Free Anki Deck: www.mattvsjapan.com/free-anki-deck Hit the link above to download my free gift to you, the 10 most common words for all 4 pitch accent patterns.
A born-and-raised-in-Japan English learner here. Thank you so much, Matt and Ken, for creating those unputdownable videos. This comment is for sheer appreciation and a request for your channel. A min read. I’ve watched all of Matt’s interviews with other high Japanese achievers, Atsu, and even an authentic linguist like Stephen Krashen and several videos on pitch accent. Without studying abroad, I’ve been into American English for years in Japan. And it’s been a massive help for me to get numerous insights into language acquiring. (ex. I was petrified when I first heard that Matt had got to consciously start tackling pitch accent even after the years of natural immersion because I’ve been immersing myself into English almost the same way as you said you had done. I guess you can totally relate to this, but I was like, Jesus Christ, is it even possible that I’m sounding weirder than I think I knew? What have I been doing, you moron!! I immediately googled and dug up information on the pitfalls self-taught English learners can fall into, and started consciously paying way much more attention to natives’ rhythm, speed, stress, etc when listening and shadowing.) I guess I’ve got to achieve the next phase for now, which I wouldn’t have done without your videos. And I’m sure I’m getting further because of your channel. I can’t thank you enough. p.s. Your Japanese is fantastic. Matt vs. Japan is evidently one of the most underrated RUclips channels of all time. I’d appreciate it if you could shoot a video discussing the so-called Affective Filter Hypothesis with Ken because it is so far the worst enemy that I can get to know its existence. It will be another gripping video for other subscribers and me if you kindly share how you guys have been dealing with the filter and overcoming it. Thank you for reading this far. Hope I see you around in Japan or the US after this messy pandemic.
As a Mandrin Chinese native speaker, I've been using Matt's imerssing method learning Englsih for the past few months. I used to watch tons of anime so I'm not completely unfamiliar with Japanese this language. I just found really interesting that it seems like mandrin native speaker would find learning pitch accent not that hard?(I'm not sure since I'm not learning Japanese) I feel like I can natrually hear and imitate the pitch accent when you guys analyzing the whole pitch accent system. This has been an interesting experience when hearing you guys talking about this topic. I wonder if it would be easier for mandrin Chinese neative speaker to pronounce the wrods since we have the concept of "tones".
I noticed that Chinese speakers pick up on Russian stress really quick compared to speakers of other languages. I saw foreigners reading specially adapted texts where the stressed syllables were marked and still making mistakes while Chinese speakers read accurately
Interesting comment but I do have to say you should probably learn to condense your messages to smaller comments because that’s very long for such a simple message. And btw your writing is very good for learning for a few months
As a second generation Chinese immigrant studying Japanese, hard agree. Never really had any issues with pitch accent. My mom has started learning Japanese too, and even though shes a complete beginner she could replicate pitch accent perfectly.
I’m a pretty new student - started self-study a little over 5 months ago and now at N5. This seems like an accomplishment, but my main goal is speak with Japanese friends, so I’m focusing most of my efforts on input these days instead of academic reading / writing. This was a very clean way of describing pitch accent! Originally, I discarded the idea of learning pitch accent because it seemed too advanced. After all, my primary focus is learning vocab and grammar. However because pitch accent is similar to music, I noticed pitch has helped my listening abilities. I’ve been casually memorizing pitch patterns while I hear new vocabulary in movies/tv. It is has become another way for me to grab on to words when spoken, much like word order helps me identify words. I’m not sure if anyone else has had this experience.
Great idea to separate the pitch study from actual words. I always understood pitch accent as just “the vibe,” and this is a wonderful way to structure learning to develop that melodic/vibe intuition :) Cheers!
Hi matt! I'm Japanese🎌 and I'm interested in your channel. I guess every Japanese says this so, Im sorry to say this but how you talk in Japanese was crazy amazing!😁 And I think that is showing us who you are. I can tell, you studied hard. Im proud that I found your channel today👏 Im Mokomi, nice to meet you😊
I knew about pitch and stress accents, but this is the first time I realized how stress accent in English definitely plays a part in parsing a sentence not only in what words are being said, but what the sentence means. I imagine pitch plays a similarly important role in Japanese.
Yeah its a thing in English, take the sentence I didn't lie. 3 simple words,.. such different meaning. stress pronounce the brackets (I) didn't lie means I am not the one who lied but some one else did lie, I (didn't) lie means I was telling the truth and,.. I didn't (lie) means I was stretching the truth, and perhaps misguiding your beliefs on the topic, like a politician.
It's been 5 days since I watched this video (just finished all 4 patterns in the top 40 deck) and I already feel the difference! I can't thank you enough for all you've given me, Matt. I really don't know where I would've been with my Japanese now if it wasn't for all the knowledge that you shared. You're a real treasure to the language learning community. It even helped me improve my English a little bit 😀 THANK YOU, MATT!
Wow, thinking of it like a melody really made a huge difference. I would always end up saying it louder, but humming out the patterns and trying to say the word seems to be really helpful. Thanks so much for the deck!
This is probably one of your best videos so far. I have been following you since 2017 or so, when I just started studying Japanese. It's great to see how the quality of your content has gone up, not only in terms of editing but also your charisma and professionalism. Looking forward to seeing more!
