Does anyone have a good app to check pitch accent for words?
Pitch accent isn’t my main focus right now, but it would be great to have it available when I want to check.
I found the app JAccent. Has anyone used it before?
It seems pretty good, except there is no direct statement that it’s in the standard Tokyo accent.
Also not sure where it pulled the pitch patterns from.
The search system can also be a bit hit-or-miss (こんにちは results in nothing, as does 今日は (read as こんにちは), but searching こんにち will turn up 今日 with the reading and accent for こんにち minus the は. Seems strange for such a common greeting.)
Please let me know if you have any recs! Or an easy way to add a pitch accent dictionary to my phone?
I don’t know anything about JAccent, but you might be interested in the NHK Japanese Pronunciation Dictionary (available both on Android as a separate app and on iOS through the Dictionaries app). Other dictionaries (for example the Daijisen that I happen to have) also include pitch accent information.
I have the Daijirin J-J dictionary app on my phone and it also has pitch accent. So, if monolingual dictionaries are something you might see yourself investing in for the future, maybe picking up one with pitch accent information (Daijirin, Daijisen or others) might be worth it.
Also, the Monokakido Dictionaries app (where you can access all your dictionaries in one place) has a sale going on until the 24th, fyi
Thank you!!! These are exactly what I’m looking for! Except that I’d prefer something free if possible… Oh well, guess I’ll keep looking until I give in and spend the money.
I have an iphone unfortunately
This is just the Midori (Japanese Dictionary) app right? I’m looking at the preview pics, but I don’t see any info about pitch accent.
I’ve seen this website around before! Nice option!
I’m just a little confused by how they represent pitch. The red sideways L represents the pitch starting high and then moving down? While the straight black line is moving up?
But I completely agree. While pitch accent isn’t necessarily needed to communicate, it is so important if you don’t want to have a strong foreign accent.
My foreignness is completely given away anytime I make a phone call
I’m so used to it that I forgot it’s not super intuitive. The red line indicates a strong jump in pitch, like the second mora in あなた. The black line is similar, but just indicates that the jump isn’t quite as pronounced, like the last two morae in 私.
But yes, pitch accent is important. If done improperly, at best you sound foreign, and at worst you’re not understood at all.
While I do think it’s true that there’s usually more stress on the mora right before the pitch drops (the red line), I don’t think it’s really fair to say the pitch “jumps” any more than usual.
Here’s what everything means on that website:
No line indicates the pitch is low
Black line indicates the pitch is high and stays high after that mora
Red line with the little hook indicates the pitch is high and drops to low after that mora
I thought I’ve seen cases where the second mora has a red line followed by a black line, as opposed to just a black line starting on the second mora (or a red line and then reverting back to the pitch of the first mora). I may be mistaken. I’ll see if I can find some examples.
I wasn’t familiar with that term before you used it here, but a quick search seems to confirm what you’re saying: “An ‘accent nucleus’ (アクセント核 akusento kaku ) or ‘accent locus’ is another name for an accented mora, a mora that carries a high tone and is followed by a mora with a low tone. In other words, the precipitous drop in pitch occurs right at the boundary between the accent nucleus and the mora immediately after it.”
On an individual word basis, the accented mora (or potential lack of one) is really the only thing that you need to know. This is why it’s possible to just represent it with a single number and have no need for diagrams. That’s really all any diagram is going to get across.
The rest is all stuff that can be understood by just learning rules that apply to pitch accent patterns in general.
Though for speed of comprehension reasons (seemingly) my NHK accent dictionary actually opts to display other pitches by putting the mora the drop is on in a box (e.g. ) if there are multiple of that mora it just places a number by it indicating the instance. It’s a lot faster and harder to mistake [じ2] than [5] I guess.
Anecdotally, I have an Anki deck which has pitch accent indicated with numbers, which I’ve used for years without picking up any information about pitch accent from it; on the other hand jpdb indicates pitch accent with the up-and-down wiggly line style visualisation, and I do find myself comparing what I hear in the audio with what the pitch indication shows. So I think especially for learners that the method of displaying pitch accent makes a difference, even if theoretically they’re all interconvertable…
) if there are multiple of that mora it just places a number by it indicating the instance. It’s a lot faster and harder to mistake [じ2] than [5] I guess.