Not really.
English pitch is a bit weird because it comes mixed in with other things (volume and duration), and it’s probably easier to pick up on than the other way around. So we listen for stress and don’t really hear it in Japanese, and many people don’t hear much of a difference at all, even after becoming aware that pitch exists in Japanese.
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I’d say the greatest predictor to sounding like a native is wanting to sound like a native probably honestly
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I didn’t say that.
I agree that a lot of people struggle with accent, but if you’re not picking it up after hundreds of hours of listening, you’re either not paying enough attention, or you’re built different in a way that I can’t comprehend.
Am I speaking from a position of privilege?
Is it because I speak Spanish?
I know people who haven’t studied Japanese a day in their life, and they know how to ask someone to take their photo, with decent enough accent, just from listening to anime. I know people who literally just started studying, and if you just say 仕事, they just say it the same way. Do they have a superpower called being able to hear what someone else is saying? People make mistakes, I tell a student not to say a word a certain way, I forget which now, and he keeps saying it like that, not because he doesn’t understand he’s saying it wrong, but because he forgets since he’s studying a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
Do you think Japanese classes are just 20 people all speaking incorrectly until they learn the magic of pitch accent? I just don’t get it.
Maybe me and 90% of the people I know aren’t most of us.
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The greatest predictor is the amount of audio files recorded in your own voice on your computer.
Are you certain of the quality of your own ears to gauge the pitch of others? That’s precisely what I am saying. You probably don’t hear the deficiency the same way a native does*.
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You are speaking from the same illusion I had because of being German. 
The privilege is to be set up for a brutal reality check, but it is true that it comes later than for English natives.
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I am. My hearing is probably the only thing I’m certain of.
You saying otherwise without knowing me does come off as patronizing, not gonna lie.
Do I make mistakes in pitch accent? All the time.
Is it because I can’t hear the difference? Nah, I just forget the way to say things sometimes, especially when they’re written the same way.
But I see that for both of you, I (and everyone else) can’t possibly be right, since it’s not like that for you, so I’ll take my leave here. 
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You could proof us that we are wrong rather than to just act offended.
Maybe you are the only exception when it comes to Japanese pitch accent.
Please upload an audio file and the discussion will come to an end naturally either way.
If you don’t like the idea I would volunteer to proof that even after living in Japan for ten years and learning pitch accent rules recently with a good hearing according to my violin teacher but without recording anything because I couldn’t be bothered my pronunciation is very bad.
I would do this because probably it would be an embarrassing enough experience that would force me to finally use my microphone. 
(Ask me to say ソーセージ )
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Ahh. I think my point has been misunderstood. If a person had trained to hear pitch accent before being deeply engaged in learning Japanese, pitch accent would be a subconscious process.
Also, again, I wasn’t trying to be offensive. I was posing the question that if a person were lacking in the ability to completely hear pitch accent, would they know if they had a deficiency in using it? I’m sorry if that came off as a personal attack - it was supposed to be a hypothetical aimed at anyone making the same argument.
We can agree to disagree, and not derail poor OPs thread anymore.
I don’t think I will ever be able to say りょう properly. I think my tongue might be kinda dumb.
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I would really like to have an embarrassing but fun pronunciation topic. I have the feeling the biggest problem is to take the initial hurdle to be aware of your own mistakes without cringing to death.
What tripped me up the most is 頂上 （ちょうじょう）
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We should honestly get a discord server for doing fun/dumb things. There probably already is one but I’m not one of the cool kids to get an invite.
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I installed it but have cero idea on how it works really. But it would definitely be fun. We could do a tictoc anime phrase challenge
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This reads like the desire for “The perfect resource” or “Wanting to learn everything in a single go”
You see this all the time in art, where people will have a fantastic resource that’s already great to learn a particular thing, yet hear them say “Yeah, but this doesn’t teach me xyz and what about bad habits and what about this? Don’t I also need that? Should I yadayada”
WaniKani is there to teach you kanji and vocabulary, that’s all. It’s great at that, and the reason it works so well is because it doesn’t attempt to “overload” you.
Learning, just like in art, isn’t about getting everything perfect the first time, it’s about getting you closer to perfection every step of the way.
If you want to try and also learn the exact right pitch, as well as ALL the meanings and applicable contexts of every given kanji, as well as how to write it… Then just try it, and see how much of that you can remember 2 weeks later, and also just how fast you will burn out trying to learn everything and learning it perfectly the first time.
That’s just my two cents. The approach is based on techniques that memory world-champions use to remember all kinds of stuff, so yeah it’s pretty good.
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I know it’s not the point, but most people say おはし when talking about chopsticks anyway, not the plain word where they could get flipped with bridge or something. I don’t really understand why people fret about this set of words in particular.
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The perfect tool with every function you could imagine but you can’t use it anymore because it is so, well, functional?
Because it’s a fun comparison. Candy raining from the sky would be pretty nice too though.
I live in Kansai where both pairs are opposite of standard pitch anyway, so maybe it’s harder for me to be amused by the idea of using them wrong in standard Japanese.
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The overlap between pitch accent discussions and amusement is probably pretty low to begin with. Grammar is where the real fun is. I was so worried when I started learning Japanese that people would mistake me for an eel at restaurants, as often as the talking point came up.
I’m actually 3 eels in a trenchcoat.
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