He always says へいぼん not へいばん. Always, it sounds very American to me. Not like an “a”.
I will comment on this once I am able to comprehend the meaning. At the moment I am still stuck at: I have a list of words, I have a microphone, I don’t know how to use the software to record things, I am lost, so I just say random things and feel embarrassed about my own voice- stage…
Hmm, I just listened to it and it sounds fine to me and I don’t think I have heard anyone else say anything about it. ばん sounds pretty close to how we say bon in bonfire. へいぼん’s ぼん sounds quite different.
I just asked my daughter (Japanese) and she also hears that it sounds American. Maybe he is doing it when he is using the word 平板 while speaking English, I haven’t heard him saying a Japanese sentence with 平板 yet.
But surely your daughter, being a native, didn’t hear へいぼん right? I’m not sure I would mistake dogen for a native myself so its not too surprising to me if he sounds american to native ears still, but I’d be very surprised if a native heard へいぼん. For reference, here is what I was listening to. Maybe he has some other instances where he pronounced it differently though.
For me it sounds as if he would like to say 平凡 as an American. Not like a Japanese would say it. For me it is a vowel between a Japanese a and o but with an American touch. It might be really only happen in the context of an English sentence. For me the difference to Japanese is very clear because German has the exact same vowels, or at least I think they are the same which could be a mistake.
I don’t know if this will help or not, but it’s pretty much a straight-forward tool to record your voice and compare it with the native speaker’s pronunciation. After that, you could re-record your pronunciation until you feel it sounds closest to the native speaker’s.
I’ve only used it for a bit until I needed to give it up due to my current load of other SRS tools. So maybe you’ve tried it before and given it up for the same reasons as well.
Thank you, that looks interesting I will have a closer look at it later.
It is my first take on training pronunciation seriously so I feel a bit lost without something like a strict guideline on how to implement the rules for pitch accent into real speech. Because there is so much possible material to use and so much ways to do it I think I just start with the most obvious for the time being and record myself saying all the words from the Dogen videos… After doing this for a while I might extend that into something bigger and more technical refined.
I don’t know if it is a good way to think about it but in my impression now the first step should be pitch accent and overall pronunciation later because otherwise I would probably solidify mistakes I wouldn’t even notice without a good pitch accent awareness.
Sounds like へいばん. Would definitely say that it was a mistake if he was trying to say へいぼん.
Sorry for appearing out of the blue and I don’t know if anyone is interested but I’ve been using “Ganbatte Shadowing” for a while now and I quite like it and it’s free. 
So 人(ひと) is a real lovely word when it comes to pitch accent I’ve found.
At first you look it up, it says heiban. Ok so its flat.
Then you really listen and you start hearing it with an odaka accent sometimes. At some point you find out that it does this when its modified via an い-adjective or な/の.
So you think, ok I got this. But then you listen to someone say この人 and wait… The accent is LHLL?? But isn’t この flat? Same for あの人. So you read up on that and it turns out この and あの (not sure about その) will form a whole new pitch accent when combined with certain common words (日 being another example).
(I’m just venting a bit by the way 
also, learning these kind of pitch accent rules is probably unnecessary, but now that I know them, I won’t forget them haha)
the fact that @distantflower keeps liking this persons posts tells me they don’t realize its a scam, so just in case other people don’t either, this person is a bot who later edits their messages into an advertisement. You can report them
https://community.wanikani.com/t/pitch-accent-awareness-corner/18746/168?u=vanilla
My mother is from Okinawa, although she has live in the US for half her life. She really couldn’t explain pitch accent to me. Okinawan Japanese does have pitch accent though, and the pattern varies from 標準語. All I know is that improper pitch does not sound anywhere near as jarring to the native Japanese ear as improper stress does to the native English ear. You will obviously sound like a 外人 but I personally don’t care that I do.
Thanks for the heads up, @Vanilla ! I didn’t notice it was a scam, and I have a bad habit of supporting good threads by spamming the Like button. I’ll report them as you suggested then 
np. if you didn’t notice, chances are others didn’t either, so I figured I’d say something.
I think vocal similarities should be able to be calculated as well. Otherwise, it’s no different from AnkiDroid recorder + compare by myself with audio files. Variations may be possible, and I am not sure if my ears can be trusted. Theories should help define variations’ limit.
Otherwise, actual Speech-to-Text?
Will read more on theories later.
I get what you mean when you say we can’t always trust our own ears, lol. At the moment, I have a weekly reading out loud session with a Japanese teacher, and I’m realising that I’m having a lot of trouble with Heiban (or generally memorising the pitch accent for 4-mora nouns, compound nouns’ pitch accent, etc.) and maintaining proper intonation.
So far, my intonation appears to keep going up and down, and up again at random when I’m reading. Thankfully, Mei-san came up with the Introduction to Japanese Intonation video below before a session this week. It explains why learning Pitch Accent is important before learning about Japanese Intonation, which has been a tedious practise for me when reading long sentences from a Japanese novel.
For the time being, keeping the pitch drop consistent without going back up when seeing another accented mora makes me sound like a robot. But I am confident that with practise, all of us will improve, slowly but surely.
I have no immediate plan to speak Japanese now (I might do in the past), but I still want to be able to listen well.
Yeah the thing about sentences is that not only does intonation sometimes change due to particles; but there are also natural break points in sentences where there’s a slight pause for reset.
Hello there, Pitch Accent aware people.
I have a question about heiban and odaka words.
Is there a difference in pronunciation when no particle follows, like as a standalone word. Even a slight difference. Or do they both sound like a heiban word in these situations?
Further more, a lot of japanese emphasize and raise their voice on the particle when speaking clearly. How would you hear the difference between odaka anf heiban in these instances?
Thanks for the attention
If there’s no particle, then yes they both have no drop in pitch and therefore have the same pattern within the space of the word. They wouldn’t have any slight difference.
As for how people raise the pitch on particles, this is actually considered a bad habit by some, and I think public speakers try not to do this.
In any case it’s not likely to cause confusion, since context does fix everything.