I'm tone deaf because of nerve damage and other progressive hearing problems, so it looks like Japanese may be out of my reach. I can't hear pitch changes unless they are drastically different (such as 4-8 keys on a piano and only within certain limited tonal ranges). Your pitch explanations seem clear, but they are just all one pitch to me. : /
You're totally fine dude. Pitch accent is just one of many factors when it comes to speaking japanese. Watching these past few videos matt has done it might seem like pitch is this end all be all when it comes to speaking japanese, but thats not the case at all. There's this channel called "saito" where a japanese couple nitpicks jp learners japanese and they talk about word choice, grammar, pronounciation etc way more than pitch in their videos. They even said that pitch is getting overrated by the jp learning community right now. While pitch is obviously important to achieve a native like accent, you can still become fluent and be understood just fine even if you ignore it completely. So dont be discouraged and get to studying! :)
Hi! Don't be discouraged. Yes, pitch accent is important but you can still communicate with Japanese people and understand animes etc. There are some channels created by Japanese people and they say the same thing. I personally decided to learn pitch accent but that doesn't mean everyone should. To say that pitch accent is absolutely necessary is a little bit exaggeration in my opinion. And I think this obsession with being "perfect" at Japanese is so damaging for the language learning community. People can learn the language however they want. Some people are just making it sound like if you don't learn pitch accent it's not worth learning Japanese at all. But that's so untrue. So never think that Japanese is out of your reach! You can learn it! Don't let perfectionism ruin your spirit.
I know almost no Japanese, but I never had trouble noticing that something was different about Japanese speech. I just assumed it was a difference in the up-and-down cadence of words similar to how British people can give a different intonation to a sentence to Americans, even if all the words in the sentence are pronounced with the stress on the same syllables as in the American usage of those words.
Wow! I'm not even trying to learn Japanese, I'm trying to learn Czech, but this video was still immensely helpful with identifying native speech patterns, pitch, and sentence structure. With native speech, it's easy to disregard such fundamental things like this and just focus on words and vocab. Keep it up, guys! You're inspiring language learners of all shapes and sizes! Even though I'm studying Czech, I still love your Japanese videos, keep it up!
In Australia we have a very flat (stress ) accent so I think it’s easier , at least for me, when learning and listening to Japanese, compared to America who are very strong with their accents
I have heard Swedes ask this a few times and my guess would be that there is no significant difference in how well Swedes pick it up in another language, since they often have a strange "pitch" accent in English. So just being aware that it's a thing doesn't seem to really help since I think the majority of people just try to map our emphasis in the sentence on to the words we're using, and this is stronger than the pull towards correct pitch, unless you've heard that pitch from when you were a child. In some ways it could even be worse because Swedes might have preconceived ideas of where the pitch and stress should go and that would be even further off Japanese than English.
I'm Swedish (from Stockholm if it matters) and I had to train myself to even be able to hear Japanese pitch accent. I'm still very far from perfect especially when it comes to speaking. Swedish is not a pitch accent language, it's a stress accent language _with elements of pitch accent._ I can't say whether I had it easier than speakers of other languages but one thing I can say for sure is that you won't get pitch accent for free just because you're Swedish.
ngl my question for Ken is just one: Why does the second word of OnePiece -- 「名声」 (of: 富、名声、力) -- sound like "めるせい", when the narrator says it ..? Is this a pitch accent thing, or is this just part of how language transforms things? (Like in English, we say "bag-ah-chips," rather than "Bag, of, chips.") I'm on S1E11 now due to your damn 進めて, and I've been shocked by how often written Japanese and the pronounced Japanese can so deeply diverge. (Another thing my mind keeps hooking up to is how often they say 「おもしり」 rather than 「おもしろい」) I am kind of coming to a place where I feel like: Written Japanese is a conspiracy. Only spoken Japanese is true.
混乱させてしまうかもしれませんが、東京accentと大阪accentというものもあります。 コメディアンには大阪の人がとても多いので、お笑い番組で日本語を覚えた人は、大阪accentで話す人が多いです。it's like American English accent and British. Ex「うしろ」(behind .back) In tokyo う↓し↑ろ↑ In osaka う↑し↓ろ↓
その通り. This is why it's worth being able to distinguish such patterns. As a native speaker of English, it is quite odd when I hear American and British accents mixed together in the speech of some foreigners. The more they try to lose their own native accent, the stranger they sound. I've wondered if it's the same with Tokyo and Osaka-bens.
I've lived in Japan for 30 years am fluent and literate in Japanese, and I still don't know what pitch is. It's never presented as a problem, that is after my first 5 years I've never had an issue understanding others nor being understood. The only issue I've had is discerning whether or not there is an うafter an お in some words...stress, intonation, I get...pitch? わからない
I'm curious about how I'll take to pitch accent being a musician. I can hear it all without a hitch, but I'm thinking I have the advantage of being "fluent in pitch," i.e. being able to sing a C and knowing F# is a disminished fifth above and yadda yadda. I've been learning Japanese for about 5 months now and the similarities between learning a language and good ear training is really staggering. They even have the same faults in college classes teaching them. For example, aural skills really starts you with singing do, re, mi, (output) and has sight singing tests before a good amount of input. And the transcribing is mostly done in a test form without giving a stress free alternative. I only got better in that class when I started transcribing music on my own time in a stress free environment and eventually taught me how to hear and eventually reproduce different intervals effortlessly. Learning Japanese and learning about Refold had been giving me a new perspective on teaching pitch to students, considering I basically Refolded my way through music reading, aural skills, and playing instruments without really knowing it.
As a musician Japanese pitch accent seems really intuitive, and I can already hear the difference between the melodies. That being said I can imagine it gets complicated when speaking quickly
Native Japanese here🇯🇵 Never seen/heard of Japanese pronunciation taught this way, and I'm so impressed and blown away with what you guys have started doing together! It's been over 160 yrs since Japan's national isolationism / closed-door policy ended, lol (in freakin Edo period), it would be great to see more gaikokujin speak "fluent Japanese" pitch accent wise, hehe. (don't think I've ever come across anyone until I found you guys, Dogen, and Nyk from Nyk channel on YT, tbh) Many times I heard them say Japanese is difficult but its pronunciation is flat and pretty easy ...and in my mind I've always been like...um..NO. If Japanese pitch accent is taught in the right and effective way, like how you do it, it might not be so difficult after all - this is so innovative and original! Lucky 100 ppl who will be participating!
