word "intonation" for "pitch". So pitch is very much a part of Japanese language, just no one puts into the basic textbooks.
It's the same with the English language's requirement for constantly vibrating your vocal cords. Every native speaker does it, but no one puts into our textbooks. So us Asians end up speak English in a very "choppy" manner, because in our language, vocal cords stop vibrating between words or sounds.
well obviously... when you learn and practice pronounciation / accent you get the accent, and when you don't practice you don't get the accent of the language but keep your own
It's like if you say "I practiced maths and I got better in math!! I'm so surprised, even my math teacher said I'm good at math!!
@@_capu the distinction here is, studying pitch accent specifically rather than trying to pick it up by osmosis. Judging by the premise of the vid you are commenting on, the efficacy of pitch accent study isn’t obvious to everyone, which is why I chimed in…
Accents are important in English, but if Japanese is spoken with a strong accent, it's hard to understand as well. When people from English-speaking countries say "Tokyo," it basically sounds like "patent."
Native speakers don't just randomly fluctuate between different regional accents - they either have a consistently mixed accent, or they have acquired multiple accents that they use in different scenarios. But no native speaker will pronounce e.g. 日本語 with two different pitch patters in two consecutive sentences, whereas non native speakers who don't hear pitch will do this all the time. It's this sort of inconsistency that's specific to learners which results in being hard to understand.
Everything is correct, but the last sentence I doubt that it is especially hard to understand.
@@tangente00 日本語のネイティブとしては、日本語学習者のピッチアクセントのinconsistencyのせいで理解がしにくくなることは頻繁にあります。ただ、hard to understandというほどでもないので、harder to understandといった方が正確かもしれませんね。
One difference with English is since it's an international language people are much more used to hearing non-native speakers of English and dealing with weird accents than Japanese speakers are.
Also the fact that English just has so many technically native accents. When people hear my accent in English they usually assume I’m a “native speaker from somewhere else”. The Americans guess that I’m Canadian, Canadians think I’ve spent some time in Britain and so on forth. Now yes Japanese also has dialects but it’s still one geographically small country, there will be less options for “native from somewhere else”. In English everyone truly has an accent, there is always a “native from somewhere else” option where as in Japanese it’s basically either that you sound Japanese or you don’t
😮😮😊😮😢
O p p l@@yeontanseyebrows5588😊l p oolo😅l😊😅 plplojky😮okmky 1:45:58 please on your phone 😅
I was once trying to tell a Japanese person I like salmon and she thought I meant alcoholic beverages so that alone tells me Dōgen might be onto something
Been there haha
ha, stories like these make the most elegant examples.
"Despite my fluent Japanese, Japanese ppl often respond in English or prefer to speak with less fluent Asians": There're comedy videos on RUclips about this. They don't know Eng-speakers’ Japanese accent is intense, sounding as if words are broken into 3 parts. This is more pronounced than Asian speakers. Pitch accent matters a lot.
Half an hour into Dogen‘s response and I’m ready to sign up for his Patreon pitch accent thing - not necessarily to learn pitch accent in itself but especially because I LOVE learning and the degree of differentiation, sensory & intellectual granularity with which he approaches and presents this (and other) topics. Just so stimulating to my brain and ears, and it puts me in touch with “Japan” and its lovely people. Ready to sign up with me?
Anyway, let’s keep learning languages fun.
In recent years, information is around in exponential abundance, and almost everything has become hyper-teachable. Still we have to do the work, in any way that works. No shortcut there ;)
Thank you for the kind words Saraha! Really appreciate it. I took a lot of time creating the series and am proud with how it turned out, so that means a lot. Best of luck with your Japanese studies, pitch-accent and otherwise! 頑張ってね！
A drive-by comment by a japanese-english person. Intonation is the first thing you immediately notice if done poorly (assuming decent vocab/grammar). For example, in western films, you can almost immediately tell who is non-native/not fluent in japanese by how they speak, not what they say.
41:59 Teaching someone anything, especially a subtle repeating pattern like pitch accent, that they were ignorant of unlocks an enhanced awareness of it. What was ignored as background noise suddenly becomes prominent. It's kind of like when someone you know gets a new car, you start to notice that model everywhere.
Learning pitch accent earlier will help your brain to look out for it and encode it into memory subconsciously, especially when you're learning new words. Earlier awareness also means less unlearning of incorrect pitch. Telling someone to ignore pitch accent is just going to extend that unlearning period.
That doesn't mean one should overwhelm or obsess over pitch accent.
Couldn’t agree more!
I know a Japanese woman that moved to Norway as an adult and she speaks Norwegian incredibly fluently because not only is the phonology almost identical, but both languages use pitch accent. That is to say, knowing pitch accent (even from a different language) is clearly a major advantage in sounding native. Almost no adult immigrants sound anywhere close to that native.
ピッチアクセントと、音の長さの違いも重要ですね。難しい日本語を知らなくても、ピッチアクセントが上手だとかなりの上級者か日本育ちのように聞こえます。
Just to speak to your point at 36:52 about how you won't get corrected until your PA is already getting better: I'm in a primarily JP-EN language exchange Discord, and I've gotten to know dozens of Japanese people there who're interested in learning English. We have a practice in the server that you can add an emote to your name to show that you want people to correct your language mistakes.
On paper, this sounds like it would lead to a lot of back and forth where people are consistently correcting each other - and corrections do happen. But largely, even when users with this emote make mistakes, they don't get corrected, and I've chalked that up to two reasons.
1. Basically what you say - even if someone is inviting you to correct them, if they're making a wide variety of mistakes, constantly (more than once per sentence), you lose the motivation to correct them. It's counterproductive to correct them every single time, because that would take too long, and they wouldn't be able to absorb all of it. But more importantly...
2. You're just trying to talk to them - you're not their teacher, you're their friend. Correcting them breaks the flow of a conversation that you're trying to have, and breaking that flow is fine every now and then, but if you correct someone's mistakes every time they open their mouth, you won't actually be able to hold the conversation you're trying to have to begin with.
In the end, the people who I find myself correcting the most are the friends who I feel have the BEST English, because they make mistakes the least often, and they're the easiest to explain to, since they have the highest capacity to comprehend what I'm trying to teach them.
Would you be so kind as to share a link to this server, or is it invite only 😅
"There are other factors, things like your actual pronunciation". THIS. This is what also tells me that they do not understand Japanese phonology AT ALL. Pitch IS part of the pronunciation. Again, it's not a decisive feature in English, but it is in Japanese. It's as important as long-short vowel distinction, but native speakers might not consciously value it as much because it doesn't have an equivalent in writing. It doesn't mean that they don't notice and it doesn't mean that it can't alter their perception of your Japanese.
It makes me wonder if this person's pitch accent is *so bad* that natives don't even bother bringing it up, as you mentioned in your example earlier.
I would actually wager it's quite good if he studied pitch accent in the past and also did a mostly immersion based approach! I think his frustrations come more from the perceived 'hype' surrounding pitch accent, if that makes sense. Appreciate the comment!
As a native speaker of Swedish, that has pitch accent, getting the prosody, i.e. the pitch accent, is MORE important than making the correct sounds of the different vowels and consonants. The rhythm of the words are essential to native speakers when we parse what someone is saying. As for Japanese, the basic vowels and consonants are fairly easy (since god did not bless them with 14 different vowel sounds), so why would someone focus on that?
