Hello, I started learning Japanese recently and watched some videos of Dogen. He makes it seem like I should dedicate 80-90% of my studying to phonetics and only a little to everything else. Is that really true? I want to sound as native and fluent as possible, so should I enroll in his course and focus mainly on that - as many said what he says is true if your goal to sound native which is mine-, or should I stick to a more traditional approach?
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How can you be fluent without grammar? Grammar is essential. Listening is essential, and so is speaking to meet your goal of fluency. Reading doesnât hurt, either.
I hope this is of some help.
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Yeah but am afraid to gain bad pronunciation habits as he said.
Yeah it did help thanks
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That can be helped by listening. Can you get Japanese podcasts or TV programs? Listen to the pronunciations WK gives you in your reviews. Listening really helped me fine tune.
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Be wary of anyone trying to sell you their course, especially if implying itâs the only one that works. If pronunciation is important to you, sure spend the time on it, but 80% is far too much.
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Blockquote especially if implying itâs the only one that works
He isnât implying that. He is just implying that phonetics is the most important aspect in learning language and you should use all of your focus learning it then learn the rest
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Keep in mind that Dogen is trying to make money off of his pitch accent course by using his other videos to advertise it. His advice is to spend a lot of time on shadowing and phonetics at the start to avoid developing bad habits later. Personally I havenât tried his paid course but I enjoyed the free preview videos he has and it seems like quality material. I just donât know if itâs worth the price because that depends on how heavily you prioritize native like pronunciation vs being able to study vocabulary and grammar to read. One of his videos that is on YouTube for free is about free resources for pitch accent, so look into those before spending money on the whole course. link here
Iâm having a little trouble finding what his course actually costs but I think itâs $15 a month? If it takes a year to master your pronunciation, thatâs $180 spent on pitch perfect pronunciation but itâs also a year that you could have spent on kanji and vocabulary through something like WaniKani. Youâre free to spend your money how you see fit, but think about the opportunity cost of getting to a mastery of pronunciation. Thereâs probably a point at which the effort required to get better sounding pitch isnât worth the improvements youâre seeing if itâs still pretty hard to read at a decent level. For what itâs worth I think I do want to try dogenâs course, but it wouldnât be soon as I donât think my Japanese vocabulary is wide enough to exercise speaking that well so Iâm less worried about the pitch than I am knowing the right words. Iâve seen with Spanish that thatâs a pattern that can last forever, so maybe it is better to speak sooner?
Lastly, consider that you may never actually pass as a native speaker. Unless youâre Japanese you probably donât look like a native to begin with, so youâll be seen as a foreigner even before having the chance to impress locals with a perfect native accent. I understand the desire to be perfect, but you only get there by being imperfect for a long time. Dogen himself didnât know pitch accent was a thing for a long time while studying Japanese in college. Now heâs raised awareness of it a lot, but making new learners concerned about it probably leads to slower speech and a higher barrier to entry for starting out. I wouldnât be stressed about native accent unless you really have a strong need to sound native soon. Itâs good to be aware of pitch rather than stress and try to listen for it, but Dogen may not be the best investment as an absolute beginner.
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Yeah thatâs why I am a bit hesitant with his advice
Thanks you helped me a lot in making up my mind
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Once you get a year into studying Japanese your mind may change. It is such a long journey that I do not care about native pronunciation. I donât think itâs that important compared to grammar, listening ability, etc.
Dogen just found something no one else was focusing on so he could make money off it.
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Heâs pretty reasonable in his advice. If you have a goal to speak close to native-like, then there are things you need to do differently from other learners to achieve that, but he doesnât act like that should be everyone.
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Just out of curiosity, do you mind linking the video where he makes it seem like 90% of your study needs to be pronunciation? Time stamped if possible
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Almost every video when he talks about his journey learning Japanese saying he only learned Phonetics and then after that learned kanji. and Iâm a bit exaggerating
Heâs also clear that he had a particular goal. For the vast majority of people who donât care about how they sound to that extent, going that hard isnât necessary.
Basically I donât think heâs trying to convince people who wouldnât actually need it to buy his stuff.
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Well I do have the same goal to be as native as possible cuz for me I never thought of leaning language except for this purpose like when I knew from here that people had different goals and didnât try to be as native as possible was new and surprising for me
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Thereâs definitely truth to the idea that once you form poor pronunciation habits, itâs virtually impossible to patch that up later. That goes for every language including Japanese and including English.
If youâve ever worked in an English-speaking company with 30+ nationalities, you probably have a pretty good idea of the range that accents can take, from cute and completely understandable to really difficult to parse.
And this is where people can make different choices: to work on native-like Japanese which is more difficult, or to work on functional Japanese which is faster.
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I have a slightly less harsh take on this: social media âlanguage learningâ content-creators have to come up with stuff to talk about on a regular basis in order to stay relevant (and potentially sell courses down the line). And you canât talk about stuff thatâs too niche/advanced because youâre going to get 12 views. You canât just make a video on the ㊠form every week, so you have to be a bit creative.
Thereâs also a competitive aspect to this, once you reach a high level of fluency in a language and you still want to show off and stand out, improving pronunciation is a good way to do it.
But then the issue I think is not so much with the advice, itâs with the way the advice is received. The Japanese language learning community is not very mature and comprised mostly of people with a very low level of fluency in the language (thatâs true for every mainstream language-learning community but in my experience itâs worse for Japanese because it tends to attract very young people and the language itself is hard to learn, so thatâs a good recipe to end up with clueless edgelords all over the place). These popular youtubers get fans who blindly parrot their advice with no understanding and push it onto others without nuance. So you get people who canât negate adjectives but insist that pitch accent is super important, actually.
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And Iâm the one here who was thinking that I can improve my accent in English if I went to an English-speaking count 
Spanish is my native language, but I am native fluent in English. Have never worried about pitch accent or an American accent. So long as the natives can understand I am happy with my accent and pitch. Speaking of which, whats the difference between accent and pitch?
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Accent has several meanings, so Iâm not sure which you were asking about.
The way you used it, when saying âAmerican accentâ itâs a broad term meaning âthe distinctive way a language is pronouncedâ.
With regard to pitch accent in Japanese, like when you would say âthe accent is located on the first moraâ, accent means âthe mora where the pitch falls from high to lowâ.
Pitch is just how high or low the sound is, similar to musical notes being higher or lower than each other.
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In particular, when people say that Japanese âhas pitch accentâ theyâre implicitly making a contrast with other languages that have âstress accentâ (a group that includes both English and Spanish). In pitch accent languages, each word has a particular pitch pattern it should follow (e.g. ćœ ăă« has a low-high pattern); in stress accent languages each word has a stressed/unstressed pattern it should follow (e.g. the difference between âobjectâ the noun and âobjectâ the verb is where the stress is).
For people whose native language is not one with pitch accent it can be tricky to even notice that pitch accent is a thing initially (this seems to vary between people).
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