I love the concept of comparison with melody and having your brain recognize pitch this way. But for me, pitch accent is very confusing as I am very tone death and struggle with it and get mixed feedback when talking to native Japanese people in person and watching online. My Japanese sensei who is Japanese and I have one on one with 4 times a month, says that pitch accent is not that important. I want to get pitch accent down but seems like me just learning the grammar, words, and everything else first seems to make the most sense. I’ve been studying for over 3 years and never heard of pitch accent until a few months ago when I saw the video of George and Matt doing a live video on it. I’m very conflicted since all these RUclips videos say it’s super important, but the Japanese people I know in person which is a good bit, act like pitch accent is no big deal 😮....It seems like it’s a depending on who you ask kind of thing. But overall, love the audio samples with melody examples. I think that puts pitch accent into a basic concept for people like me who are very tone death. I’ve saved this video so I can come back to it later on when maybe I’m ready
It's not only Japanese, all the language has their melody. And some of them like English, Italian, French, or the different Arabic languages have a very strong one.
Tihs was an AMAZING explanation of how to do different pitch accent patterns. The analogies you gave, with the person wearing different clothes, also made perfect sense and I could see were well thought out. Usually it's kinda hard to explain concepts in a language to a speaker of another language when they have totally different frameworks of looking at things, but I feel like you translated the idea of a pitch accent pretty well for me. You finally explained to me in a concise way what's the difference with pitch accent and stress accent. Amazing
Why do you feel it necessary to memorize these patterns and consciously recognize this stuff? Do you disagree with the notion that we can acquire language through input alone?
Yeah, if you don't know what pitch accent is you'll never acquire it, and you can also speed up the acquisition process by studying some grammar and vocab with srs, at least that's my experience.
As a musician who weekly sings psalm toned chant at Mass, this is honestly weirdly complicated for me. I find myself analyzing the pitch musically rather than for speech and wonder things about how big the rises or drops in pitch should be (in terms of intervals) and whether or not the distance between pitches (said intervals) is determined for each different pattern. I also have to assume that the pitch *pattern* is what's recognized rather than the exact pitches themselves (which is actually very similar to the fact that in the Gregorian Chant I often sing, the exact pitches are not so important as the actual sequence of pitches are; the pitch to start on is decided by a director and/or the singers each time a chant is sung ). Needless to say this makes things very interesting for me to follow along
1st and 4th seemed very identical but I can ear a slight difference. I am sure it is obvious but my untrained hear is still learning edit: you actually gave us a free deck for pitch accent, I love this channel. Thanks Matt for all the information shared this is incredible. btw if you ever thought about creating a merch I let you know that I would by a hoodie or so, I really want to give something back, I feel like we got so much for free. I LOVE MATT VS JAPAN CHANNEL
Thank you very much for the deck! I really have no intention of speaking Japanese but being able to improve my comprehension is more than satisfactory for me. Keep doing what you're doing Matt and Ken :)
I am not good at it, but I think it's kind of like the "cadence" in Italian and Swedish. It's part of the pronunciation, just a lot more subtle in Japanese...which is why I find it harder.
This is something that has always bothering me when studying languages, it was the same with English. Why ALL courses and people that try to teach, ALWAYS focus on individual words, but NEVER show what they are trying to teach, how it affects ENTIRE sentences. It remind of English class, where the teacher would talk hours and hours about individual words, so when I tried to listen entire sentences I never was able to identify that word that I suppose already "know". Also, make yourself self-conscious of something like this won't damage the language somehow? I mean, if you need to always consciously remember of the right pitch for a word and also keep consciously looking for the pitch for each individual word when listening to it, won't make people struggle to understand and talk? it remind me the same with conscious translation when learn English. The teacher gives you like a ton of individual words to learn the meant of, but with no audio, then when you try to listen or talk you keep struggling to remember the right work for that sentence or something. I wonder why all courses do that? Doesn't it just makes things hard for who is trying to learn a new language? not to mention that is not how we learned our native language. I just can't understand.
Your videos have been a great help and I even listen to your 3 hour video explaining your Journey of learning Japanese. II am very interested in anything you guys can do to help as I have a four-year-old daughter who lives in Japan who is supposed to be able to visit here on the States 3 months of the year but because of the pandemic that his it that has not been able to happen happen since. I've been studying Japanese for the last year and a 1/2 and I have progressed quite a bit but I know I have so much more to learn and I could really use the help.
Besides the point, but this pitch accent pattern used to be prevalent in the Meiji Era and is maintained in dialects like Osakaben, but….you’re not about to tell me Americans used classical Japanese to inform their pronunciation? :’’’) 😎
Hey thanks for the deck, Matt and Ken!! I studied the first ten heiban words today with Audacity. I recorded the native pronunciation and mine and the difference in the blue diagram was quite funny. Her was so symmetric and mine was just wishwash :P By the way... Do you happen to know, what the name of the program shown at 7:12 above Audacity is?(I assume the one below is Audacity)
I tried really hard to hear pitch accent before this video and I legit couldn’t and for some reason that humming exercise made me really hear it for the first time. Like you addressed I’m concerned because I realize just how terrible I probably sound so I hope you make more pitch accent instruction in the future.
Hello! It is one of my life dreams to learn japanese. Right now I am a total beginner, but I intent to improve myself. Therefore, I really wanna nail pitch accent as much as possible. Can anyone recommend a good dictionary website that lists Pitch accent of words? Each time i learn a new word from a book or something, i would like to also understand its pitch accent. Thank you in advance!
my problem is that, being that I'm croatian and from a part that has a really tonal dialect, I'm oftentimes able to identify more nuances in Japanese pitch than what the textbooks say there are
I'm interested in Hrvatski, can you explain what you mean with the tonal dialect, what part is it exactly, and could you give an language example? Thxx
weirdly enough, I'm brazilian and I learned lots of dialects just so I could fuck with the people I know are from certain regions, and pitch accent translates strangely well to how you pronounce stuff when speaking in a southern brazil accent. They're known over here due to their "singing speech".
