Pitch-Accent Awareness Corner

I plan on subscribing to dogen’s patreon too! Do you like it so far? Is it very helpful?

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I’ve found it very useful so far. There don’t seem to be very many English language resources that explain pitch accent in such depth as his lessons do. By depth I don’t mean every last detail regarding pitch accent but rather explain very clearly what the patterns are and how to apply them to words, and also how to predict which pattern is used for what, and what just needs to be memorized. Right now I’m using the pitch accent plugin for wanikani, but I didn’t really understand very well how to use it before watching this. In fact I think I noticed an error in it today :exploding_head:

Edit: I think the info in his series is useful if you plan on doing shadowing, also. I didn’t notice the pitch accent patterns listening to speaking before, or I misunderstood what I heard i.e. I thought I heard low-high-middle, but it was really a low-high-low pattern, because middle is not really a thing. Even if you don’t plan on practicing pitch accent on its own I think it helps to understand how it works so the high and low tones actually register when you are shadowing.

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Thank you :slight_smile: It really seems super useful! I can’t wait to subscribe!

Also, I couldn’t really find any detailed explanations of pitch accent in English, so you’re probably right about his videos being the only ones explaining it in depth

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Does anyone know if Dogen’s patreon videos are downloadable? Ideally I’d like to pay once to check out the videos but still be able to go back to them later for reference.

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Aren’t all YouTube videos downloadable if you use a site for downloading them?

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Are his paid videos still hosted on YouTube?

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They were when I was paying.

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Yes, Dogen just uploads the videos to Youtube, sets them to unlisted so you can’t find them without the direct link and then posts the link to the video on Patreon.

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Okay, thanks @Leebo and @vzwGrey for the information.

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I’ve been interested in this topic. I notice that many words are marked as flat tone (0). In this case would they still considered having a pitch, or we can just pronounce them “flatly” ?

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That’s called heiban. The pitch must change between the first and second mora. When a word is heiban (0), it starts low on the first mora, then goes high on the second mora and stays high for the rest of the word.

In my opinion heiban sounds flater than other intonations, but it still noticeably rises between the first and second mora.

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And just to add to that, it stays flat (high) for any attached particles. There are many words that sound like heiban in isolation and can only be differentiated by what a particle does when it comes next.

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Got this working on my Anki deck pretty smoothly. Nice little addition.
I’ve also noticed that the accent marks look better with different fonts. Was looking a bit wonky on the mac until I changed to a different one.

I’m having a little problem getting my head around the blue and red accent marks though…

  • Red circle mark: Nasal pronunciation、e.g. げ would be a nasal け.
  • Blue color: barely pronounced at all. For example, a blue ヒ would be closer to “h” than “hi”. Likewise, a blue ク would be more like a “k” than “ku”.

For blue, that kind of makes sense… for example:
えんぴつ pronounced enp’tsu… so shortening the ‘pi’ down just to a hint of the ‘p’.

But for red, I don’t understand what it means by a nasal sound. Does anyone have any examples of what this means?

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Stack Exchange has a few questions and answers on this. Here’s just one, but you can find others by searching there.

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Ah, great. Thanks!

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I wrote a blurb in another thread (Need help with Pitch Accents) explaining how pitch accents work under the hood. Today I was talking with someone and it inspired me to clean it up which I have posted here: Japanese Pitch Accent

Please share your thoughts if you have any. :slight_smile:

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Coming to Japanese from Ancient Greek, I’m familiar with pitch accent. But man is it a bitch, in either language.

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Ancient Greek buddy! o/

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χαιρ’ ω φιλε!

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My relationship with AncGreek has really deteoriorated over the past 8 years, I practically remember nothing except for the alphabet and the diacritics …

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