20 yr resident of Japan, 34 yrs studying Japanese, and I just discovered the pitch accent about a year or 2 ago. Before that, I was baffled that some Japanese didn't understand me. Since I started trying to improve my pitch accent, this happens less often. Learn pitch accent early. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Why not give yourself every advantage by learning pitch accent?
For the average person it's a scam, you've lived and worked there for 20 years, the average person just starting out or who will only ever go to Japan on holiday it's a waste of time.
Don't worry. They won't understand you even if you NAIL the pitch accent. 😂🤣😂
Haven’t heard all 3h yet, but love this so far! You respectfully present your points. Loved the point around 35:35, that Jpn native speakers recognize improved fluency, which to me (when I lived in Japan) meant hearing “Nihongo jōzu” less and less! Great video Dogen!!!
It's a very good point to be honest. It's like natives subconsciously go from "This person is a learner, it's normal for them to make mistakes, I'll just whitenoise them" to "Wait no, this person is *good* at Japanese, it makes no sense for them to make this mistake, raise the alarms". Even as a language teacher, there's nuanced mistakes that you wouldn't correct in, say, an A2 course, but you would in a C1 course, because the bar isn't set at the same height in each case.
As a linguistic nerd, I'm not obsessed with "sounding native" but I still study pitch accent because I think it's a very interesting feature of Japanese. Knowing pitch accent not only makes your Japanese more understandable but also makes Japanese more understandable to you. It's not about vanity, it's about comprehension.
Having a broken dialect due to moving is actually a good point. When I lived in North Carolina, I lived in Tarboro. Outsiders might pronounce the town's name as "Tar-boh-roh," but people there pronounce it as "Tah-bruh." I often went to another town called Greenville. (We often joked that this town is so small, you'll blink and drive right past it.) Some might pronounce "green-veel," but we pronounced it as "green-vuhl."
Meanwhile, on the other side of North Carolina, there's a lighthouse called "Bodie Island." I and everyone I knew, including my parents, say "Boh-dee," but people from there call it "Bah-tee."
When I moved to New Jersey, I could not understand anyone. They talked way faster and used different terms to describe things. (Someone from North Carolina might say, "crank up the car, cut that light on, cut out the light," while someone from New Jersey might say, "start the car, turn on the light, turn off the light."
I also got a lot of place names wrong. Raritan is "Ray-rih-tuhn," not "Rah-rih-tuhn." Hoboken is "HO-bo-ken," not "ho-BO-ken." Newark is "Nohrk," not "New-ark." Hamilton is "HA-milton," not "ha-MIL-ton." Trenton is "Tren'n," not "Tren-ton." McDonald's is "mehk-donalds," not "maek-donalds." Absecon Lighthouse is "AB-secon," in not "abSEcon." Secaucus is "seh-KAH-kuhs," not "SAE-kah-suhs." I still have to listen very carefully when speaking with someone from New Jersey.
When I moved to Pennsylvania, I often got corrected on street names. Schoenersville Rd is "Shay-nerz-veel" and not "Skoh-nerz-veel."
Interestingly, video games also shaped my dialect. For years, I pronounced "schedule" as "SHEH-ju-ahl" rather than the American way to pronounce it, "SKEH-ju-ahl," because I played a train simulator from Australia.
Funny, I would immediately pronounce Schoenersville as Sherh-nas-vill, since Schoener looks like it's an umlaut-less way of spelling Schöner.
@@n8pls543 that's exactly where it comes from yeah. A lot of German taken into English this way, the umlauted vowel unrounds. Same if it's from Pa Dutch, which likewise unrounds front rounded vowels. What's left is something like an eh or ay sound
Pronouncing ö as 'er' is more of a American accent in German type thing, which is more likely to pop up in individual accents rather than place names which tend to be either more thoroughly anglicized or dialectal in origin
I was a bit wary checking out this video, because your comedic persona is a bit arrogant, so I thought it might be something you based on a real trait, but you quickly put my worries to rest by being fair, humble and open in. Thank you for your video. I glad I watched it
why do english-speaking people on yt argue so much over this?
It is a feature of the languge. If you want to speak it well you should pay attention to it, preferably as early as possible. End of the story.
That's so right!
It literally is A FEATURE of the language. It is there. Whether you want to learn it or not.
Its also a part of the language saying the correct conjugation for example but i dont care if foreigners or immigrants saying them wrong. If i understood them, why should i point them out for their mistakes when literally every non native speakers make them on regular basis?
@@jannemakela8107 yeah you don't care but you notice it. That's not the point of learning it.
The argument is, that you might not need to learn it deliberately, because you acquire it with replicating a lot of input. So it's the argument over methodology, prioritisation and efficiency. As Dogen mentioned you can arrive at the same place with different paths, but you can do this once per language, so it's hard to compare with your own experience
As a Japanese learner from China, pitch accent is included in our factory settings!
Still need tweaks here and there though.
I think the idea that foreigners mistakes would ever sound like a native's mix of dialects is kind of absurd. As for tonal patterns, they are often different, but they are consistent. A second language speaker who do not understand them will not sound like a native mixing dialect, but like a foreign accent. Swedish has pitch accent, and the pitches are different in different regions - but they're almost always consistent over the patterns. So, if you make a word dialectal, you must still use the same pattern but different accent on the syllables. This is the same as different dialectal variations, and this is the reason we very quickly can adapt and understand speakers from other places, because we quickly adapt to the correct patterns. If the patterns are wrong, it is going to be meh.
Also, I am not sure for Japan, but in Sweden, most people speaking Swedish have no idea we have a pitch accent. Unless given a minimal pair, the concept is entirely foreign to most native speakers. It is not marked in our writing, and it is not taught in school. Thus, a lot of people would be able to say they do not care for the accent. However, I have never heard a Swedish speaker make an error when it comes to pitch accent in a grammatical form or a word they know. It's notoriously hard to sound native like in Swedish as well, and this is because the accents are hard unless you have them in your own language.
Some of my family moved to Österbotten where the Swedish dialects have lost the pitch accent. It's not like I can't understand the locals when I visit, but there's a certain friction to comprehension that requires that bit more extra effort. Though as you point out, since they're internally consistent within their accent, it is still somewhat different from second language speakers.
You never know how intelligible do you sound to a native speaker! My example comes from Swedish, which is a Germanic language, but with a pitch accent. From my experience of learning the language, it was extremely frustrating when I would learn a word, pronounce all the syllables "just fine" (as I thought), but even my Swedish partner would not understand me, despite being used to my Slavic accent in English. After 5-7 failed attempts to pronounce the word at him, he would finally get it, and pronounce it back with a slight pronunciation twist that was apparently making all the difference between being unintelligible and understood. After learning and practicing Swedish for a couple of years, I haven't had any problems with getting people to understand me as of recently, but some days I can hear my own accent, and it pisses me off terribly. I can hear that I sound out of whack, but just can't tune it back in!
Long story short, stay humble and don't think you're easy to understand. People might just be really polite and good at guessing things from the context. On top of that, don't underestimate the compound effect that small errors make when they snowball. One fumbled word in a sentence is usually easy to understand, but half a sentence pronounced slightly wrong is just so difficult to make sense of!
