I was browsing the forms here and stumbled upon this great companion site https://www.kaniwani.com/. Over there they have this super handy pitch accent diagram. I would love to see this added over here!
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Welcome to the forums!
This is probably low on their to do list, but in the mean time, hereâs a userscript:
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Woah super cool! Thanks for sharing and thanks for the welcome to the forums. I can already tell thereâs lots of great stuff here. Iâll have to try out the extension!
This is probably low on their to do list
Kind curious⌠what makes you say that? Is it because the pitch accent diagrams are pretty niche in general or is there actually some list of features that the Wanikani team is working on?
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Itâs not that niche, Iâve seen it all over.
Itâs just a feeling in general, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think itâs more that itâs not that high of a priority on a website that focusses on teaching you kanji, which in itself have no pitch. The vocabulary is mostly there to help you learn all the different kanji readings, and how they are used. So teaching the pitch accent of the vocabulary is not that required for learning kanji.
Furthermore, they focus more on content and learning structure updates, which is a lot of work. Recently they looked into the best way to teach transitive and intransitive verbs for example.
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So pitch is basically where the stress is?
pitch in japanese can be compared to stress in english. though where stress is slightly louder/longer than the rest of the word, pitch is the tone variation. some parts of the word are pronounced with slightly higher tone than others
No, and thatâs a good example of why itâs hard to get the hang of.
Many resources will call it âstressâ when talking about Japanese but it helps me to think of it like this:
English is a stress accented language. Syllables in words are stressed by modulating the pitch or adjusting the time taken or both.
Generally, Japanese moraâs take the same amount of time each and only the pitch is modulated. So itâs pitch accented.
For example:
ăŻă as 玸 chopsticks starts high and then drops.
ăŻă as ćŠ bridge starts normal and then goes high.
ăŻă as 獯 edge is flat all the way.
Source: OJAD - ć¤ç´˘çľć
Thereâs also this helpful comment from StackExchange:
To anyone unable to hear the difference, go grab a musical instrument and play do-mi and mi-do. Do-mi is âbridgeâ and mi-do is âchopstickâ. â lâĂŠlecteur Nov 26 '16 at 6:16
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Thx for the answer. That seems to describe how stress works pretty much though.
One more question
What is"chopsticks?" Then?
not quite, that is literally just changing the pitch.
I can only talk about stress in English, I do not have much experience with stress in other languages. Stress can change the pronunciation at heck of a lot more; not just the pitch, but also vowel length, it can merge constants, reduce a vowel to a schwa, even potentially change the number of syllables.
Take Worcester, a city in England, (the âceremonial county townâ of Worcestershire ⌠which the awesome sauce is named from). The stress is on the first syllable, and is pronounce /ËwĘstÉr/, a bit like âWuh-sterâ; which would be only a 2 syllable word. However if we shift the stress to the centre /wÉrËsÉstÉr/, a bit like âwar-Sest-terâ; weâve now got three syllables, changed the vowels a bit, and it sounds completely different.
Stress is a more powerful beast; but usually the pronunciation rules for a languages are âusuallyâ clear which is the stress, and even if itâs not and some have to be learnt; itâs still âusuallyâ clear how the rest of the word contracts in the language. Heck, even if you arenât explicitly taught such rules, it can be loosly summarised as âpronounce of the rest of the word lazilyâ and youâll probably get it right.
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Japanese rarely has a word/suffix to indicate plurals. You usually have to gauge from context if they are talking about one, or many, a specific (the), or unspecific (a/an).
Like I said, many resources will call it stress, but when learning pitch accent, itâs very hard not to modify the mora timing as well so I find it helpful to separate out just the pitch part.
Japanese doesnât pluralize like that so it would be the same as chopstick.
Comparing Japanese pitch accent to English township names is hardly a fair comparison.
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It occurs in most, multi-syllabic words we speak in English. Vowel reduction to a schwa is so unbelievably common, most donât even know schwa exists and itâs the most common âvowelâ in English. If vowels donât change to a schwa, their lengths usually do, or open become closed etc.
Worcester is a great example because of how radically it can change by moving the stress; it really does change the word completely. Itâs county, Worcestershire, is even better when you compare itâs actual pronunciation /ËwĘstÉrĘÉr/ (Wuh-ster-sher), to if you considered it all stressed /wÉrsÉstÉrĘaÉŞÉr/ (war-sest-ter-shy-er); (3 to 5 syllables).
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Haha yeah, reminds me of this Tom Scott video.
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Alright, you have a point there, it feels like the entire english language could function with É in place of evey other vowel lol. I wonder, though, how much this vowel reduction is true for japanese.
To my knowledge; not at all. Such vowel reduction is usually due to stress, specifically in unstressed parts of words. Japanese doesnât have stress, it only has pitch.
Someone please correct me if Iâm wrong; the vowels, consonants, and morae length are all exactly the same, regardless of pitch. The only thing that changes is the pitch itself.
got to love Tom Scott
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My question was not about pluralizing. The mi-do and do-mi explanation feels more like itâs about intonation rather than stress to me. Thatâs why I was curious how those giving the do-mi examples would explain âchopsticks!!!â vs âchopsticks???â I hope thatâs a better way of explaining what the question is about.
As someone who had to deal with languages that clearly distinguish long and short vowels (like finnish) as well as languages with compound words with multiple stresses, that are not always even, I donât seem to find anything difficult in japanese phonetics worth doing so much theory about. I feel like I can easily distinguish words and reproduce them correctly. I may be wrong, but Iâm starting to suspect this is another area in the japanese learning system for english speakers that is just bad due to the way english is. Like when it comes to verb transitivity for instance. The explanations just donât seem to cut it for me. At least in those resources that I used. And the wk translations for transitive/intransitive verbs are pretty inaccurate at times I think. I can often think of a context sentence where the âcorrectâ answer that wk wants would not fit. Iâm talking about about those âto be + verbâ mostly.
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Ah ok, that makes sense now.
So for a questioning tone that usually rises at the end itâs all good since the pitch accent follows.
For emphasis like in âchopsticks!!â, what usually happens is a drop using a particle like â玸ăŽďźâ or using the copula like â玸ă ďźâ
One thing to note is that pitch accent changes a bit as words are used in a sentence. The pitch in a sentence tends to get lower overall as it goes on except for rise in questions like I mentioned and particles can effect the pitch drops.
Iâm actually the same way, and I think itâs more intuitive for people who know a different language like that or who are used to hearing different English accents.
I started looking into it more because I was also curious as to why it seemed to give people trouble. And it seems like many people arenât able to distinguish the differences without study.
Not to say that people who can intuitively grasp it have an advantage other than that they donât have to actually study pitch accent. I think everyone can get to the same initial facility where the only way to further improve is practice.
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