Do you need to have a certain Japanese level to do best with the project? I've been focused on Korean with the intention to switch to Japanese, but figured stronger Korean will help Japanese. I'm like B2 Korean and can read Japanese (slowly) and know basic phrases and some words, but really haven't spent much time with it at this point :)
This is very useful, I didn't know about pitch accent training until I saw your video. My native tongue is Arabic. I know also English and Kiswahili, Japanese is a language that I am learning by my self now for years. Still not close enough to understand basic conversation.....
thanks for the deck. I'll use it to formalize my knowledge a little but I think I already have a good ear for pitch since early on I had a language exchange partner who would correct me even on the tiny number of words I knew. I'm really curious about the one on one tutoring, but I worry I might be the sort of person who can't follow instructions. I think there's tools and lots of things you could teach me and ordering improvements, but if you told me to memorize the kanji as step 1 or watch 4 hours of anime a day I'd say no (ヽ´ω`)
People like you guys inspire me, Matt. It's actually very motivating to see that, in a society as superficial, vain and frivolous as many have become and are increasingly becoming nowadays, and especially on the internet, there are still people of character committed with such vigor and seriousness to things that are beyond themselves. Yours is a very positive work, and not only to a small community of Japanese afficionados; I believe it's an actual cultural gem, and much appreciated.
@Matt vs Japan I have a question about 13:58. What about conjugations? If a newbie learns the pitch pattern of say 食べる, they may look for that pattern everywhere. But if it's conjugated to the past or the て-form, then the pattern is completely different. Wouldn't that confuse them?
Would I be right in thinking that listening to songs would be a really bad way of picking up pitch accent as the lyrics would fit to the melody of the song rather than the standard pitch melodies of speech?
personally pop/rock music tends to have some words pronounced differently in every language, just because that pronunciation fits the rhythm better. If you really like learning from music then I would recommend rap songs, those tend to be the most natural sounding ones (not to mention fast, which is great for practicing your pronunciation)
That's correct. The pitch patterns are completely overridden by the song. Song lyrics are actually the most difficult Japanese for me to parse atm because I can't rely subconsciously on pitch to recognize words.
@@FilipP88 yeah I’ve been listening to a wide range including rap which as you say is good for the speed, especially tracks like Sky-Hi’s “Nanisama” or “Name Tag” which includes various rappers guestung like Hunger, Salu, Moment Joon. Also Aklo is one I checked out, and Osaka “ragga-pop” female singer 775 is quite fast and throws up a lot of Osaka-ben
I feel like this is probably an English lang learner thing. Being able to natively speak Spanish and seeing that all languages have accents and emphasis even if they claim not to (English, lol) always clued me into being able to hear pitch accent in Japanese
10:38 I was pretty sure she was saying “弟が” right after I listened to this humming sound once. I don’t know what made it so clear but it was quite distinctive for me.
Are there any plans to run another group for project uproot in the second half of the year? I would love to participate but have a bit too much on with my final semester at uni and working, plus the massive timezone difference for where I live 🇦🇺 (Sorry if this wasn't the right spot to ask this question. The emailed out videos didn't have a comments area)
hey, matt what do you do if you are struggling wtih grammar, like me with my immersion im constantly struggling with particles and contractions like partcles and something else attaching to it. then i just look it up and people like cure dolly is so hard to understand because it's so like logical and complicated that you have to twist your brain to kinda understand it.
I'm not a native english speakers but I mastered english word stress just by immersion. I reckon I can do the same for Japanese, I guess my language being a tonal language helped a little
Free Anki Deck: www.mattvsjapan.com/free-anki-deck
Hit the link above to download my free gift to you, the 10 most common words for all 4 pitch accent patterns.
"You're actually going to be really surprised-once you can hear pitch, you'll notice how bad your pitch is"
just @ me next time bro
"Your japanese is so good"
The master has spoken. Or perhaps sang.
英語上手
じょうず！
DOGEENNNNNNNNN
A born-and-raised-in-Japan English learner here. Thank you so much, Matt and Ken, for creating those unputdownable videos. This comment is for sheer appreciation and a request for your channel. A min read.
I’ve watched all of Matt’s interviews with other high Japanese achievers, Atsu, and even an authentic linguist like Stephen Krashen and several videos on pitch accent. Without studying abroad, I’ve been into American English for years in Japan. And it’s been a massive help for me to get numerous insights into language acquiring.
(ex. I was petrified when I first heard that Matt had got to consciously start tackling pitch accent even after the years of natural immersion because I’ve been immersing myself into English almost the same way as you said you had done. I guess you can totally relate to this, but I was like, Jesus Christ, is it even possible that I’m sounding weirder than I think I knew? What have I been doing, you moron!! I immediately googled and dug up information on the pitfalls self-taught English learners can fall into, and started consciously paying way much more attention to natives’ rhythm, speed, stress, etc when listening and shadowing.) I guess I’ve got to achieve the next phase for now, which I wouldn’t have done without your videos. And I’m sure I’m getting further because of your channel. I can’t thank you enough.
p.s. Your Japanese is fantastic. Matt vs. Japan is evidently one of the most underrated RUclips channels of all time. I’d appreciate it if you could shoot a video discussing the so-called Affective Filter Hypothesis with Ken because it is so far the worst enemy that I can get to know its existence. It will be another gripping video for other subscribers and me if you kindly share how you guys have been dealing with the filter and overcoming it.
Thank you for reading this far. Hope I see you around in Japan or the US after this messy pandemic.
As a native Japanese speaker I can guess what the word is just by hearing the “hummed” versions in the video :)
Teach me! :)
Thats awesome. I hope to get to that point one day.
As a Mandrin Chinese native speaker, I've been using Matt's imerssing method learning Englsih for the past few months. I used to watch tons of anime so I'm not completely unfamiliar with Japanese this language. I just found really interesting that it seems like mandrin native speaker would find learning pitch accent not that hard?(I'm not sure since I'm not learning Japanese) I feel like I can natrually hear and imitate the pitch accent when you guys analyzing the whole pitch accent system. This has been an interesting experience when hearing you guys talking about this topic. I wonder if it would be easier for mandrin Chinese neative speaker to pronounce the wrods since we have the concept of "tones".
