Need help with Pitch Accents

[tmahrt]

There are some threads here that I think are worth reading through:

Pitch-Accent Awareness Corner

As evidenced by a couple recent posts, many Japanese learners make it surprisingly far into their studies prior to the shocking discovery that pitch accent exists in Japanese, and that understanding how to acquire it correctly it is essential for speaking Japanese without an obvious accent. Whether or not to dive into this subject (and when) is apparently slightly controversial, but for those who have decided to take the plunge, here’s a place to share resources, strategies, and questions. I’ll…

Pitch Accents? Where did these come from..?

While I was watching a video on Japanese phonology recently, the topic of pitch accents came up. I know about how pitch and tone can influence meaning in particular languages, but in the one and a half years I’ve been learning Japanese, I’ve never heard about the Japanese pitch accent. From what I’ve gathered, it seems to be quite a minor detail in spoken Japanese, only affecting a few words such as 橋 (bridge) and 箸 (chopsticks). Has anyone else heard about these (probably), and if so, where di…

After reading those (and the resources linked to in them), I think you’ll have a much better understanding of Japanese pitch accent.