I think you have it backwards. From what I have heard in France by some French people, the French do not like speaking other languages (even when they know them well!) because they are afraid of making mistakes. In my personal experience they absolutely would prefer I speak broken French over English. It’s only when communication breaks down that we usually switch to English.
I’ve been in France for almost two years now–not once has a French person ever made me feel bad for the way I spoke French.
I had never heard this particular stereotype, but it does seem to be a stereotype held by some people:
Stereotypes can be weird and not based on fact at all
Come to France! I’m in the south. It’s awesome here! Great food. Great weather. Beautiful nature.
So, it sounds like there are some heated opinions on this subject. So, in that case, I like to got to the research!
There was a study in 2014 looking into the effects of pitch accent on language comprehension. They used EEGs to measure brain activity to try and understand the importance of pitch accent in language comprehension in Japanese. The result of that study: Pitch accent only plays a minor role in comprehension and distinguishing homophones in normal spoken Japanese, even when the wrong pitch is used for words. What does play a major part? The context in which the word is used.
This is why in Japanese pitch is just an accent, and isn’t inherent in the semantic meaning of the words. In fact many of the words people usually use to show off pitch accent have the same pronunciations when spoken in isolation, and then in different contexts they can take on different pitch patterns. Because of this, I believe pitch accent isn’t as important as learning correct pronunciation in Japanese. It’s simply an accent, and it varies.
There are plenty of other regional variation in Japanese accents also, for example, it sounds completely strange to my ears to hear が pronounced like /ŋa/ (with a velar nasal) but that is the standard Tokyo pronunciation, which I never learned. I always had teachers from areas outside of Tokyo and lived in areas which pronounced it /ga/, that doesn’t mean that my pronunciation is broken or wrong. I just have a different regional accent.
If studying pitch accent is interesting to you, there’s nothing wrong with learning the standard Tokyo pronunciations. You can learn about a specific regionalism in Japanese. It’s similar to how I like learning about different regional accents in English. But I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone as an important aspect of learning Japanese, especially if the learner isn’t already fairly advanced in their studies.
My point wasn’t that it was universally true, but that since it’s the reputation, people are going to be reticent to speak to natives. Kqaotix pointed out that they get criticism from even the French on Canadian French.
Obviously it’s exaggerated to some extent, but I seriously doubt the French are more encouraging than the Japanese.
Even is probably the wrong word here. It should be no surprise that there are negative stereotypes of regional dialects in French. We have plenty of them in English. [EDIT: In general, for any language, non-standard varieties are lampooned, associated with a lack of education, or associated with other negative stereotypes.]
It’s not exaggerated, it’s wrong [in my experience]. But also from my experience, you’re right: even if the French are encouraging, the Japanese are more encouraging.
While I fall into the camp of ‘learn pitch accent if you want or if it suits your needs’, this is just one study. And they apparently found a null result–that they failed to find an effect, does not mean there is not an effect there. EEG could be an inappropriate tool for the task (has EEG been used on studies of Mandarin tone?). Their subjects could have been not engaged in the task, etc etc.
As a counter example, here is an fMRI study I haven’t read where the authors found differing activation patterns depending on whether a word was spoken with the correct or incorrect accent:
EDIT: For clarification: My point here is that one article doesn’t establish ‘fact’. Actually, even a lot of articles in agreement on the same idea could be wrong. Here is a relevant article I recently read
A similar phenomenon of contextual tone change also occurs in Chinese:
And contextual stress shift occurs in English
Basically, the point I’m making is that the brain is fairly accommodating to rule-based structural changes to words. Just because we say a Japanese word has a certain accent status, does not mean it will always have to be realized that way to be recognized as a member of that accent status class.
I’ll repeat a point someone else made in another thread (paraphrasing): If you speak Japanese without pitch accents, you aren’t going to be perceived as speaking a particular regional dialect–even without accents, they still use Japanese phrasal intonational patterns which we learners lack. Without using all of the other prosodic features of a dialect of Japanese, you won’t be perceived as speaking that dialect. You’ll be perceived as being a foreign learner of Japanese.
I don’t dispute that pitch accent is a small part of being understood. Though it’s also wrong to suggest it can’t play a part in confusion.
But it’s a major part of not sounding natural. I don’t want to stop improving. I don’t foresee a time when I’m not studying Japanese daily (at about 4 years now). At some point there won’t be a lot of useful vocab or grammar left to learn. But I’m not going to call it quits there.
I heard some similar comments in my thread about Kanken, that there’s “no reason” to take it. Okay, whatever you say.