I must also say that I am annoyed at the argument of "git good and your pitch accent will fall into place", as if getting fluent is a walk in the park. How about using different tools to get fluent, such as both immersion and pitch accent? Not everyone in the learning community picks up and is able to reproduce nuance just from the listening practice, and approaching language learning from different angles is always a good idea. I don't like how OOP is dunking on the "pitch accent cult" while promoting a different "holy grail" approach. Again, from my personal experience with Swedish, I got a huge boost in understanding other people when I started to speak myself, as some things finally "clicked". But then to get better at speaking, I had to both practice speaking, acquire input (that I was finally able to understand better), and review some more formal rules to fine-tune the intuitive understanding that I got. There's zero conflict between formally studying pitch accept and using immersion. Although, if you just want to watch anime and get bored by more formal study forms, then just leave it at that and don't hate on other people providing unique teaching materials. Just letting things happen and hoping that your brain will act like a lint roller is all fun, until that doesn't work out as planned. Work hard where it's due, accept your flaws, and don't get worked up if someone cares about something you don't. I still pronounce consonants too hard for Swedish, so people most often identify my accent as Finnish. If I were to choose to not care, I wouldn't have the moral right to belittle people who work on fixing this flaw in their speech. Especially using all those snarky comments and weird labels that OOP chose for the pitch accent learning community.
Anyway, I'm off to submit a petition to make you all say イケア instead of Aykeea, have a good day!
Why would you avoid output for the first years of study?
Besides one studious PhD in a bar in Thailand, is there any evidence that this has benefits? What benefits?
Something else that these people probably don't know is that there is a lot of correspondance among the different Japanese accents. What I mean is that it is often possible to predict where the accent will fall in the Kansai accent if you know where it falls in the Tokyo one. Some Japanese are also used to hearing other regional accents, of course. So, to say that "if you have the wrong accent but everything else is great, you'll just sound like you're from another region" is plainly wrong. When foreigners have the wrong pitch, it's all over the place, it doesn't follow a "logic" like it would in Kansai-ben and so on.
Thank you Dogen!
I always learn a lot with you
People think "English has prosody and it's not a big deal, so Japanese must work the same way". That's just wrong. English obviously has pitch, but it's not a phonological difference. It cannot alter the meaning of words. It is a separate phonemic difference in Japanese, so it can create confusion and make natives misunderstand words, just like L and R in English.
Thank you for answering a lot of questions I had about the value of learning pitch accent and reasonably responding to those with somewhat contrary views.
I kind of get where he is coming from. When you listen to people teaching pitch accent, you get the impression, that if your pronunciation (including accent) is not perfect, you are bad at Japanese. Witch is not true.
I usually tell my students, that they need to get basics right, so their Japanese is easy to listen to, and from that point, it is more beneficial to focus on other stuff. Native Japanese teachers who I spoke to about it, all agreed.
Very fair!
39:48
When I was in Japan recently, I got like FIVE 上手's. This was how I knew...I sounded like a beginner. 😂
It hurts every time.
@@honeybunbadger I feel you. This is so sad and funny at the same time.
I just got done watching a segment of this video on stream (it seemed apposite because I'd been meaning to look at it and a beginning Japanese learner in my chat asked what the deal with pitch accent was), and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how you approach this.
My association with the Japanese language goes back to the late 80s, and I had already been working for roughly 20 years as a translator and occasional interpreter in Japanese, and getting mistaken (mostly) on the phone for a native speaker before I'd even heard of the concept of pitch accent. My awareness of it was limited to noticing differences before I assumed a word I had only seen in writing was pronounced and how I heard people actually pronouncing it (one early example was -gaoka place names); I overwhelmingly picked it up by hearing the emphasis of certain syllables without actually having a name for the thing I was hearing. I'd basically never heard any theory on the phonology of the language until watching your videos, from which I've learnt quite a lot.
It seems to me that what is taken as an 'obsession' with pitch accent is actually just a neglected aspect of Japanese pronunciation actually getting its due for the first time; naturally, there is a massive spike in the attention paid to something that previously had barely been acknowledged.
My main problem with The Immersion Guy's take is that a lot of vague terms end up doing a lot of work. What is 'sounding good', for example? Surely, that's an extremely subjective standard. If someone's idea of 'sounding good' does not include reliably accurate pitch accent (or other syllable emphasis patterns depending on language), then obviously it is by definition possible to 'sound good' without acquiring them. That does not, however, mean that acquiring them in one way or another (my recommendation in this case is a combination of conscious awareness of pitch accent and what it sounds like with just listening to people and modelling one's speech on them) is pointless.
As a Texan, what you likely heard was the Southern accent, but among just us, most of us have a more specific texas accent, and its likely that you didn't hear it specifically because you spoke with the west coast accent, which is how we speak in school, even in texas.
A few years ago, my wife at the time (she was Hawaiian) noticed when i finally started speaking in my texas accent at home, and she she said it felt like i was finally letting my guard down.
Love your content, specifically the knowledgeable humility you approach everything with
Thanks Dogen 🙏 …for skillfully sharing your linguistic understanding… but I think even more for meeting this critique with so much clarity and focus, inspite of the many snide notes in said critique.
Regardless of what "The Immersion Guy" was actually trying to say, I found his tone and delivery off-putting and inflammatory. He claims he didn't mean to instigate, yet denigrates "phonetics nerds" and "pitch propagandists" at length, as if his approach was the one true way to do things. Even the title of his video is hyperbole and clickbait; can he really claim pitch accent is "useless?" The irony is that "The Immersion Guy" is the one acting like a propagandist (in a ploy to get more subscribers), no one else.
I can't imagine how people who are interested about studying phonetics and pitch accent, much less those who teach it and have studied it intensively, wouldn't be offended by his harsh tone. He also seems to like the word "naughty" for some strange reason.
I think you and Yuda's point at the 1:02:00 mark about Kyoto is *similar* to some things in English, too. For example, if I were to say "I need to go out and buy tiiiiiires..." it would sound like I'm beginning to list out a set of items I need to buy, but if I'm just saying tires in that different way, I could throw the listener off if they were expecting a list and I really just meant, "I need to go out and buy tires."
I think a good argument for pitch accent is simply asking how well do you want to communicate and be understood by others, because it doesn't just make you sound "more native" (with the goal of having your ego stroked), but rather how much effort do you wish to put forward to help other Japanese in understanding you and feeling comfortable listening to you. It's making it easier for people to converse with you, i.e. for their benefit.