I noticed that Chinese speakers pick up on Russian stress really quick compared to speakers of other languages. I saw foreigners reading specially adapted texts where the stressed syllables were marked and still making mistakes while Chinese speakers read accurately
It's easier cause you use tones lol
Interesting comment but I do have to say you should probably learn to condense your messages to smaller comments because that’s very long for such a simple message. And btw your writing is very good for learning for a few months
I’ve been studying mandarin for two years, and since studying I can easily hear Japanese pitch accent. I think tones prime your brain for it
As a second generation Chinese immigrant studying Japanese, hard agree. Never really had any issues with pitch accent. My mom has started learning Japanese too, and even though shes a complete beginner she could replicate pitch accent perfectly.
I’m a pretty new student - started self-study a little over 5 months ago and now at N5. This seems like an accomplishment, but my main goal is speak with Japanese friends, so I’m focusing most of my efforts on input these days instead of academic reading / writing.
This was a very clean way of describing pitch accent! Originally, I discarded the idea of learning pitch accent because it seemed too advanced. After all, my primary focus is learning vocab and grammar. However because pitch accent is similar to music, I noticed pitch has helped my listening abilities. I’ve been casually memorizing pitch patterns while I hear new vocabulary in movies/tv. It is has become another way for me to grab on to words when spoken, much like word order helps me identify words. I’m not sure if anyone else has had this experience.
Great idea to separate the pitch study from actual words. I always understood pitch accent as just “the vibe,” and this is a wonderful way to structure learning to develop that melodic/vibe intuition :) Cheers!
Hi matt! I'm Japanese🎌 and I'm interested in your channel. I guess every Japanese says this so, Im sorry to say this but how you talk in Japanese was crazy amazing!😁 And I think that is showing us who you are. I can tell, you studied hard.
Im proud that I found your channel today👏
Im Mokomi, nice to meet you😊
I knew about pitch and stress accents, but this is the first time I realized how stress accent in English definitely plays a part in parsing a sentence not only in what words are being said, but what the sentence means. I imagine pitch plays a similarly important role in Japanese.
In this sentence in English the stress can change the word from verb to noun. “ He ExTRACTed the EXtract during the experiment”
Yeah its a thing in English, take the sentence I didn't lie. 3 simple words,.. such different meaning. stress pronounce the brackets (I) didn't lie means I am not the one who lied but some one else did lie, I (didn't) lie means I was telling the truth and,.. I didn't (lie) means I was stretching the truth, and perhaps misguiding your beliefs on the topic, like a politician.
It's been 5 days since I watched this video (just finished all 4 patterns in the top 40 deck) and I already feel the difference! I can't thank you enough for all you've given me, Matt. I really don't know where I would've been with my Japanese now if it wasn't for all the knowledge that you shared. You're a real treasure to the language learning community. It even helped me improve my English a little bit 😀
THANK YOU, MATT!
Wow, thinking of it like a melody really made a huge difference. I would always end up saying it louder, but humming out the patterns and trying to say the word seems to be really helpful. Thanks so much for the deck!
私は日本語話者ですが、英語と日本語の違いがわかる興味深い動画でした！
アクセント辞典も日本語学習に役立つと思います。(自分が知ってるのだと「JAccent」とか)
This is probably one of your best videos so far. I have been following you since 2017 or so, when I just started studying Japanese. It's great to see how the quality of your content has gone up, not only in terms of editing but also your charisma and professionalism. Looking forward to seeing more!
I'm tone deaf because of nerve damage and other progressive hearing problems, so it looks like Japanese may be out of my reach. I can't hear pitch changes unless they are drastically different (such as 4-8 keys on a piano and only within certain limited tonal ranges). Your pitch explanations seem clear, but they are just all one pitch to me. : /
You're totally fine dude. Pitch accent is just one of many factors when it comes to speaking japanese. Watching these past few videos matt has done it might seem like pitch is this end all be all when it comes to speaking japanese, but thats not the case at all. There's this channel called "saito" where a japanese couple nitpicks jp learners japanese and they talk about word choice, grammar, pronounciation etc way more than pitch in their videos. They even said that pitch is getting overrated by the jp learning community right now. While pitch is obviously important to achieve a native like accent, you can still become fluent and be understood just fine even if you ignore it completely. So dont be discouraged and get to studying! :)
Hi! Don't be discouraged. Yes, pitch accent is important but you can still communicate with Japanese people and understand animes etc. There are some channels created by Japanese people and they say the same thing. I personally decided to learn pitch accent but that doesn't mean everyone should. To say that pitch accent is absolutely necessary is a little bit exaggeration in my opinion. And I think this obsession with being "perfect" at Japanese is so damaging for the language learning community. People can learn the language however they want. Some people are just making it sound like if you don't learn pitch accent it's not worth learning Japanese at all. But that's so untrue. So never think that Japanese is out of your reach! You can learn it! Don't let perfectionism ruin your spirit.
I know almost no Japanese, but I never had trouble noticing that something was different about Japanese speech. I just assumed it was a difference in the up-and-down cadence of words similar to how British people can give a different intonation to a sentence to Americans, even if all the words in the sentence are pronounced with the stress on the same syllables as in the American usage of those words.
Wow! I'm not even trying to learn Japanese, I'm trying to learn Czech, but this video was still immensely helpful with identifying native speech patterns, pitch, and sentence structure. With native speech, it's easy to disregard such fundamental things like this and just focus on words and vocab. Keep it up, guys! You're inspiring language learners of all shapes and sizes! Even though I'm studying Czech, I still love your Japanese videos, keep it up!