I would disagree with anyone who thinks studying intonation is meaningless. After studying in Japan for several years and knowing foreigners who didn’t bother with it, the difference between people who seriously practiced intonation and those who didn’t was very clear. Even those with an N1 certification would have trouble making themselves understood when their intonation was off and they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The grammar was perfect and the vocab was fine, but they would have to repeat them selves once or twice before their speaking partner would get what it was they were saying.
Studying pronunciation and intonation is one of the more underrated aspects of studying the language, but for oral communication, arguably one of the more important aspects.
I think the closest thing to pitch accent in English is stressing certain syllables. And while it generally doesn’t change the meaning, I would struggle to understand someone who stressed the wrong syllable.
Take for example the word “concentrate” which a native speaker will pronounce CON-cen-trate. If an English learner said con-cen-TRATE to me I would still understand them pretty easily. But if they said con-CEN-trate to me I’d have to really think for a few moments to know what they said. So there aspects of “accent” that while not changing meaning, can make you easier or more difficult to understand.
English has a small number of noun-verb pairs that differ only in stress
obJECT vs OBject
conTRAST vs CONtrast
And while it is true that it can be difficult to understand words in English with misplaced stress (I’ve been in such situations), it’s not clear that it is comparable in misplaced accent in Japanese. For that, we’d need a native speaker (or ideally a bilingual Japanese-English speaker who grew up speaking both languages regularly).
The longer you wait the more episodes will be available if you do decide to pay. Right now there are 19 episodes. He said he imagines it being 30-35 long. If you wait to the end of the year, you could pay $10 and watch the whole thing, as opposed to paying $10 a month that whole time.
Having an accent and speaking poorly are two separate and unrelated things. Do Australian, British, and American people speak English “poorly” when talking to each other because they have different accents? Many French people have strong accents but can speak English very fluently. I know many fluent speakers of English that have accents. This doesn’t mean that they speak poorly. Even my Japanese teacher who has lived and taught in America for over 20 years has an accent. There have been multiple studies that show that if you begin to study a foreign language after the age of about 12, you will almost certainly have an accent forever because if the way your brain has already devoloped. There are of course exceptions, but this is the overwhelming majority of people.
You’re making no distinction between native and non-native accents? You’re equivocating. The word accent has multiple meanings. In this case, there are probably 3 different nuances being used and you’re mixing them together to make it sound like I’m being unreasonable.
First, everyone has an accent, which is “the way they pronounce everything in their native language.”
Second, there are degrees of foreign accents, when speakers use their native language’s sounds in a foreign language. This is something that can be improved, and while there’s no single target (in English, some people try for an American accent, others try for other regions), the goal is to reduce the usage of foreign sounds in a particular language.
Third, Japanese pitch accent is actually the stress and intonation pattern. There are natural and unnatural ways of saying Japanese words with various stresses.
To gauge if someone is speaking poorly, you need to know what the goal is. Why do we bother teaching the phonetics and intonation of Japanese at all? Because if you don’t use Japanese pronunciation and intonation, you won’t be understood. Beyond the threshold of “merely” being understood, you can continue to improve toward a particular regional variation of Japanese, be it Tokyo, Kansai, etc.
The degree to which you achieve that is what I’m referring to, and yes, you can be better or worse at it. You can have a foreign accent so bad in Japanese that you aren’t understood. And you can have every degree of accent in between.
The fact that you can’t eliminate a foreign accent entirely is not a reason to not study natural pronunciation and intonation. There is a difference between using 20% of Japanese sounds and 80% of your language’s sounds, and using 95% of Japanese sounds and 5% of your language’s sounds.
Also, if you don’t think there are people trying to do this in English, just search youtube for “American accent.” In addition to the videos just talking about regional variations, you’ll find thousands of videos helping speakers of other languages sound more American. Good for them, if that’s their goal.
OP: Does anyone know any good pocket knives? I’m going to be placed into a survival situation and thought a good knife might be useful.
A: I recommend this knife.
B: What? Water and food are the most important things in a survival situation! Why would you waste time filling your bag with knives? A knife has no use whatsoever.
A: Well it is kind of useful.
B: No it’s not. It’s not necessary for survival. Like water. You need water to live.
A: Well, yes, I mean, that’s a given. But, while bringing food and water, it might also be useful to have a knife.
B: No. Bring water.
A: Yes, okay. But with a knife you can…
B: No. Water. Telling OP to empty out his water and fill his bag with knives is a bad idea.
A: …but no one’s saying that. We’re just saying a knife is small and light and can have some uses.
Also, even if you bring a knife, you’ll never be able to use it as well as someone trained from birth, so there’s no difference between levels of knife-using ability below that.
