Yeaaaaah… Pitch accent doesn’t apply much to living where I live, in Kyushu. So I got lucky. But it definitely exists, and is an important aspect of Japanese pronunciation in most of Japan. It’s really tough for me to use Japanese pitch accent instead of English stress when I speak Japanese.
I agree it’s one of the least important parts of pronunciation, but to be consistent with the message of my original post, I still think it’s important to realize it exists, and to understand it.
As I said, intonation / pitch accent is your biggest hurdle to sounding native, and I agree that it’s not important for communication, because context usually matters more and Japanese people are used to hearing other variations on it.
It’s just that without it mastered, you’ll be spotted for a foreign accent instantly no matter how good your pronunciation is.
Just have to accept that.
나도 경남에서 살았어요. 2년동안 창원시에서 살았고 서울에서 1년동안 살았어요. Elgillie는 어때요? 경남 어디 살았어요?
아 맞나? ㅋㅋ
부산에 살았었지만 전 남자친구가 창원에서 왔어서 나는 창원을 많이 방문했어요 ^^
This is a heated topic, but I appreciate the chance to hear about such things. There are a few remnant way-off pronunciations from when I was first (poorly) learning the language that are encoded pretty deeply now; and in some ways I’m finding more I didn’t know I had as I learn more.
I have to fight my brain not to read ”おお” like “eww” (don’t have the same problem with ”おう" even though they should be pronounced the same) and I probably still have a few wrist-slaps to go before I stop wanting to say e.g. “ookie” a la Addams Family for 大きな.
I’ve tried listening to a few examples and it turns out I literally cannot hear the difference between “dehs” and ”です”. In my mind and probably when speaking, I pronounce that “e” like Eskimo even though I think I have the correct pronunciation anywhere else で pops up.
Also, haven’t heard this mentioned yet, but I’m also shaky on Japanese words I learned as English words. I have to (at best) hesistate and at worst might mangle without thinking on:
さけ (Sockey)
ひろしま (Heeroshimuh)
てりやき (Terry-yakey)
ラメント (Ramin)
たかみね (Takameenee)
したけ (Shitockey)
…basically any word that ends in an “e”. That seems particularly, consistently way off, in American English at least.
Edit: That’s not to say English is “wrong”; Saying “Carry-okie” in an English sentence is as correct as saying "コンピュータ” in a Japanese sentence. You’d look a little pretentious or even a bit foolish insisting on saying カラオケ in the middle of an English sentence. Related to that, I wonder about names. Mine (Riley, ライリー）is already pretty rare in English. I have literally never said ”私のなまえはライリーです”and had it understood the first time.EVER. Especially non-native Japanese speakers will be trying to fit that to an English name in their heads and come up empty, and I’ll say it two or three times before I just say “Riley”. Any advice on whether I’m better off just saying "わたしのなまえは”Riley"です” when introducing myself to native speakers? Non-native speakers?
Ooooooooooooooh!!! I love studying Japanese pronunciation. Being able to create sentences and form your words may be the most important asset to a language… But in terms of really connecting with someone, and talking freely - pronunciation is the most important thing I think. When someone has a really strong accent with an odd speaking pattern, even if their grammar is perfect, it feels like a wall is built up and it makes it seem like the person isn’t quite as good at the language as they may actually be.
If you have really good pronunciation, and can speak smoothly, it makes you look like your a LOT more advanced in the language then you actually are. Of course a good pronunciation can only get you so far, but if you can speak well, it can really improve the way people see you and interact with you.
The key thing (for me, at least) is to remember that Japanese only has 5 vowel sounds. And unlike English, the writing system is really really consistent. When a word is written with え or け or せ or め or れ etc… The vowel is the same 99% of the time.
あ - “ahh” as in car
い - “ee” as in key
う - “ooh” as in moo or boo, but further back in the mouth
え - slightly different than NW American “eh” in mess (Never “ee,” like key)
お - slightly different than NW American “oh” in slow
Try to get away from romaji spelling as much as you can, because we’re used to seeing many different sounds represented by the same roman letter. Try to think in kana. That helps me.
Yeah, I also say words I learned first in English incorrectly. ハンバーガー / ハンバーグ (hamburger) is especially difficult for some reason. I totally agree with you, and I generally pronounce “karaoke” Carry-okie in English to be clear. With the same idea, I try to pronounce English loanwords in Japanese pronunciation as best as I can.
For your name, I see two options:
You can practice the らりるれろ sounds especially vigorously, and say your name slowly in Japanese. (This is super difficult, and takes a looooot of listening and speaking practice.)
For native Japanese speakers you can say your name “Lailee,” which will be more consistently understood (probably). But of course, that’s just substituting one English sound for another, incorrect one. For non-native speakers with English understanding I see nothing wrong with just saying your name normally.
My suggestion for your name would be 私はRileyです。ラ・イ・リー。Start with your native pronunciation and then slowly give the syllables.