I think this is an excellent analogy to pitch accent for us English speakers. It definitely can throw the listener off … which sucks when you work hard to have grammar and vocab locked down but still get confused Japanese faces
3時間もあるのでまだ全部視聴してないけど、まず学習者がピッチアクセント(要は日本語における音の高低、高低の流れ、節(ふし))を聞き取れないとどうにもならないかと思う。
この音の高低が聞き取れれば、ネイティブの日本語話者がしゃべった音声を聞こえた通りに真似る作業を重ねるだけ。
発声が初めは下手でもちゃんと聞こえているならば練習を重ねて少しずつネイティブの音に近づいていくだろう。
音の高低が聞こえないならば、「なにやら◯◯という言葉は平板で言うらしい」みたいな神秘的な話に終始する。
じゃあ聞こえるようになるためにはどうするのかと言うと正直わからないが、根本的には、まずは2文字や3文字レベルの極短い日本語の音声を何度も真剣に聞いてそれを自分で発声し、それを録音する、それを聞いてみてお手本の日本語と聴き比べ、発音、音の長さ、リズム、そして高低が合ってるかを確認する、という作業を愚直にするしかないのではないか。これをいろんな単語でひたすら繰り返し、この単語に関してはokとなったら少しずつそのお手本の日本語の文字数を長くする(長くなるほど再現が難しくなるから)。
Just as another data point against "immersion will handle everything": I know someone who lived here in Japan for 30+ years, very eloquent and well spoken, even does MCing for local events.
His pitch accent is very noticeably foreign. Immersion isn't a cure-all, and you do need to put some work into it.
I'm reminded a bit of a lecture I heard through the JET Program. The speaker was questioning what we define as "native English" giving examples of the differences between the US, England, and India, all of which have English is taught as the official language, but have a great variety of accents, regional dialects, and even vocabulary (e.g. "pants" vs "trousers"). The sort of thesis of the lecture was that "native speaker" is a poor metric to use in education, and that we should encourage variety over the "blonde hair blue eyed foreigners" in the textbooks.
I think this perspective makes a lot of sense and is probably close to where immersionguy is coming from. On the flip side, and to Dogen's point, people raised in the same environments (or who start in an environment and then move to a new one) all tend to speak in a similar way and have consistent dialects within their native language, which we could call standard or correct. We could say that Americans who learn Japanese have a consistent and similar "dialect" in Japanese, or that they make similar "mistakes" like over-emphasizing words or using the wrong pitch.
I think the key point of contention here is: where is the line between "accent" and "error" when it comes to pronunciation? And I don't know if that question has an objective answer.
The line is consistency. Dōgen said that in the video.
As a Japanese, I’m glad to see Japanese learners discuss this kind of deep topic. Until I found Dogenさん, I even didn’t know the word, “pitch accent”, which is I assume difficult for Japanese learners to acquire.
If you listen to a lot of Japanese speech you can start to pick up on pitch accent unintentionally, at least for common phrases. I have a strong musical background so pitch of words has always been something that feels like an important aspect of pronunciation. Studying it directly confirmed a lot of intuition I had but it’s important to understand so you can learn new ones you haven’t heard much!
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate, I've been picking up pitch accents for my earlier studies while continue ahead with my intermediate studies. so i feel like I'm still making progress.
but along this road I've been having a consistent issue with picking up pitch accents for any word that has i
り い し and so on, I'm having a great amount of trouble telling if the accent is going up or down, and the same goes for n since the word before seems to just go together too well. do you have any tips for getting over this hurdle? this goes to anyone who is studying pitch accents or if its just me.
I have noticed that if its しい together most of the time its going down if it isn't already down the likes of your 新しい 悲しい etc tend to look like hei ban but the い in most instances if not all instances i have encounted always goes down, and this may turn into a bad habbit if this rule is untrue....
this may just mean i need to practice and study more but any help would be much appreciated!
Many thanks,
V
Which was the video where Dogen changes from a British accent to southern accent in the same sentence
日本人ですけどpitch-accentはやった方がいいと思いますよ。必須化していいぐらい。I think it really makes your Japanese level higher and for me it’s more comfortable to talk with someone who is paying attention to pitch-accent than someone who isn’t. Understanding weird accented Japanese sometimes makes me annoyed, because it usually doesn’t make sense, actually.
I’m also learning Albanian because it’s my husband’s native language. They have a few letters like “l” and “ll” that I can’t really hear the difference (to me it just sounds elongated but I still get it wrong). It annoys the hell out of my husband when I get it wrong because to him it’s obvious! So I can empathize with Japanese speakers not hearing the “l”/“r” difference. I can definitely hear the difference in pitch accent, though, and to me that’s something I value getting right.
Im on chapter 17 on busuu up to negative verbs and use Japanese from zero/genki am i cooking with right stuff? Also pitch accent isnt that complicated ngl basically just emphasis/how long or short word is dragged out is how i see it/visualize it easier. I also speak spanish and some words in Japanese sound the same and even 見て is close af to mira which is look in spanish and when speaking i sound the same high pitched like when i speak spanish
Polish (someone from Poland) and polish (your boots) sound weird in English if you mix them up.
Lead and lead as well. That's actually why Led Zeppelin didn't call themselves Lead Zeppelin.
Loved this video, especially the "okay, I'm going to rant on this.....later in the video." teasing.
Hope to be a student soon!
Your honesty, integrity, and respect of other people’s opinions really impresses me. Videos like these are good for everyone. Keep making them!
2:27:00 how he analogizes to weightlifting he's absolutely correct. Working on pitch accent took me from having native speakers ask me to repeat something to getting actual compliments on my accent that isn't the dreaded 日本語お上手ですね.
Some people may find pitch accent useless or not serving their own personal goals when it comes to language learning. But it's definitely not a scam
For my Japanese studies currently pitch accent at the very bottom of my list. Only recently have begin to read, speak and keep up somewhat keep up with Japanese speakers with just my knowledge alone. It's thanks to studying kanji, shadowing, and various type of immersion training (Anime included). I still have only have the basic of Grammar down and I WANT to study that more. Should I study pitch accent too with everything else that I'm currently doing?
At the very least I would encourage you to check out the free lessons I have on youtube, as many of them will allow you to pick up on things you might otherwise take a fair bit of time to start noticing. If you find the information useful, then you may want to consider signing up for my course on Patreon, but of course no pressure either way, and think carefully before spending your money. Here's a good place to start:
ruclips.net/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/видео.html
I remember watching that video by myself when it came out and I thought there were many things wrong with it. I'm glad you reacted to it :D
Random question: Will you sometime make a pitch accent course for other dialects? Do you speak other dialects or only standard Japanese? I believe you’re living in Kyushu so thought you might pick up the dialect for the prefecture you’re in? Since there’s not a ton of sources on those dialects I think it could be useful too, but maybe pain in the ass to create 😂
Probably not, as I think that it's definitely best to study standard Japanese. I understand Oita dialect perfectly, however.
This is from my perspective who currently studied Japanese for over 3 years without doing much pitch accent studies.
The one thing I found out throughout the year is that if you want to learn pitch accent through a course or through communications. It’ll all depends on the learner themselves.
How you want to learn pitch accent depends on you. If you want to sound very native like and learn pitch accent through communications, after enough time of making the same mistakes, you’ll eventually stop making that mistake. Yes you’ll learn it slower than those who are studying pitch accent from the beginning.
So in conclusion, how you want to learn pitch accent depends on you. They will all converge to native pitch accent once you spend enough time on it. Some are shorter than others, but you’ll eventually come back to pitch accent in the end. Either through communication or through a course.
1:34:10 I first thought I misheard but then I saw you reacting. I wonder if he mispoke or meant to say atamabaka instead of atamadaka. If it was a honest mistake, it was still funny.
