Does anyone here study the pitch accent as well?

I try to study the pitch accent for each word I learn but I was wondering if anyone else does it as well. I use aedict which shows me the Tokyo pitch accent.

I started studying pitch accent last November, I became a patreon for Dogen and I was learning the basics, but then I got really busy and in January I payed for the WK lifetime subscription, so Iā€™ve cancelled my patreon subscription. I want to focus on kanji right now and save some money, then I would like to focus on pitch accent and kanji for a while before I go back to learn grammar and everything else.

In the meantime I still have this on my wall:


(Some of the post-its fell :frowning_face:)

What are you doing to study? Are you taking a course or watching videos? Or just using the dictionary?

So basically what I do is I have this app on my phone that tells me the pitch accent for literally every word so I look each word up during the original lesson and look at pitch accent. I play the Wanikani audio for the vocabulary and then try to repeat it with the correct pitch which usually works since I have been doing this for months. I can help you out with that if you want.

I do as well. There is actually a script here that provides the pitch accent, too. Itā€™s just called WaniKani Pitch Info. Not sure if thereā€™s a forum thread for it. Maybe one of the more forum-savvy members can provide a link. :upside_down_face:

Is it this? Link.

Yup, thatā€™s it!

So what do you generally do when you see the pitch accent, do you try to say the word/verb with the pitch accent as well? As I find doing that the first time I see it really helps cement the word in my mind aside from teaching me the pitch and making me have a good accent.

Ah, yes I have that script too! But Iā€™ve noticed that sometimes the audio uses a different pattern than the one that is displayed by the script; Iā€™m not sure if thereā€™s some info missing or there are some mistakes.

Sometimes I think the speaker can be from a different region of Japan and thus speaking with a different pitch accent. That or you are getting different pitches than normal. I find my dictionary app to be in line with what they say usually.

Yup, I always use the WaniKani audio and pronounce the words out loud. In addition, I live in Japan, so itā€™s common for me ask friends or coworkers especially if one of the pronunciations seems strange to me. Iā€™m also a Japanese literature nut (I made it to the finals at my middle schoolā€™s karuta tournament :rofl:), so listening to classical poetry ingrains a sort of ā€œfeelā€ for how words are supposed to sound.

I see. Did you ever find yourself picking up otherā€™s speech patterns or pitch without noticing? Like, you already knew the pitch for a word you just learned.

Quite commonly. When I first came to Japan, I actually hadnā€™t known that Japanese had pitch accents. Once the homophones started throwing me off and people informed me their were pitch differences, I started to notice them like crazy, a full-on Baader-Meinhof moment. Unfortunately, Iā€™ve noticed Iā€™ve also occasionally picked up some of my prefectureā€™s regional variations (my girlfriend is a Tokyoite, so she will laugh whenever any Gunma-ben slips out).

How different is gunma-ben? Because if she is laughing at it it must have been different enough for you to subconsciously pick it up XD

The actual grammar and vocabulary arenā€™t too different, especially since Gunma is in close enough proximity to Tokyo that most younger Japanese are fazing it out, but there are a lot of times where the pitch accent changes because older words were different and resulted in different homophones. Itā€™s not very common that it happens, but I think the humor comes more from the fact that my Japanese when we first met was very text-book Japanese with a splash of anime-talk.

I know the biggest thing I picked up is the tendency to end questions with 悓 instead of 恮. Otherwise, itā€™s just the rhythm and phrasing. Itā€™s quite bouncy, especially when you have someone their sentences with ć ć¹ instead of 恠悍恆.

ä½•ć—ć¦ć„ć‚‹ć® (normal)
ä½•ć—ć¦ć„ć‚‹ć‚“ (Gunma)

I donā€™t even study speaking, actuallyā€¦

So basically I am probably going to pick up my prefectureā€™s accent if I go to Japan

Depends on how much and who you talk to. Iā€™m quite popular with the older populace due to my love of mahjong and shogi, so, near my home, Iā€™m pretty sure I spend more time with people twice my age or more than I do with people my own age. Most younger Japanese who want to hang out with me are into the modern, western lifestyle (especially since Iā€™m the special gaikokujin). As the traditional culture and history is one of the things I love most about Japan, I gravitate away from people my age as a result.

The more fluent you are speaking-wise, the more resistant youā€™ll be. When I came to Japan, I had solid but slow reading ability (as I could understand kanji and knew most kunyomi), moderate writing ability, very high listening ability, and crap for speech fluency because I didnā€™t have any practice partners. As such, I gradually learned to speak more fluidly by mimicking what I heard most often. Since the majority of Japanese I heard in a day changed from anime (usually Tokyo-ben) to Gunma-ben, it was inevitable that I picked up bits as I got a feel for speaking like a human and not a robot. :rofl:

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That actually sounds like me. Do you have any recommendations for what I should do when I go to Japan? I donā€™t know how long you have been there but it sounds like quite a while

I have a pitch accent dictionary, but mostly because I like to collect dictionariesā€¦ I use it less than I feel like I should.

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I have a feeling dictionaries are but a single collection of what you possess

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