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I agree with you that pronunciation matters, but the goal of “native level” of pronunciation is kind of misleading. A native of where in Japan, exactly? Do you plan on studying the pitch accent variations, colloquialisms, slang, consonant variations of Kansai? Tokyo? Iwakane? I think a lot of people talk about sounding like a ‘Native Japanese Speaker’ with the assumption they will study and pick up NHK japanese and then be indistinguishable from a native speaker, but that accent itself is constructed. It’s like trying to speak BBC English or imitate Ted Copple from Nightline– you’ll be perfectly intelligible, but unless you’re literally giving a newscast, everything in the way of speaking, from the blended accent to tone would sound stilted and awkward in conversation.
Also on a separate note, while I wouldn’t say I’m an an expert on British English, whether it’s RP or some more specific dialect (e.g.: scouser), I do think it would be significantly harder to teach than American English because they have more vowel sounds on average than English (e.g.: for them “caught” and “cot” each have different vowels, as do “ken,” “can,” and “can’t”), and they have a fair number of words that are spelled opposite to how they’re read (theatre, centre), or else have little to no connection at all between spelling and pronunciation (victuals, worcestershire).
“Caught” and “cot” are not uniform through the United States. Some places merge them. I pronounce them differently.
I think when people say they want to speak like a native, they presumably mean someone from Tokyo. But it’s important to not just know the location, but the age. You probably don’t want to speak like an 80 year old woman if you’re a 25 year old guy. Maybe you do, I won’t judge, but I’m just going by probabilities.
So, find someone who you want to emulate and shadow that person on youtube etc.
I’m like 99% sure I’m nailing the pronunciation. The same thing would happen when a native Japanese person introduced me to someone else while I was living there-- it’d still need to get repeated 2-3 times.
I think I’m going to attempt this instead. At least the switch to English pronunciation should signal to the listener that I’m not trying to give myself a Japanese name or something.
Off the topic of pronunciation, I think the same kind of goes for order of last name/first name for introductions, especially since my first name could be a last name. I don’t think there’s any winning strategy-- If you do it Japanese style, they might assume you did it in the English order, and vice-versa. I usually just give the name I’d prefer to be called by (my first).
I have given Dogen a try and it has been really helpful for improving my pronunciation. He goes in great detail over the pitch accent in particular, over the course of a series of lessons. It’s very detailed and based on linguistic principles. Highly recommended to try to get a more native sounding pronunciation.
I just want to jump in and say thank you for this post (and everyone’s subsequent replies)! It’s been so insightful and I realized I hadn’t actually thought about a lot of these things before… whoops 
I was wondering if anyone had any more info as to how or where to study something like this aside from the options of going to Japan and/or talking to a native speaker. I understand that generally speaking, it’s all about listening and then mimicking to the best of your ability, but are there any sites that could help with this? Or get a general guide perhaps.
Just wondering if anyone had any other resources or tips for this 
So ~70% percent of native Japanese words are unaccented, and the same is true for just over half of Japanese words of Chinese origin. But this pattern is not so common with other loanwords (eg. from English).
I don’t think you can really say this. How would you even begin to compare these two? English is spoken natively by about 3.5 times as many people as Japanese, over an area about 85 times larger. And while the phonetic inventory in Japanese doesn’t vary that much, the same really cannot be said of its intonation (including accent system) and its vocabulary.
I’d disagree.
If the goal is communication, understood as “getting the point across”, then that’s a pretty low bar indeed. A couple of grunts and a picture book would surely suffice. But the question, I think, is what are we communicating.
Japanese native speakers are trained, to a certain extent, to understand differences in intonation. But even native speakers of varieties of Japanese that do not use a pitch accent system at all (there are some) are able to distinguish words with different accent positions (from accented varieties) when given only fragments of those words (this is called a “gating” experiment). So native speakers may be forgiving, but they are very highly tuned to those accent differences. They may be forgiving, but they are definitely paying attention.
So, when you choose to ignore that, and go with “context will save the day”, you are communicating a whole bunch of things in Japanese other than the fact that the book is on the table, or that the car is red; and the less effort you place in understanding those aspects of the language you are ignoring, the less control you’ll have over what exactly it is you are communicating.
I do not think we, as language learners, should aim for native-like pronunciation “or bust”. But we should aim to get to a point where we can understand what we are broadly communicating, and make a decision about whether we are happy with it or not. And understanding that intonation is an integral aspect of Japanese is a part of that.
If you want a bunch of sentences paired with audio that you can follow along with, repeat, shadow, or do pretty much whatever you can think of with, Glossika is great for that.
I want to ask…
What is your opinion in mistaking:
Beside the problem of typing in the IME?
Also, I am not sure if I overdo ‘ŋ’ too often when I pronounce a word.
Nice post! I agree it is very important to focus on pronunciation as part of your studies. The better you pronounce something, the better you can hear the sounds themselves. IPA is a great way to find the general sounds and adjust your pronunciation to what you hear from there.
Thanks for the replies, everyone!
Whether or not you agree with my specific statements about correct pronunciation, I’m glad our discussion is making people think about the inclusion of pronunciation in their Japanese studies.
With the many different forms of English, yours may not differentiate words by vowel length, but mine certainly does.
The only difference between “putt” and “part” is that “part” has a longer vowel. /pɐt/ vs /pɐːt/
Similarly, the only difference between “meh” and “mare” is vowel length. /me/ vs /meː/