I think perception and personal experience are a big factor. As someone who is haafu and born there, there were a lot of kids who nitpicked everything about me to reinforce that I wasn't really Japanese. I was always gaijin. After spending the majority of my life in the US and not keeping up with my Japanese, I am absolutely gaijin now and I am now more prone to get "jouzu" because I'm good enough to stumble by. But yes. Pitch-accent did matter - if I ever misspoke, I was dogged. But I think it matters more for not being perpetually perceived as a foreigner when you are not a foreigner to begin with. I know Japan has changed a lot though so my opinion is very much based on my experiences in the early 90s.
I started learning pitch accent fairly early into my Japanese journey. In fact, I learned pitch accent as I was starting to immerse in the language after having learned the basics and then continued to learn it and acquire it as I went on. Now 6 years into learning Japanese, I don't really need to think about pitch accent when speaking or reading. Occasionally, maybe I forget the accent of a word I dont use all that much or hear very much but it is rare so what I want to say is this: Yes, at first when you start speaking or reading out loud pitch accent is going to be an extra load on your brain, but with time you will acquire it from listening and practicing output so that it comes naturally to you.
I'd argue the pitch accent equivalent in english would be like how we put emphasis on certain syllables in words when speaking. Like when we say the word "banana," there is an emphasis in the middle like ba-NA-na. I'd imagine if someone said ba-na-NA enough times, the person they're talking to would eventually ask why they're saying the word "banana" like that. Another example is "waffle." It's usually said like "WA-ffle," and it would sound weird if someone started saying "wa-FFLE." I would imagine that a native english speaker hearing someone say "wa-FFLE" would give them the same weird feeling a japanese person would feel after hearing "ni-HON-go."
Yes. I can confirm this, because I have taught a lot of ESL students who had this type of problem. Other things to add would be intonation, sentence stress, and weak form.
The example I like to use is that you can tell exactly what I mean when I say pre-*zent* (verb) instead of *pre*-zent (completely unrelated noun with two different meanings). No syllabic stress would make this word even more ambiguous.
What you're describing is stress accent. It's equivalent to pitch accent in that it's how English differentiates meaning between words with the same pronunciation. i.e. "dessert" is a treat; "desert" is dry land full of sand.
that's just intonation no?
@@EvaFuji Intonation is variation in pitch to communicate intended nuance/emotion. It has no bearing on the inherent meaning of individual words in a sentence.
"You're coming with us," has a flat intonation. "You're coming with us?" has a rising intonation.
Japanese is a pitch accent language unlike English, but both use intonation
Nichado? What is the spelling for the channel? Can't find...
RichaadoTV!
instagram.com/ricchaadotv/
This was interesting - thank you. The pitch accent mistakes in my Japanese speaking is one of the reasons I gave up studying actively speaking Japanese.
As you say - most learners care that they make mistakes and want to avoid making them in the future. For me my pitch accent mistakes were so abundant that despite trying to correct them I lost all motivation and enjoyment to speak Japanese. I've come to think I'm just pitch accent deaf. I still enjoy reading in Japanese, but that's about it.
So maybe I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but I largely agree with you, Dogen, on this. Studying pitch accent is valuable in wanting to speak better Japanese, especially if pitch accent is an area you're making a lot of errors in.
Using your basketball analogy - if dribbling is your weak area, then I'm sorry, but you're going to have to practise dribbling if you want to improve your basketball game.
The hard truth is that Japanese is a pitch accent language - you're kidding yourself if you think you can ignore pitch accent, hand wave it away or pretend it doesn't exist.
Didn't watch yet but one thing comes to my mind:
Even while I'm at a very low level when it comes to speaking I get the feeling that when I try to have good pronunciation and pitch-accent Japanese people tend to understand me more easily.
@@diydylana3151 That's right. Even just knowing the 4 patterns makes your immersion a lot more effective. And you can learn about those patterns in half an hour I would say.
Note I'm far from the end of the video while writing this comment, sorry if I say things that have already been said.
I've seen native speakers on both sides: some care a lot about pitch, while others don't care at all. Even those who care a lot probably won't criticize Japanese learners, so it's probably okay not to learn pitch. However, I believe that making your speech as clear as possible for your conversation partner is a respectful stance.
I can say for sure listening to most skilled strangers in my native language is fatigue-inducing in the long run (at least for me). If all foreigners made the same mistakes, I would be used to those, but it's clearly not the case. They're all inconsistent "by default". The brain is a pattern recognition machine, and it works best with consistency. Each time someone makes a pronunciation/accent mistake, it feels like my brain is auto-fixing the sentence before "I can process the content".
Some of my friends don't seem to care at all.
The simple fact that I've seen some natives caring about pitch is enough reason for me to put some effort into having an 'okay pitch'.
Didnt know you were at the University of Washington! I graduated from the tacoma campus. Heh
One thing I've learned about myself is that when I hear people talk about the lack of importance of pitch accent (like the pitch accent is useless video), it takes a weight off my shoulders, whether correctly or not. I think myself and many others perceive the task of learning vocabulary, piecing together sentences, etc., difficult enough already that when someone brings up pitch accent, it feels a bit overwhelming. I think, "Are you telling me many words have patterns in how you're suppose to say them otherwise youre not even going to be understood?!"
In the end, I don't want to be delusional and stick my head in the sand and pretend pitch accent isn't important if it is, but for some reason the perceived difficulty of it does pose an obstacle to my motivation of continuing to learn Japanese.
55:13; f/e no one is going to go into a candy store, ask for "ame" in the wrong pitch, and get rain.
I was not aware that there was a "pitch-accent craze" or people against it, and I really don't care about it now after watching this, but some of the things in this guy's video triggered me sooo much. 😅 Not only in regard to learning Japanese, but any language really. The way he's phrasing things sounds needlessly hostile, despite what he's written in the description and pinned post...
For me personally, this attitude of "when you get good overall, your accent/pronunciation will also naturally get better" is such bs... I struggled so much with English, even though my level was quite good and I had no problems using it for listening, reading and writing. But speaking was hell, because my otherwise high level was clashing with my bad pronunciation. I was aware of my strong accent and some of my bad habits, but couldn't exactly pinpoint and fix them, and it was a constant source of embarrassment, especially when communicating with native speakers for work. Did they understand me? Yes. Did they ever correct me or say something about my pronunciation? Of course not; we got our work done and they didn't care about anything else. But it was bothering ME and getting in the way of MY speaking. So I started recording myself and trying to figure out where I was getting things wrong, but it wasn't until I scheduled classes with a proper speech therapist that I fully understood my mistakes and more importantly - how to fix them. After just a couple of lessons, I felt such a boost in my confidence and I could hear significant changes in the way I spoke; it was amazing and I will never regret the time and money spent on these classes.
