I’d say it is important to be aware of pitch accent, but in all the important things to know, it is the least important. If you get bogged down in trying to remember this all, it’ll be one thing that hinders progress.
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After listening to Matts latest interview with Ken I got major scam vibes, so I of course signed up for the free email mini course from Ken Cannon.
Besides the emails directly from Ken, I got fake emails from another email, claiming to be Ken with some clickbaity text and a shady looking link.
I emailed Ken a warning with this information, that someone was gaining access to his email sign up list. I of course never heard back from him.
So yeah, avoid at all cost, just do some language exhange or get a teacher through one of the trustworthy language teacher sites out there. Or get one of the many trustworthy resources out there.
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OK, so based on what you just said, I had it backwards in my head: all the sounds that people make in a language are one thing (which phonetics studies), but how they’re split up and distinguished from one another is another (which phonology is concerned with).
Thanks also for the illustrative examples. I did read about allophones (or sounds that are treated as such) at some point, especially while studying Spanish, but I was aware of the phenomenon more on an intuitive level than on a technical level.
And finally,
I see. That makes sense. And in my experience, even in languages that do distinguish between the two, like French, how important that distinction is depends on usage in a particular territory and whether or not another distinct word using the other vowel exists, so as long as one is able to map what one hears to the relevant phoneme, possibly with the help of context, recognising a specific pronunciation is not important for understanding.
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dont really see anything critical. Just typical sales tactic and ext. Matt is a normal guy but I don’t really think that he or anyone can really create any evolutionary course that can significantly speed up the learning process.
Learning a language is all mostly about acquiring vocabulary. There is a limit to how fast a person can learn 10-15k words. + matt by himself spend like 3 years living close to hikimory style immersing language 24/7. Not the best example.
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‘an you imagine if someone used the wrong pitch accent constantly in English? They’d be perceived pretty poorly, and rightly so.’
I don’t know. Wouldn’t it just be the same as someone that has a strong accent from another language? I know people who have studied English for years and and still have a strong accent which make some words slightly difficult. But I never thought, ‘Your English is poor.’ I just thought, ‘Your accent is strong.’
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I don’t know what it is but I find accents pleasing. I almost never have a hard time understanding people even if they have heavy accents. One thing is to have a heavy accent but a whole different scenario is to mispronounce words or to speak in a broken language.
Among the ones I like the most are:
Italian, Russian, and Greeks speaking English with their accents. Asian accents are also cool!
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Language is about communicating. You can have an accent and still be able to communicate well. If your accent is so strong that people can’t understand you, then it’s a problem. So I’d say it just depends.
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I’m disappointed Ken Cannon is going into business with Matt…I like Ken Cannon, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy…but yeh at the end of the day everybody has gotta earn those dollar bills and I understand why you would want to use your knowledge to make a profit.
I don’t like the way they’re going about it though.
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Lately I have been getting a lot of weird emails from his mailing list… I was wondering what was going on and well I guess I got my answer. 
Time to unsub from that.
I was never a fan of the refold thing. I’m not saying it’s bad or doesn’t work. I have a friend who followed it for two years and he’s VERY good at Japanese (despite his humble opinion of his Japanese).
It just doesn’t work for everyone. Not everyone has that kind of time and dedication.
But I digress…
I loved watching Matts earlier videos… I found them to be motivating and educational, so I hope this is just some stupid short lived phase, but I guess we will see…
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Sorry for derailing from the main topic, but just in case some readers here don’t know other pitch-accent resources besides Matt or Dogen. I usually would trust a native Japanese speaker more when it comes to learning the language and if they say there’s pitch accent in their language, I’ll take their word for it.
Female native speaker.
The Very Basics of Japanese Pitch Accent | 2 Rules and 4 Patterns - YouTube
Male native speaker.
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It’s saddens me to see how much he’s fallen off because I used to adopt his content and methods into my learning. Even though refold was a good project of his, I didn’t really keep up with that because I kept hearing the criticisms thrown at him during the time (most of which were unrelated to Refold, but still). And then he does this “Linguists don’t want you to know this secret!!!” thing and now the little respect I had for him is gone.
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It has to do with pitch accent and not necessarily with accent in itself. It’s completely different. Pitch accent languages utilizes pitch accent to distinguish words and their meanings.
Pitch accent sounds like magic to people that don’t speech a language where it’s used.
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Not sure about that, they’re not even pronounced the same… びょういん vs びよういん
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Another example would be 橋 and 箸.
But I think most of the time context is gonna help determine which word you’re saying, even if you’re using the wrong pitch pattern. It will probably still sound funny though lol
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Yeah, the 4 mora vs 5 thing is probably going to be a bigger source of confusion than the pitch. It was probably just a bad example.
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Or 雨 and 飴, but then again, the context will make it clear.
I’m really curious to see a real life sentence where the pitch is necessary to avoid confusion. I’ve yet to find one, pretty convinced it’s not really a common occurrence (meaning pitch accent is hardly necessary)
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I’ve never heard of Matt until today, but that’s unfortunate that he’s gone that way.
This line is so funny to me. Like, I just imagine someone saying “C’mon guys we can’t keep letting Big Linguist get away with this!” What would even be the goal for these evil linguists? 
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You’re really focusing on the “technically” and ignoring the in-practice effect. English is not considered a pitch-accent language, but I can tell you, listening to someone with a heavy Indian accent is super-difficult. Even when they are using 100% correct grammar and vocabulary. The reason is their natural inflection is completely unexpected to the American ear. Can I understand them? Technically yes, but It results in a lot of “what?” and having to have sentences repeated. Similar to what I get sometimes when I’m speaking grammatically-correct Japanese.
So “most important” thing, probably not. But the question is how much "what?’ and having to repeat yourself do you want to encounter?
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Right? I don’t think I’ve ever run into any scientist or researcher of any topic who won’t bore you to tears with their specialty at the slightest invitation. LOL at the idea of one refusing to talk about it.
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There’s a lot of money to be made from language learning. Every day billions of people try to learn a new language, many of them on the internet. So it tends to attract scammers also.
Scam itself is not a zero or one thing. Something can be “scammy” but you can still profit from it. For example, somebody can offer you a genuine language course but using clickbaity and pushy language that is designed to make people curious/ensnared. One example is That Japanese Guy Yuta who made some good YouTube videos, but then several years ago offered a quite expensive course promising you to go to the moon and back. And if you call in the next five minutes we will also throw this magic cleaner for your kitchen, etc.
From the experience of people who took the course from Yuta, it seems to be a good course. But I was turned off by the infomercial aspect of it. If you treat your potential customers like idiots, don’t be surprised if they don’t like you.
On the other hand, there are many people who genuinely create good language courses, such as Tofugu, Maggie Sensei, iKnow.jp, BunPro, kitsun.io, LingoDeer, etc. I’m not affiliated to any of them, so I don’t get any money mentioning these names.
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