‘If your accent is so strong that people can’t understand you, then it’s a problem. So I’d say it just depends.’
Ya, but isn’t this the crux of the argument?
George says everyone can understand you, even if you don’t have the pitch right and the others say it’s super important.
I’d rather be able to understand/speak full on Japanese with poor pitch then to be able to speak a little Japanese with perfect pitch…
…and on that note, it’s time for some reviews. ha!
And that’s not a “wrong” strategy. Others might say it’s easier to learn right than to un-learn bad habits later, so a little extra effort now can save having to do a lot of accent work later. Still others don’t plan to speak at all, only read and write. There’s no wrong way and no One True Correct Way.
I’m guessing this is really only a problem if you’re learning from textbooks or internet or whatever. Even if you learn it wrong, if you’re in a constant-use environment and try to mimic what you’re hearing, you’ll correct that pretty soon just naturally. People of all types of accents lose them over time. But you do need to know what it is, so you can recognize the difference between what you’re saying and what other people say.
FYI, if you highlight the text in the post you are replying to and hit the Quote button, it’ll be easier to see what part of your post is a quote and what part is your response.
Personally, I find that (like many things in learning) the 80/20 rule is great here. You can learn a lot of very important and common pitch accent patterns with very little effort and improve your pitch accent dramatically. You will most certainly not have perfect pitch, but personally I don’t think that having perfect pitch is a worthy goal for most people. But my point is that you don’t have to choose between speaking fluently with a poor pitch and speaking little Japanese with a perfect pitch. With a little extra effort you can achieve good (but not perfect) pitch while working towards fluency.
Just here to bump the thread and spread the word to be cautious.
Also, I’ve noticed a lot of this thread has turned to talking about whether or not pitch accent is really all that important or not.
I just want to point out that whether or not pitch accent is important or not is irrelevant to the problem at hand: The problem is that Matt and Ken are running this in the style of a scam/grift (create a problem only they can solve, say you can’t learn it from others, create artificial scarcity, feed off of whales, etc). The desire is to keep people from falling into this trap.
Even if pitch accent was some kind of secret sauce to speaking Japanese in an understandable way, the methods would still be questionable.
See Dogen for an example of a creator who runs a business centered around Japanese pitch accent but does so in a non-grifty/scamy way.
This always reminds me of Robert De Niro wearing balaclava in Brazil. Gotta watch that movie again…
Ya, I do shadowing and stuff too.
But I’m also level 4. It’s been 6 weeks since starting Japanese and I still have trouble recognizing watashi in hiragana. sigh.
Even my shadowing right now often goes, ‘Kore ha gurglegurglehmmakai desu ka?’
I hope to be in a true immersive environment eventually and I think my speaking would improve a lot then. But for now…?
Ooooo. Thanks!!
And I agree, and I agree with what George said. It’s hard to regularly listen to a language and not have some understanding of how to say words properly, especially if you give it some thought. But I also agree with George that it is another layer of learning that I can’t really focus on right now. Maybe at level 10+ when I feel comfortable with basics…but by then I would hope that I can hear subtleties better anyway. As it is now, even at my super beginner level, I’m hearing sounds I hadn’t before, or picking up words I never would have registered. Very exciting!
Sorry for derailing your post…
Would you recommend Dogen then? I did look at his website before and was thinking of getting his patreon to see what he says.
Are your sure you’re not mixing stress and pronunciation ? I have trouble with thick indian accent too (I’m not native) but it’s because of how they pronounce the words (and often articulating poorly), not because they stressed the wrong part of it.
But I agree, working on speaking (ie pronunciation/pitch) is about reducing how often you’ll have to repeat things. I just feel that not that much is needed, you quickly reach diminishing returns.
Pitch accent differs regionally though and so long as you apply it correctly in sentences (pitch up on the last mora for questions sort of thing), you’ll be fine. I think a lot more people would be better served by learning how to pronounce ん correctly. Pitch accent is good to know about, but hearing about people studying it when they can’t even say basic phrases correctly is silly.
Agreed.