So it really baffles me that there are people out there criticizing or even attacking those who put emphasis and importance on studying pitch accent, when it's an important part of the Japanese language, it's quite different than the stress accent most of us are used to, and not everyone will have the ears or time to acquire it by immersion. If the video was targeted towards the supposed "pitch accent fanatics", this should've been made way clearer. Being told that it's "useless", or will happen "naturally" in time, or that natives "don't give a f*ck" and thus we don't need to do anything about it, can be a pretty d*ck move. Because I've been the "I've watched a lot of anime and my native Japanese teacher praised me for my pronunciation, so it must be really good" person, until - like with English - I started recording myself and playing it back to my utmost horror and embarrassment. It sounded nothing like what I was hearing while speaking and I really wished my teaches had brought it up, instead of trying to "encourage" me with all the jouzus... I'm still not at the point where I've started actively studying pitch accent, but now I am at least aware of it, I make it a point to pay more attention when I'm listening and speaking, and I intend to give it some proper study time eventually. That should've been this guy's argument if he was addressing the people who obsess with pitch accent needlessly - just a simple "don't overthink it, but be aware of it". Instead, he went on a 20-minute rant with a lot of honestly bad "advice" and a mountain of anecdotal evidence, which can be countered with another mountain of anecdotal evidence...
Sorry for the long post. Like I said, it really bugged me, but I don't intend to give his video any extra views and comments, so I'm venting here. 😄
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say.
People who are downplaying it, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language.
Good idea about recording yourself, I am gonna try that too :D Good luck with your journey!
I'm only here because dogen has hair in the thumbnail.
36:28 Good point and it should be reasonably obvious to anyone in an international environment regardless of specific language. When somebody sounds obviously like a foreigner, you are not going to be an ass and point it out every sentence. You are going to wholeheartedly enjoy that you can communicate at all.
But of course you do very clearly notice mistakes in pronunciation of your native language. And you automatically try to classify if the speaker is a foreigner, a native with a strong regional variation, or otherwise is maybe awkward or not good at speaking.
Natives commenting they don't care about pronunciation of other natives, well, are probably just being polite.
100% with you on this. I was working with some Japanese coworkers for over a year, and speaking my basic japanese to them when able. And they'd teach me things here and there. Then one time, they taught me a new word which I repeated as i always do. and they laughed REALLY HARD. and I was like wait what was so funny? - I had perfect pitch accent when I said it, randomly. Having never done that before. over 1 year and they never even mentioned it, because of course my accent was wrong.
You can use arrow keys on keyboard to navigate in the video, left and right 🙌
I think one important thing missed in his analysis is that the mistakes of a native Japanese speaker are not the same as those of a native English speaker. When I learned Italian, I mispronounced /l/ as dental-alveolar instead of the correct alveolar pronunciation (it is sometimes dental-alveolar, but it’s a special case). The difference is so small to me that I can barely tell them apart. I actually felt proud that I could properly pronounce the Italian l. The Italians, hearing this mistake, would often not know which word I was trying to say and as a result struggled to understand what I was trying to say. (I corrected this mistake, and I now get compliments in Italy for my “perfect” accent [it is not]) Very small details for language learners can easily become significant issues for comprehension.
2:39 開始
If you listen to Japanese 10-20k hours you generally can pick it up or autocorrect your own pronunciation and pitch-accent (cuz Japanese is always flowing through your brain), at least that happened to me over spending half my life with the language. But I have also done a bit on Dogens Patreon course a few years ago and it confirmed that I was already solid enough even though I didn’t know some of the technical terminology (just like Japanese people don’t bother studying pitch accent in isolation unless they are linguists)
I might do it on occasions cuz living in America nowadays😅
Usually I get words right from intuition , but I can understand that people without thousands of hours hearing the language might benefit a lot by studying it more in isolation.
It saves them time and is more zoned in.
I also majored in Japanese 15 years ago and there was one advanced pitch accent course that went through a ton of dialects and some quizzes destroyed me. It was a wake up call because I struggled with it then 😂
I can’t remember multiple accents for several dialects , and just know standard and KansaiBen. Hint of Tohoku dialect too.
A part of me wants to master a region that most “foreigners” don’t speak just to develop a more unique character. Nowadays Japanese people are used to me using Kansaiben and it’s not super cool anymore. Before, people thought I was a bit more special lmao 😂
Can you make a video about counting accents? I always heard the difference between them "十三"や"十四"や"十五"や"四十"や"五十"... "一時"や"一時間"..."九円"や"十円"...but didn't know the rules about their accents. I have not seen anyone working on the accent of counting even though it is used a lot in everyday life. especially counting money. Thanks a lot.
Hello! I have about eight different lessons on numbers and money in my Patreon series. Please see lessons 65 through 73 on the index page here to get a preview of exactly what I cover:
www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-index-16489306
Numbers are particularly complicated, with a lot of exceptions and speaker variation, but if you think this may be helpful I would encourage you to sign up!
Me: Ain't no way I'm watching a 3-hour video
People who fell asleep with autoplay on:
I’ve been learning Japanese for 10 years and understanding Pitch Accent helps me to better differentiate between the Tokyo accent and Osaka accent. Rather than mixing the two, my goal is to separate the two clearly so I am conscious of when I’m speaking in Tokyo accent or Osaka accent, and hope to add on other accent later on in my Japanese learning journey. This is also a goal for my Chinese so I can either use standard mandarin or dialect influenced accents.
I think this is REALLY something like the learning style argument, some people might not need it, but for many people it will be necessary. It's like the immersion argument all over really.
I do think for English-speakers, pitch accent is something we need to spend some amount of effort on.
Also the "native speaking" use different pitch-accent argument is totally wrong. Japanese people are consistent with how they vary. (And there's a flow to how they vary - people in Tokyo from Aomori all sound the same.)
Many young people watch a lot of comedy on TV that uses Kansai-ben and will switch into a kind of 関西弁風味 when being funny. I tend to switch a lot between Shizuoka-ben, and imitation versions of Tokyo Japanese and Kansai Japanese because I live in Shizuoka but my closest relationships are with people from outside the prefecture. I don't believe that picking up dialectal elements of Japanese first will damage your learning in the long run, as many Japanese people pick up Tokyo Japanese as a kind of adult business voice anyway. As always in language learning the most important thing is to be aware of elements of the language because that's what lets you acquire them.
Idk, I feel like at the end all this immersion guy is saying is that there are many factors to learning a language and if you hyper focus on one at the expense of all the rest, you're not going to get the results you want, and that being comfortable in the language is important. These are both pretty DUH points to be making, but he's framing it in a pretty weird way by saying pitch accent is purely useless. It depends on your goals, weaknesses, strengths.
I agree, but also see merit in questioning whether or not studying pitch-accent is best for everyone. Think he made a good video talking through a lot of his own experiences related to the phenomena.
I found the explanation of "intonation" to be quite off. Intonation isn't about "how far" your pitch goes up and down. It is about the change in pitch on a sentence level, as opposed to word-level (accent). Through intonation, you can indicate a question or what parts in your speech you want to highlight. Note that it's not simply expressed through a higher/lower pitch than usual, but rather through specific intonation patterns. To indicate a question, for example, you'd go up slowly in pitch at the end of the sentence. ５時？ as in "Is it five o'clock?" would have a drop first at ご↓ and go up again after じ↑ (this is called 疑問上昇 = doubtful rise). Another example is the 上昇下降 pattern (rise and fall) which could be used in order to prompt the listener to take a specific action as in 「ちょっとあなた⤴️⤵️。もういい加減に起きてくださいよ。」
This is certainly hard to indicate with just emojis...
Anyways, intonation has regional differences too, like in dialects of Nagoya or Kagoshima, where questions are indicated with a falling pitch towards the end.
