I’ve learned a few languages to a very basic level, German to a high level, and Japanese to a basic level of conversational fluency (I speak with a Japanese friend for 30 minutes/week since a few years).
My observation is, when something is different to your native language, you need to enhance your awareness of it. For pitch accent, you can do that through:
Find a conversation partner and actually use what you learn. Nothing trains the brain better than human-human interaction! If your pitch accent is too far off, you’ll get immediate feedback and practice.
Whether pitch accent needs intensive training depends on you and your goals. For me personally, just having some awareness and keeping up with conversation practice is enough. I get compliments on speaking clearly and having a “pleasant” accent that doesn’t have some of the harsher mistakes common to native English speakers. But I can imagine if someone has reached a higher level of Japanese and struggles with pitch accent, more intense lessons could be helpful.
I have talked to linguists who say the brain has “buckets” for the sounds it hears, and some non-native sounds, being in between the buckets, seem impossible to hear because they end up getting shifted by the brain into a nearby “native sound bucket”. But, the brain is flexible, and over time, does learn to recognise new sounds by creating new “buckets”, you just have to learn what you are listening for (in an exaggerated way), and practice regularly.
The sad truth is, unless you get both PERFECT pitch accent and cosmetic surgery to LOOK Japanese, you will always be perceived and treated as a foreigner. You will be be: A. The foreigner that can’t speak Japanese B. The foreigner that speaks Japanese, but weirdly C. The foreigner who somehow speaks amazing Japanese.
Your interactions with Japanese people face-to-face will always revolve around those things. By learning perfect Japanese you will NEVER have a natural conversation with a Japanese stranger that doesn’t revolve around your language skill.
Not true. Sometimes the topics are also the color of your skin and “height” of your nose.
Anyway, I think it’s better to separate the idea of being included in Japan socially from learning Japanese. Pitch accent training has definitely a high gain for relatively little effort.
That’s a pretty specific type of person. There are lots of people who live in Japan and speak excellent Japanese and don’t do it on Youtube. I would imagine that you’re basing your stance on a sample of mostly young and more drama-inclined people, considering what is out there on Youtube.
Oh no arguments there. There are things that only become apparent when you master them, but OPs question seemed to be about normal interactions with Japanese people, so I just wanted to prep them for the ugly reality that you are and always will be foreign to Japanese people; the only thing that changes is the topical nature of your differences.
I’ve seen discussions about pitch accent and put two and two together myself and I think I might have an explanation that actually satisfies you.
During formative years, the subconscious parallel processes in the brain that perform automation and analysis decide what types of information are useful, and what types are not. This eventually coalesces into a template for the “lens” through which we will experience the world for the rest of our lives.
For persons living in Asian countries, the ability to perceive (not hear) pitch and tone accent is crucial to their understanding and participation in (their region of) the world, and the ability to perceive (again, not hear) it is retained.
For a westerner, tone and pitch accent are not crucial to our ability to understand and participate in (our region of) the world, and so the ability to perceive it is pruned, and we subconsciously from that point onward tune it out because our template has been instructed to filter this out as unnecessary background noise.
Sidetracking here, but to further demonstrate how this “template” I mentioned earlier works - persons that are on the autism spectrum have a very different template than the rest of us, and thus a different “lens” through which they experience the world. The reason for this is that their brain’s automated pruning processes did not make what we consider to be intuitive decisions about which information to trim and which information to keep, and so persons with autism take in quite a bit of “irrelevant information”, while tuning out what many of us consider to be crucial information (like nonverbal communication such as facial expressions and body language, subtext and nuance). This also explains the “super powers” that autistic people sometimes display, because they are capable of pulling in large amounts of data that we no longer have the ability to consciously perceive.
Getting back to the pitch accent, a westerner can retrain the brain to be able to perceive it, by modifying the template for the “lens” and instructing it to stop filtering it out.
So the phrase “hearing pitch accent” is wrong and should stop being used. We perceive the world through a lens that performs filtering based on a template we developed during formative years, our subconscious mind having automatically decided what to include and exclude. BAM.
One thing I’ll say is that people are a lot more inclined to share negative experiences that contradicted their expectations than positive ones that fell right in line with their experiences.
I expected to have a pretty normal social life here and…yeah that’s about what I got. I don’t really go around saying that though because there’s no point. On the other hand, people who had unrealistic expectations or just got unlucky are likely to share that and I think it distorts the treatment of foreigners. Obviously this stuff happens, but I don’t think it’s really all that bad for most people with good japanese.
Honestly if anything it kinda tripped me up. I was used to people talking about how japanese people will baby you and do things like talk to you in English even if you use japanese. Then when I got here, once japanese people figured out I was literate and could speak I only really got japanese. Hell, they didn’t even give me my contract in English and we went over the japanese version. It wasn’t an issue, so I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining, but my point is people who don’t have issues are less likely to complain about it online.