There’s a million different Japanese teachers but there doesn’t appear to be that many teaching pitch. These guys are coming at it from a different angle to appear unique.
Oh well, because it’s Matt I will once again steer clear like a ship in the night.
Absolutely. I definitely didn’t know anything about pitch accent when I was only 6 weeks into learning Japanese. I don’t really remember when I first encountered it, but considering I spent most of my first year just learning the basics from Japanese From Zero, it was probably some time after that.
No worries.
It’s been a long while since I closely followed his stuff, and I don’t subscribe to his Patreon anymore (although I used to).
However, assuming things haven’t changed, I think the tier where you can see his pitch accent teaching series is $10, and that gives you access to an unlisted playlist of videos covering pitch accent. From there you can go through them at whatever pace you’d like.
I like his teaching style.
I think it is worth a try if you’re interested in pitch accent. It’s only $10 a month and since it is Patreon you can cancel anytime no fuss.
In fact, unless he’s changed things (he might have) even if you cancel you can still access the unlisted YouTube videos so long as you save the URLs.
It’s a subscription iirc so I’d wait until you’re further along in your studies
Yeah him and Ken really are ramping up the online marketing… as a marketer, I applaud them.
It is important if you want that extra level of epic… but that’s everyone’s own opinion. Of course their marketing technique is set to make you think it’s absolutely vitally…
I suck at languages in general… it’s my thing, however I made it through living in Japan for two years being pretty shit at the language. (okay I’m not horrible)… but if one just wants to “make it” it’s certainly possible with a lower level language skill.
Everyone is different with what they want.
I’ve listened to Matt monologue for 10 min now and that’s still 10 minutes too long lol.
It sounds like it’s all repacking basic Linguistics terms as if they’re something new and mystical while not bothering to explain them well or that they are pre-established terms.
I find it immensely funny that he gets people to kiss up to his accent when from the clips I’ve heard, he sounds like a nhk newscaster. Like do you know anyone irl who sounds like a newscaster? Yet he gets people calling his accent natural. When saying parts of the syllabary in the new video, he said them with an American accent. I can’t stand Matt’s attitude and how much importance he continues to ascribe to the pitch accent of individual words. He’s not the end all, be all of accents. Even at least Dogen admits that his is not perfect. Before anyone wants to jump down my throat with an “oh yeah?” about Matt’s accent, here’s Karl. He’s got a beautiful accent.
I believe they’re usually called cunning linguists.
If you happen to meet them irl, they might even kill you a little
I think a lot of it is just going to take time and effort. I really struggle myself when listening to audio, but I try to actively listen to at least try and pick out certain pieces.
I can definitely tell that it has gotten better; but I’d attribute a lot of that to building more of an understanding as to how sentences are structured, particles, etc.
The same goes with kanji and whatnot. Over time things have started to click and not only do I recognize a lot more kanji in text, but the structure of the sentence is a lot more apparent.
I suppose I mention all of that to say that it just takes time. I’m not very far myself, but I know at level 4 I was definitely in uncharted waters and still trying to figure out how to swim!
For now, focus on building a bit of a foundation for your vocab. I think WK even recommends waiting to learn a bit of grammar until ~level 10 or so. It may feel like you are going nowhere, but learning a language is a marathon and a bit of practice each day is what will accumulate over time.
Maybe a good tip to keep in mind is that Spotify has put in that synced lyrics section semi-recently and it has done a fairly good job for a lot of japanese music. So if there are any artists you like to listen to, maybe turn on a few of your favorite songs and enable the lyrics section, then try to read it / listen / speak it.
Yeah legit.
If you ask me, pitch accent isnt overstated. You`re just oblivious to how terrible you sound in the first place.
Its been made very clear that no one needs to learn pitch accent to be understood as a whole. I dont think dogen or matt have ever claimed that. Sometimes it will trip japanese people up, but everything can be worked around if your japanese level is good enough by just explaining.
What it will change though is how easy and comfortable it is for japanese people to listen to you speak, and for a lot people, it will likely give them a much much better impression of you, your intellect, and japanese ability.