In Australia we have a very flat (stress ) accent so I think it’s easier , at least for me, when learning and listening to Japanese, compared to America who are very strong with their accents
THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH MATT, been trying to find a video like this for a while
As a Swede, I wonder if we can understand the Japanese pitch easier? Since our own language is also a pitch one.
I have heard Swedes ask this a few times and my guess would be that there is no significant difference in how well Swedes pick it up in another language, since they often have a strange "pitch" accent in English. So just being aware that it's a thing doesn't seem to really help since I think the majority of people just try to map our emphasis in the sentence on to the words we're using, and this is stronger than the pull towards correct pitch, unless you've heard that pitch from when you were a child. In some ways it could even be worse because Swedes might have preconceived ideas of where the pitch and stress should go and that would be even further off Japanese than English.
@@daysandwords That's really interesting! I had wondered the same as the OP, but your points make sense. Love your channel btw
I'm Swedish (from Stockholm if it matters) and I had to train myself to even be able to hear Japanese pitch accent. I'm still very far from perfect especially when it comes to speaking.
Swedish is not a pitch accent language, it's a stress accent language _with elements of pitch accent._ I can't say whether I had it easier than speakers of other languages but one thing I can say for sure is that you won't get pitch accent for free just because you're Swedish.
Why is it only Japanese that seems to have this big barrier of entry or effort to learn vs other language?
ngl my question for Ken is just one: Why does the second word of OnePiece -- 「名声」 (of: 富、名声、力) -- sound like "めるせい", when the narrator says it ..?
Is this a pitch accent thing, or is this just part of how language transforms things? (Like in English, we say "bag-ah-chips," rather than "Bag, of, chips.")
I'm on S1E11 now due to your damn 進めて, and I've been shocked by how often written Japanese and the pronounced Japanese can so deeply diverge. (Another thing my mind keeps hooking up to is how often they say 「おもしり」 rather than 「おもしろい」)
I am kind of coming to a place where I feel like: Written Japanese is a conspiracy. Only spoken Japanese is true.
混乱させてしまうかもしれませんが、東京accentと大阪accentというものもあります。
コメディアンには大阪の人がとても多いので、お笑い番組で日本語を覚えた人は、大阪accentで話す人が多いです。it's like American English accent and British.
Ex「うしろ」(behind .back)
In tokyo う↓し↑ろ↑
In osaka う↑し↓ろ↓
その通り. This is why it's worth being able to distinguish such patterns. As a native speaker of English, it is quite odd when I hear American and British accents mixed together in the speech of some foreigners. The more they try to lose their own native accent, the stranger they sound. I've wondered if it's the same with Tokyo and Osaka-bens.
I've lived in Japan for 30 years am fluent and literate in Japanese, and I still don't know what pitch is. It's never presented as a problem, that is after my first 5 years I've never had an issue understanding others nor being understood. The only issue I've had is discerning whether or not there is an うafter an お in some words...stress, intonation, I get...pitch? わからない
Best/most fun explanation of pitch accent I've seen so far
I'm curious about how I'll take to pitch accent being a musician. I can hear it all without a hitch, but I'm thinking I have the advantage of being "fluent in pitch," i.e. being able to sing a C and knowing F# is a disminished fifth above and yadda yadda.
I've been learning Japanese for about 5 months now and the similarities between learning a language and good ear training is really staggering. They even have the same faults in college classes teaching them.
For example, aural skills really starts you with singing do, re, mi, (output) and has sight singing tests before a good amount of input. And the transcribing is mostly done in a test form without giving a stress free alternative. I only got better in that class when I started transcribing music on my own time in a stress free environment and eventually taught me how to hear and eventually reproduce different intervals effortlessly. Learning Japanese and learning about Refold had been giving me a new perspective on teaching pitch to students, considering I basically Refolded my way through music reading, aural skills, and playing instruments without really knowing it.
As a musician Japanese pitch accent seems really intuitive, and I can already hear the difference between the melodies. That being said I can imagine it gets complicated when speaking quickly
Native Japanese here🇯🇵
Never seen/heard of Japanese pronunciation taught this way, and I'm so impressed and blown away with what you guys have started doing together!
It's been over 160 yrs since Japan's national isolationism / closed-door policy ended, lol (in freakin Edo period), it would be great to see more gaikokujin speak "fluent Japanese" pitch accent wise, hehe. (don't think I've ever come across anyone until I found you guys, Dogen, and Nyk from Nyk channel on YT, tbh)
Many times I heard them say Japanese is difficult but its pronunciation is flat and pretty easy ...and in my mind I've always been like...um..NO.
If Japanese pitch accent is taught in the right and effective way, like how you do it, it might not be so difficult after all - this is so innovative and original!
Lucky 100 ppl who will be participating!
それは素敵な言葉です
さらに、SakuraDropsは誠に可愛いです
I love the concept of comparison with melody and having your brain recognize pitch this way. But for me, pitch accent is very confusing as I am very tone death and struggle with it and get mixed feedback when talking to native Japanese people in person and watching online. My Japanese sensei who is Japanese and I have one on one with 4 times a month, says that pitch accent is not that important. I want to get pitch accent down but seems like me just learning the grammar, words, and everything else first seems to make the most sense. I’ve been studying for over 3 years and never heard of pitch accent until a few months ago when I saw the video of George and Matt doing a live video on it. I’m very conflicted since all these RUclips videos say it’s super important, but the Japanese people I know in person which is a good bit, act like pitch accent is no big deal 😮....It seems like it’s a depending on who you ask kind of thing. But overall, love the audio samples with melody examples. I think that puts pitch accent into a basic concept for people like me who are very tone death. I’ve saved this video so I can come back to it later on when maybe I’m ready
It's not only Japanese, all the language has their melody. And some of them like English, Italian, French, or the different Arabic languages have a very strong one.
Yes, but in most of those languages, it doesn't have a real importance. I'm French and I don't hear anything like pitch accent you should be aware of.
