I am arabic native speaker and my English is good but it isn’t native level and I hate that.
Would pitch accent be naturally acquired by talking to natives on those various talking apps? Can I expect to obtain it after consuming tons and tons of native content?
This is how I learned English through a lot of native content and luckily the US has a ton of cultural exports.
But the thing is even on WK I enabled the audio so the lessons stick better, but I cannot tell which is the high and which is the low. Would this pose a problem? I eventually want to go to Japan for tourism even though its not required to learn it to go, I feel it would lead to a better experience.
Exposure alone would not guarantee you’d acquire it. Your brain is likely to filter what it hears through the paradigm it already is familiar with. Many long-term Japanese speakers regularly pronounce common words with incorrect pitch accent (pronunciations that are impossible in any variety of Japanese).
If you don’t want to create bad habits, doing small phonetics studies will never hurt, but they shouldn’t take so much of your time that could be spent doing more productive things imo. There’s no point of perfect phonetics when you still sound like a textbook.
That and if you either aren’t going to an area that requires complete fluent japanese or are really really interested in phonetics, there’s no needs for perfect phonetics
No, it won’t be a problem. Unless your pitch accent is horribly wrong, Japanese people will be able to understand what you are trying to say. In general Japanese people are genuinely pleased if a foreigner can speak some Japanese.
There’s a pitch accent user-script and jpdb also provide pitch-accent
You have to go through a lot of Dogen’s stuff before you find this useful statement: Dogen says at one point it’s good for new users to learn phonetics once they have about six months study under their belts. So for those of us who don’t have that much, I believe a cursory exposure and understanding is sufficient. I have switched pitch display on (the user script Wanikani Pitch Info) and am trying to get the rhythm right, but I’m not obsessing about it. I will revisit phonetics after I have done six months Japanese. I did try a free tonal checker to see if I could hear whether the pitch goes up or down, but that was just a one off: I’m not using it regularly to improve. I decided that now I can read the kana okay (if still too slowly), I should concentrate on vocabulary and basic grammar for the first six months.
We also cannot forget that some people are more inclined or have more ability to learn phonetics. There are people who, for various reasons, either don’t have the interest or the flexibility to lose their original accent.
Of course. My point was aimed at us newbies who don’t yet have a consistent Japanese accent to lose.
We also cannot forget that some people are more inclined or have more ability to learn phonetics. There are people who, for various reasons, either don’t have the interest or the flexibility to lose their original accent.
100 times this.
I studied Mandarin in high school a long time ago and I have a terrible ear for pitch, or just about anything in general, and trying to reproduce and differentiate between the four tones was… no bueno - oh, our Chinese teacher was a Spanish teacher primarily. And that was when I was young, which in theory is the best time to learn that type of thing.
I watched / listened to Dogen’s free stuff and I think he does a pretty good job frequently pointing out that his course isn’t for everyone. For me, it’s still early but I think my thoughts are that anything that can help me overcome that shocking gap in my otherwise tremendous skill set (including modesty, naturally!) is probably worth the effort if it is well done, and I think his series is well done.
I disagree with the notion of cutting almost everything else out to focus almost exclusively on pronunciation, though. If that’s what’s important to someone else, more power to them, of course. I want to learn it all!