Also, the claim that intonation is somehow much more important than pitch accent to sound native is just an opinion right? I certainly don't believe so, and considering the immersion guy's flawed understanding of the concept of "intonation" suggests that he doesn't really know what he is talking about either.
I agree with this, but didn't point it out because it wasn't really related to the main points of the debate and therefore felt a bit like splitting hairs. Cheers!
@@Dogen I figured so. Thanks for making such a detailed and amicable response to the original video. Not getting hostile and even highlighting some of the good points that are made is certainly the right approach
I don't understand why people try to hard to write off pitch accent. "It's not important", "you don't need to study", etc. The same argument can be done to a lot of other aspects of the language. It's a part of the language, why not study it? Study it!
Edit: 75% of the video in, and I have to say that the immersion guy is making a lot of moot points. He is generalizing exceptions. Exceptional people are not the norm. We are not them. Also, he seems to be confusing "accent" and "pitch accent". These are not the same thing.
Final edit: Finished the video, and I my feelings were true. The guy is finding justifications for himself. He is a "immersion supremacist", and thinks that you can simply learn everything just by immersion... while the many accounts of advanced japanese language students who didn't aquire pitch accent show that that's not so simple. So what does he do about it? Rethinks his position due to new data and tweeks his study method? No, he looks for justifications as to why this aspect of the language is not important, and makes moral judgement on people who say the contrary. Dougen has been really polite with this guy, but truth is most of this guy's conclusions don't follow from his initial observations. He is just trying to not change his ways, and to pretend to be right while doing that.
HAHAHAHA you need to work on that southern drawl a bit LOL :). "Kore wa 'Peen' desu."
For me the case is, When I speak English I know I pronounce the words right and even thou you can tell I have foreign accent it is different to my native one like I use English "r"'s and so on . with Japanese pitch accent it is very different then Polish or English and it has conncepts I am completely unaware off so I feel like it is something that I need to study at least a bit to be at least aware of some general rules and types of accent. It is the same with grammar. Sure you can get grammar just by listening to tons of materials but is it really the most effective? It is a mix of imput and deliberate study.
One more point is the fact that I read more then I watch or listen, so at least at the moment If I want to read correctly I need to look up the accent of the word in the dictionary (or find a recording of it which takes more time). Knowing some general rules and being able to understand the pitch accent of looked up words is if not important, at least helpful.
And third point is people learn more efectively in different ways. I don't learn well by mimicking and memorizing. I learn the best by understanding. Of course during day to day conversation there is no time to remember every rule and exception and apply them every time, but the most efective way for me to remember a word or phrase is to understand it's structure and logic behind it first.
All that being said I bouth access to the videos and find them very helpful, thanks.
I really liked the description of pitch accent as diminishing returns, and its a concept that people should apply to everything.
Everyone is going to have a different learning journey and its impossible to make a one size fits all learning program. 100% immersion is going to leave you with gaps, just as 100% textbook courses will. Maybe not equivalent magnitudes of gaps, but gaps nonetheless.
But it's important to study a little bit of everything to a certain level. You should make a concerted effort as a learner to at least find your learning curve for each aspect of the language: grammar, vocab, kanji, pitch accent , pronunciation, levels of keigo, etc. That doesn't mean you have to hardline memorize every word or hard memorize every pitch accent, but just that you should understand how to improve yourself. Making a religion out of language learning is how you limit yourself.
I, personally, really disagree with the whole "the reason why your Japanese is bad is because all of it is bad, so there's no point in studying pitch accent" argument. The reason I disagree is partially what you said, but also; If everything of my Japanese is bad, and that's why I shouldn't study this part, then why I should I study other parts because my Japanese is also bad there? Isn't the whole point of learning and improving to, well, learn and improve? That would be like saying, you shouldn't improve your fingerings on a piano because it's just one small aspect and it's going to get better anyway with experience. Sure, it will ... but I could make it better faster and not have to worry about it as much while working on other aspects.
On to the hearing of pitch accent part, I am a musician (probably could have guessed with my piano example xD) so the pitch difference is something i've always noticed ... but just because I can hear it doesn't mean I can easily emulate it or remember it just from hearing it alone, especially if it's only a couple times in a blue moon. It's something I would need to actually study to be able to do consistently, even if I can already hear it out the gate.
Anyway, just my 2 cents on the matter. A friend recently introduced me to this channel when I mentioned to him that I was in the beginning stages of learning Japanese. I really enjoy your content, and I am going to be joining the pitch accent studies soon tm (when I can get the money to) Keep up the good work! ^^
Edit: typed the wrong word
The generous interpretation is that certain skills aren't appropriate to prioritize at some skill level. You won't see any benefit to your playing by studying voicings for tritone subs if you can barely play your chords in one key. However, I still don't think pitch accent maps too well. You can learn the basics (e.g. it exists) as you learn the basics of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Maybe this guy just thinks people are studying it way too deep compared to the rest of their skills, but with how he talks, it's hard to tell if anything but listening is acceptable.
It honestly depends on your learning style. If you're a gestalt learner where you learn to speak by memorizing and scripting entire phrases, learning pitch accent is vital in order to *hear* the different words in the sentence and how to say them exactly and/or change your tone and pitch according to different social contexts. It's a manual learning process for many people who aren't neurotypical. If you're a gestalt learner even learning English as a native speaker is like learning a foreign language and you never feel fully fluent.
this is like a three hour version of the video of the other vtubers making fun of korone speaking with the wrong pitch for haagen dazs
Most people learning another language never learn an accent and I think that’s a travesty in its own right. How is it not a grating experience every time you say something and hear someone native speak? I can’t comprehend it.
About ten years ago I met a guy who had lived in Japan for 25 years. I said "so your Japanese must be great" he then reeled off like 20 seconds of Japanese. And even at the time, I remember thinking "that sounded like English just wholly made of words that I don't understand"
Even before I'd started learning Japanese, I could tell his intonation was way off.
My Japanese is not great... However, I remembered that encounter and didn't want to sound like that guy. So I took pitch accent into account right from the beginning. Japanese people don't give me the 日本語上手 instead, they almost always say 発音うまい！ My grammar still sucks, but they notice the fact that my pronunciation is good.
@@キラキラくりくり頭 Nice story. I think it's the same for foreigners using wrong stress on words. We don't judge them, but sometimes it's difficult to understand. I don't want to be hard to listen to, so I work on pronunciation with the same dedication as the other aspects.
Good luck on your journey, you are on the right path !
If only dictionaries had pitch accents by default, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem?
Japanese to Japanese dictionaries almost always do, for what it's worth!
ruclips.net/video/zRSXbqjC2Yg/видео.html
It's true it's not his place to tell what people should care about, but it's good that the guy tries to put anxieties to rest for some people and bring some mundane reality into the mix. Because some people might inflate the stakes based on what they hear online
I wonder if the remark around 1:59:00 about "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is good" would be better understood as "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is clear". If you speak clearly like an audiobook narrator and enunciate well, then you'll probably almost always be understood regardless of pitch, but if you slur and speak fast and mumble and stumble over or approximate some mora like normal native speakers do at native speed, then not having a correct/recognizable pitch contour would probably make you *impossible* to understand.