Tihs was an AMAZING explanation of how to do different pitch accent patterns. The analogies you gave, with the person wearing different clothes, also made perfect sense and I could see were well thought out. Usually it's kinda hard to explain concepts in a language to a speaker of another language when they have totally different frameworks of looking at things, but I feel like you translated the idea of a pitch accent pretty well for me. You finally explained to me in a concise way what's the difference with pitch accent and stress accent. Amazing
Why do you feel it necessary to memorize these patterns and consciously recognize this stuff? Do you disagree with the notion that we can acquire language through input alone?
Yeah, if you don't know what pitch accent is you'll never acquire it, and you can also speed up the acquisition process by studying some grammar and vocab with srs, at least that's my experience.
Matt : Trying to mermorize the pitch accent of the most 50 common words will really help you .
Me : How about 6000 . . .
This is just what I needed. Your recent content has been on fire!!
I am highly looking forward to the highly valuable work you both will be creating together.
As a musician who weekly sings psalm toned chant at Mass, this is honestly weirdly complicated for me. I find myself analyzing the pitch musically rather than for speech and wonder things about how big the rises or drops in pitch should be (in terms of intervals) and whether or not the distance between pitches (said intervals) is determined for each different pattern. I also have to assume that the pitch *pattern* is what's recognized rather than the exact pitches themselves (which is actually very similar to the fact that in the Gregorian Chant I often sing, the exact pitches are not so important as the actual sequence of pitches are; the pitch to start on is decided by a director and/or the singers each time a chant is sung ).
Needless to say this makes things very interesting for me to follow along
Had the same thing going on lmao
I am all for it, where can I apply ?
Does anybody know the background music at around 11:15? It sounds familiar
Not 100% sure but I’m pretty confident it’s from kaiji (the anime)
@@Blah6384 Ya, it's definitely from Kaiji
1st and 4th seemed very identical but I can ear a slight difference. I am sure it is obvious but my untrained hear is still learning
edit: you actually gave us a free deck for pitch accent, I love this channel. Thanks Matt for all the information shared this is incredible. btw if you ever thought about creating a merch I let you know that I would by a hoodie or so, I really want to give something back, I feel like we got so much for free. I LOVE MATT VS JAPAN CHANNEL
Anki file is fucked - at least for me on mobile....
Thank you very much for the deck! I really have no intention of speaking Japanese but being able to improve my comprehension is more than satisfactory for me. Keep doing what you're doing Matt and Ken :)
Your eyes are turning Japanese.
no seriously if there was a pitch accent app with the humming exercises i would totally use that!!
I am not good at it, but I think it's kind of like the "cadence" in Italian and Swedish. It's part of the pronunciation, just a lot more subtle in Japanese...which is why I find it harder.
Love that you’re uploading Matt!
This is something that has always bothering me when studying languages, it was the same with English. Why ALL courses and people that try to teach, ALWAYS focus on individual words, but NEVER show what they are trying to teach, how it affects ENTIRE sentences. It remind of English class, where the teacher would talk hours and hours about individual words, so when I tried to listen entire sentences I never was able to identify that word that I suppose already "know".
Also, make yourself self-conscious of something like this won't damage the language somehow? I mean, if you need to always consciously remember of the right pitch for a word and also keep consciously looking for the pitch for each individual word when listening to it, won't make people struggle to understand and talk? it remind me the same with conscious translation when learn English. The teacher gives you like a ton of individual words to learn the meant of, but with no audio, then when you try to listen or talk you keep struggling to remember the right work for that sentence or something.
I wonder why all courses do that? Doesn't it just makes things hard for who is trying to learn a new language? not to mention that is not how we learned our native language. I just can't understand.
Your videos have been a great help and I even listen to your 3 hour video explaining your Journey of learning Japanese. II am very interested in anything you guys can do to help as I have a four-year-old daughter who lives in Japan who is supposed to be able to visit here on the States 3 months of the year but because of the pandemic that his it that has not been able to happen happen since. I've been studying Japanese for the last year and a 1/2 and I have progressed quite a bit but I know I have so much more to learn and I could really use the help.
9:28 penultimate syllable.
Second this! Case in point:
o-ko-no-mi-YA-ki
ka-go-SHI-ma
ka-mi-KA-ze
Besides the point, but this pitch accent pattern used to be prevalent in the Meiji Era and is maintained in dialects like Osakaben, but….you’re not about to tell me Americans used classical Japanese to inform their pronunciation? :’’’) 😎
The anki deck is a great idea!
Thanks a lot for all your amazing contributions to the immersion learning community!
Hey thanks for the deck, Matt and Ken!! I studied the first ten heiban words today with Audacity. I recorded the native pronunciation and mine and the difference in the blue diagram was quite funny. Her was so
symmetric and mine was just wishwash :P By the way... Do you happen to know, what the name of the program shown at 7:12 above Audacity is?(I assume the one below is Audacity)
I tried really hard to hear pitch accent before this video and I legit couldn’t and for some reason that humming exercise made me really hear it for the first time. Like you addressed I’m concerned because I realize just how terrible I probably sound so I hope you make more pitch accent instruction in the future.
This video is amazing, the space dandy music at the end of the video is classic in this channel
Thank you very much for what you do and what you bring to the community 🙏🔥
What is the name of the anime at 14:03 where the character is intently watching Future Boy Conan?
さすがマットさん、これは完璧です
thanks for the awesome video man! what is this anime? 13:34
As a Brazilian, I like so much the Japanese accent, for me, it is one of the most beautiful and cool accents
love the kaiji background music
Thanks for the video! What's the anime at 5:54? It looks beautiful.