And…well…I’ve met some people IRL who have complained about similar things and had opportunities to observe their japanese level and…they weren’t as good as they thought. So maybe for some cases (certainly not all), overconfidence is also leading to some people’s frustration.
Interesting. I think I have a pretty good ability to hear pitch because I played violin. But until I knew that pitch accent exists I didn’t consciously hear the tonality in Japanese. Now, after years of living in Japan I started to train it and after a few days I started to hear Japanese in a different way. It seems just the information of what is important was missing even if I knew that my speech is different and “off” sometimes.
I never thought it is possible to train it in may age so I hesitated to start pitch accent training but now I don’t think so anymore. It is a bit like working with colors, people who never heard about color theory tend to be unable to make good color schemes but once they have a theoretical knowledge it is something easy. Not everyone can develop skills in the same way but training definitely improves the sense for many things.
I’m not just talking about negative experience. I’m talking about being “Jouzo’d”. “Oh, your Japanese is so good!”
If we put that into the context of a minority person approaching a white person in America and asking a question, and the white person responding with “Wow, your English is so good” we would recognize that as racism. There is more than 1 type of racism. There is hostile racism, and well-intentioned racism. Both are still racism. It’s not exactly untrue that most westerners in Japan don’t have perfect pitch and pronunciation - but let’s recognize that it’s also racist of them to assume we won’t have it.
That is a negative experience for a good portion of the people who talk about that on the internet. Based on the rest of your reply you seem to view it as a negative too.
Well, speak for yourself…but thats not really worth getting into.
I’m kinda losing you here so lets just agree to disagree. I think we can agree that a vast majority of japanese people dont have any bad intentions when it comes to this stuff.
Regardless, my point stands that upset people are more likely to be vocal.
If I’ve lost you that’s fine. I will help lead the stray sheep back. The point is that as an American you will rarely have a “native” experience where your proficiency in Japanese doesn’t become topical. The more you work on your Japanese in an attempt to “blend in”, as was OP’s intention, the more you will stand out and become remarkable. It’s just the nature of the beast. It’s not always a negative, but it can be exhausting being prompted to explain why you can speak Japanese at a high level.
But…I’m an American living in japan…and thats not the case. Like when I went to work, people were like “oh you can read? wow neat” and that was kinda the end of that. Like when the librarian recommended me 告白 and 人間失格, I went home and read them, and came back and talked to her about the books and my opinions like a normal person.
This hasn’t really been the case for me. I’m not sure what youtubers you are watching thatt are telling you this, but I’ve had a different experience. Japanese people really don’t give a shit if you’re great at japanese from my experience. Its like a wow factor at first because its rare, but then they’re like ah yeah. I honestly would have thought differently at first too, but I truly think the more compliments and attention your japanese gets, generally the worse it is. If you’re really like perfect, you’ll get one line of surprise out of them probably.
For reading I’m a lot more confident and have seen the above phenomenon many times for people figuring out I’m literate, but even for speaking where I’m probably just above average…I usually just get one line about it. Usually if they say something they just ask where I learned. But thats also just like…making conversation. So I answer them and segue the conversation to the next topic like a normal person, yknow.
Well, what is your take on my analogy? Is it wrong for a white American to be amazed that a person of a different ethnicity can read (English) and make a topical remark on it? I just ask for the sake of consistency, and discourage the use of kiddie gloves to handle sensitive issues.
Well, in this case there is an important point to be made.
If you say a japanese sentence to a native, they will know that you a non-native speaker.
So, with that in mind. To accurately answer your question:
If someone who was clearly a non-native speaker said something in english an was complimented on it by a white(?not sure why being white is important here) person or if a white person was amazed by their ability…not I don’t think thats wrong.
Would I personally do it? Eh, probably not. I’m so used to ELLs with really good english by now that you would need quite a bit to legitimately wow me and I don’t feel like flattering everyone. Maybe if they came from a language like chinese or japanese and had a near perfect accent after a very short period of study I would be impressed.
Compare that to japanese people’s experience where they’ve probably never met a JLL with what I would consider really good japanese in their entire life. If that were the case and had never met someone with english that current me considers good, I would probably be much more easily wowed and thus willing to give compliments.
if your only just beginning japanese it is a thing you honestly dont need to worry about… at all.
No japanese person will expect you to be perfect. Not to mention the fact that depending on where you are in japan, the pitch accent order will change.
For example (maybe not “pitch accurate” but the point applies): In tokyo, the “hana” for flower might go High then Low. But in Osaka it would be the opposite.
It’s a thing thats not even worth worrying about unless you get to a high JP level and can easily hold daily conversations. at least IMO
It doesn’t really matter that much to me anymore but thanks for that!