I never quite understand what people have against pitch accent in Japanese.
Like from my perspective, my goal as a language learner is to learn the language as the native speakers speak it. My goal is to ideally sound as close as I can to such a speaker in a way that makes sense
If their speech clearly shows evidence of pitch accent, than I'm beholden to learn that, the ins and outs of that, just as any other form of pronunciation. I think of trying my best with that as just being respectful to the language. I'm not going to go out of my way to butcher it, so it doesn't really make sense to me why people might think it's "useless," like I don't think they really have the right to judge it so, that's not their responsibility nor do they have the authority to do so without presumption
I think people who are downplaying pitch accent, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language.
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. We will never sound native, but Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say.
Good luck on your journey!
@@kingofthejungle2894 Potentially yeah. There's a tendency for learners of one language to downplay the importance of features that aren't shared in their native language, or and in my thinking this is probably the main one in this context, is to downplay the importance of features with a relatively low functional load.
Functional load is essentially how much a particular thing linguistically speaking impacts meaning.
As an example the difference between initial P and B in English has a fairly high functional load as it distinguishes many words like pat and bat, and this is a quite common distinction
However with initial Th, where there's a similar voicing distinction as between P and B, there isn't a high functional load as there are relatively few words that're distinguished only by voicing starting with Th (this is actually usually considered the phonemic distinction with the lowest functional load)
Thus a non native learner whose native language doesn't have Th sounds may not necessarily see the importance between them and go with whichever is easiest at the moment, which will result in a distinctive accent.
If they're trying and that's just what they got to work with then that's fine and valid, but it's a different matter altogether if people start trying to actively downplay the importance of th voicing as something not important to care about _to other learners_ since it spreads bad habits.
A similar thing I think is happening with pitch accent here in Japanese
Actually a personal example, or semi-personal more accurately, as I've just got to the section about L and R getting confused by Japanese speakers being akin to pitch accent mistakes; Pa Dutch a language I speak a bit of has this sound /β˕/ spelt with a W that's half way between English W /w/ and English V /v/ and in Pa Dutch accents of English
Or more accurately non native speakers of English whose native language is Pa Dutch and aren't Amish (the conservative anabaptist sects like the Amish learn English very thoroughly from about the age of 7 or so onwards) who are nowadays very rare or even extinct
historically would often pronounce their W's *and* their V's with this /β˕/ sound.
But what's interesting is what happened in the early 20th century.
See that's when many Pa Dutch parents stopped teaching their children the language and started using English exclusively, but they were using this dialectal form of English influenced by their original language
And this /β˕/ sound didn't make it into Pa Dutch English, instead they adopt the usual /w/ and /v/ of English buuut they put them in non standard positions.
Essentially Pa Dutch speakers who could pronounce the /w/ vs /v/ distinction in English often couldn't do so consistently and these inconsistencies got 'set' so to speak when they passed it on to their kids, becoming lexically coded (i.e. individual speakers at that point were no longer mixing up W and V but rather words were set with one or the other but in nonstandard positions)
I learned Japanese at a language school. They teach pitch accent on day one.
Nice!
Pro-Streamer manually communicating, that his stream just started. Hmmmmm Dogen-kun mada mada desu ne
some people can't notice a chord having one note with +- 10 cent deviation. these people are extremely unlikely to ever pick up pitch accent through input alone. Their brain is just literally not wired to care so much about pitch on the whole, for these the only way to improve pitch accent is deliberate practice, not just the patterns, but rather the ability to even tell the differences. for those who can tell a 10 cent deviation they might be fine with just immersion/input, and those to whom such a deviation is simply grating input alone is very likely enough.
of course, this is all predicated on how much the learner cares about sounding good. but we are on a dogen video. we care.
additionally i think it needs to be stated that yes there is possibly undue attention given to pitch accent, but we have to keep in mind this is a /very/ recent phenomenon. these days /because/ pitch accent is so hyped a new learner to japanese is likely to discover that it exists, and as such, at least be somewhat aware that it's something to pay attention to. before this occurred not only were there /very/ few resources to study it there was also no collective awareness that it was something to pay any attention to at all. and so japanese learners will do better on average. this is in part thanks to mattvsjapan and dogen being such vocal advocates for it.
1:24:30.....YES.
I still care about who/whom usage.
Bro pronounced that RUclipsr name like 5 times in a row around 49:00 and even after rewatching I still didn't catch it. Maybe I should go back to studying English before I continue with Japanese 😅
As you all know German natives have usually a strong accent when we speak English. It is not that we couldnt speak it better, but rather we are early on disincentivized by our peers in class and even teachers. If you speak in a perfect correct American accent you get kind of bullied. They will say things like "Are you trying to be cool?" or "Do you think you are an American now?"
Also in Switzerland where Swiss-German is spoken we find it kind of awful if foreigners try to speak Swiss-German. We prefer they speak German instead, otherwise we feel they are imitating our identity.
This is also the reason I do not pay too much attention to Japanese pitch accent since it feels I try to pretend someones identity I am not. I know this might sound strange to you, but this is how I personally feel. It feels like I am insulting their identity if I speak 100% pitch accent correct Japanese.
Wait they dont like foreigners trying to speak Swiss-German? That's the first I ever heard of that because I mostly hear from other Swiss people that they think its great for foreigners to speak Swiss-German and appreciate foreigners trying to integrate as long as it's not bastardized/half-assing the dialect. Ik there are different local dialects and it probably is frustrating hearing a foreigner mix those dialects(especially mixing it with standard german) but I usually see the distain pointed at Germans trying to speak the local dialect. If you're comfortable going in-depth, why is it insulting to hear foreigners speak Swiss-German?
Sorry to break this to you but that's pretty fucking dumn
@@MegaLokoLolo Sorry, I was not very precise with my comment, actually I was not precise at all. It is true - as you said - that this applies usually only to Germans. If a Portuguese, Thai or Iranian immigrant tries to speak it, it is usually fine - they will never nail it, but the effort is usually appreciated and it sounds kind of cute and even if it is a mix of German and half broken Swiss German it is fine.
Our national identity is very strong and our dialect is the biggest part of this identity. Almost every little village has a distinguishable dialect and indicates your origin. So you kind of could argue if Germans speak Swiss-german that it is kind of cultural appropriation especially since there is not one single dialect. I cant really explain it. But I just watched a documentary about this topic and half of the Swiss think it is okay if Germans speak Swiss German and the other half thinks it is not.
It's sad when you don't even hear the difference in PA, even when someone tries to explain it to you. Doesn't help that in my native language phonetic stress is instead represented with volume/length rather than pitch. Then again I don't distinguish similar pitch in music either.
great to come from a non-phonemic (stress) language, so neither the stress accent examples nor the pitch accent examples make any intuitive sense to me. Like both of the "tomorrow" examples sound pretty much the same to me, or at least i wouldn't be able to say which one is correct, so it's not a hypothetical example in that sense. But hey at least we have the same concept of consonant and vowel length.
What's your mother tongue?
@@innw2303 Finnish
Pitch accent is not a scam. I wish I could afford your service because I think it would help me tremendously.
For the time being I'd encourage you to check out the free content on RUclips! Here is a good place to start: ruclips.net/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/видео.html
@@Dogen Thank you.