四月は君の嘘 (your lie in April), you will cry😭
Hello! It is one of my life dreams to learn japanese. Right now I am a total beginner, but I intent to improve myself. Therefore, I really wanna nail pitch accent as much as possible. Can anyone recommend a good dictionary website that lists Pitch accent of words? Each time i learn a new word from a book or something, i would like to also understand its pitch accent. Thank you in advance!
my problem is that, being that I'm croatian and from a part that has a really tonal dialect, I'm oftentimes able to identify more nuances in Japanese pitch than what the textbooks say there are
I'm interested in Hrvatski, can you explain what you mean with the tonal dialect, what part is it exactly, and could you give an language example? Thxx
weirdly enough, I'm brazilian and I learned lots of dialects just so I could fuck with the people I know are from certain regions, and pitch accent translates strangely well to how you pronounce stuff when speaking in a southern brazil accent. They're known over here due to their "singing speech".
Oh I'm a croatian too, which dialect are you refering to?
I don't understand why that is a problem. Shouldn't it be an advantage for you then?
3:18 I have face blindness, so that's exactly how it is for me 🥲
Do you need to have a certain Japanese level to do best with the project? I've been focused on Korean with the intention to switch to Japanese, but figured stronger Korean will help Japanese. I'm like B2 Korean and can read Japanese (slowly) and know basic phrases and some words, but really haven't spent much time with it at this point :)
This is very useful, I didn't know about pitch accent training until I saw your video. My native tongue is Arabic. I know also English and Kiswahili, Japanese is a language that I am learning by my self now for years. Still not close enough to understand basic conversation.....
Matt " pitch accent is important" also Matt " keerati"
omg the humming practice helped so much!!! i wish i could just do exercise after exercise with that humming thing.
thanks for the deck. I'll use it to formalize my knowledge a little but I think I already have a good ear for pitch since early on I had a language exchange partner who would correct me even on the tiny number of words I knew.
I'm really curious about the one on one tutoring, but I worry I might be the sort of person who can't follow instructions. I think there's tools and lots of things you could teach me and ordering improvements, but if you told me to memorize the kanji as step 1 or watch 4 hours of anime a day I'd say no (ヽ´ω`)
I really like the quality of the video editing. What softwares do you use Matt? Tx
S tier video fellas
People like you guys inspire me, Matt. It's actually very motivating to see that, in a society as superficial, vain and frivolous as many have become and are increasingly becoming nowadays, and especially on the internet, there are still people of character committed with such vigor and seriousness to things that are beyond themselves. Yours is a very positive work, and not only to a small community of Japanese afficionados; I believe it's an actual cultural gem, and much appreciated.
@Matt vs Japan I have a question about 13:58. What about conjugations? If a newbie learns the pitch pattern of say 食べる, they may look for that pattern everywhere. But if it's conjugated to the past or the て-form, then the pattern is completely different. Wouldn't that confuse them?
日本人です。面白うそうな動画なので登録しました！
Would I be right in thinking that listening to songs would be a really bad way of picking up pitch accent as the lyrics would fit to the melody of the song rather than the standard pitch melodies of speech?
personally pop/rock music tends to have some words pronounced differently in every language, just because that pronunciation fits the rhythm better.
If you really like learning from music then I would recommend rap songs, those tend to be the most natural sounding ones (not to mention fast, which is great for practicing your pronunciation)
I’ve found it’s pretty terrible yes
That's correct. The pitch patterns are completely overridden by the song. Song lyrics are actually the most difficult Japanese for me to parse atm because I can't rely subconsciously on pitch to recognize words.
@@FilipP88 yeah I’ve been listening to a wide range including rap which as you say is good for the speed, especially tracks like Sky-Hi’s “Nanisama” or “Name Tag” which includes various rappers guestung like Hunger, Salu, Moment Joon. Also Aklo is one I checked out, and Osaka “ragga-pop” female singer 775 is quite fast and throws up a lot of Osaka-ben
This is where my music degree really comes into its own :-P
The kaiji backround music 😍😍
Great to see you uploading again Matt!
I feel like this is probably an English lang learner thing. Being able to natively speak Spanish and seeing that all languages have accents and emphasis even if they claim not to (English, lol) always clued me into being able to hear pitch accent in Japanese
The details in the editing, especially the "remix" part... Wow!!
What are the lavalier mics you guys are using? They sound great!
Title: Why you can't hear Japanese pitch accent?
Thumbnail: Your ears are clogged. You need to remove earwax blockage.
Matt:
I will be eagerly waiting for the release of the verbs pitch accent video!
At this point I can't tell what's more bullshit, the English spelling & phonetic inconsistency or the Japanese fussy pronunciation rules.
Imitating anime characters as a kid helped out a lot in pitch's.
Thanks for this video. Very helpful to better grasp pitch accent!
Thank you for this video, it really helped with my pronunciation. Hopefully a lot of people learning Japanese watches this
Actually such a good vid bruh like legit this deserves so much more praise and views than these other "language influencers" doing spews for views
日本語習得すんのって大変なんだな。。すげえ
Revolutionary stuff, guys🤝🏾
This thumbnail better be relevant😂
The Rich Man, Poor Woman reference😼
Thank you sooooo much for this! I've been looking more into pitch accent lately so this is really helpful🥺
6:30
Use this to repeat the part with the exercises :)
10:38 I was pretty sure she was saying “弟が” right after I listened to this humming sound once.
I don’t know what made it so clear but it was quite distinctive for me.
I'm not even learning Japanese why am I watching this
This is exceptionally useful 🎉
Are there any plans to run another group for project uproot in the second half of the year? I would love to participate but have a bit too much on with my final semester at uni and working, plus the massive timezone difference for where I live 🇦🇺 (Sorry if this wasn't the right spot to ask this question. The emailed out videos didn't have a comments area)
Liked before watched
ありがとうございます😊
hey, matt what do you do if you are struggling wtih grammar, like me with my immersion im constantly struggling with particles and contractions like partcles and something else attaching to it.
then i just look it up and people like cure dolly is so hard to understand because it's so like logical and complicated that you have to twist your brain to kinda understand it.
Thumbs up only because of the Kaiji's soundtrack at 11:02. Just kidding, thanks for the awesome video :)
I'm not a native english speakers but I mastered english word stress just by immersion. I reckon I can do the same for Japanese, I guess my language being a tonal language helped a little