I think some of the points he’s making in those sections are fine, but just in the first two parts you mentioned he emphasizes “if you’re the only one who can’t hear pitch accent”, which sounds like a scare tactic to me.
Also, what’s with the comments about learners not being able to hear vowels and consonants? If someone is having that problem, that is so much of a bigger issue compared to not being able to hear pitch accent, and yet he’s combining the two as if they are equivalent.
Regarding the statement that you need pitch accent to learn through listening and that you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t know pitch accent, I think this is a misleading statement. I agree that if you literally can’t hear pitch accent at all you’re at a disadvantage. But you can be fine at identifying pitch accent (consciously and subconsciously) even if you haven’t memorized the pitch accent for thousands of words. Personally, I can usually identify the pitch accent for words I hear and I also know many patterns for how pitch accent changes after conjugation. My problem is that I haven’t memorized the pitch accents for most words, meaning I also don’t know which pitch accent conjugation pattern to follow. But I don’t think there’s a “super special secret” to addressing that. I would just need to prioritize memorizing pitch accent for words and practice reproducing the sounds within sentences.
He said “you can’t be reading a book while walking realistically”. Well I showed him! I’ve been reading Japanese books while walking for the past two years! And I only hurt myself twice!
Regarding the broken ankle analogy, it’s a little overstated, but I don’t think it’s wrong. I think if you had two Japanese learners who you knew would never give up on learning the language, the one who learns good pronunciation and pitch accent early on will probably be at an advantage in the long run. Or more broadly, the person who has a more balanced learning routine (e.g. not just learning kanji for a year while ignoring grammar) will be at an advantage in the long run. The problem is, this ignores the human factor. You can’t guarantee that neither of those two learners will quit. There is such a thing as too much information, and I worry that making beginners focus on pitch accent too much would cause more people to quit learning the language. It’s better to come back to pitch accent later and be less efficient than to give up at the beginning.
He said “Most people, no matter how much they immerse they never pick up on pitch accent”. That just sounds like complete nonsense to me. If I was able to pick up on some pitch accent patterns from watching anime, I’m sure the average person immersing in listening or learning Japanese while living in Japan will be able to pick it up. Unless by “pick up on pitch accent” he means “learn it incredibly well”, in which case, sure most people probably can’t do that without trying. But he makes it sound more like “can’t identify pitch accent and maybe don’t even know it exists”, which is just a silly claim to make.
He mentions having to work harder to identify the word you’re hearing by not knowing pitch accent (which is probably true), but then says it could happen multiple times a minute. That sounds ridiculous. If you know a lot of words (even without knowing the pitch accent), context should fill in the gaps most of the time. You’re not often going to have a sentence in isolation like あめがすき (雨 or 飴) without any context.
