Thank you for sharing your experience. I am fascinated by your story.
You spent 6,000 hours studying Japanese, acquired 20,000 vocabulary items, and read 60 books before moving to Japan, so your knowledge of the language was already at a much higher level than most foreigners.
But it was even better than that. Because you learned Japanese grammar and vocabulary in context from authentic native materials, you were never going to make the sorts of horrible usage mistakes that most non-native speakers make when they learn grammar from formal rules and memorise vocabulary from word lists.
I’m trying to imagine what it was like for you when you arrived in Japan, with such a high level of literacy and without a passionate interest in phonetics. I would love to know how you came to the decision to devote a significant chunk of your time to improving your pronunciation and learning pitch accent.
What was the most important factor for you?
Did you have any trouble communicating with people in Japan before you started learning pitch accent? In particular, did you experience any of the following problems when you first moved to Japan?
Comprehension:
People don’t always understand what you say to them.
For example, they look blank or confused, or ask you to repeat what you said.
Underestimating your level of Japanese:
People assume you know much less Japanese than you actually do. For example, they dumb down their language when they talk to you by speaking slowly and using simple words.
Switching to English:
People reply in English when you speak to them in Japanese, or continue to use English with you even after prolonged conversation.
Aloofness:
People restrict their conversation with you to the bare essentials for communication. They are not inclined to spend time chatting with you about other topics.
(Other stuff I haven’t thought of)
I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of anyone who has experienced a similar shift in the focus of their studies, in either direction.
Well, I not only had 0 interest in phonetics but in producing the language as a whole. So in that sense, the most important factor for me was actually my coworkers. They’re all really nice and fun to talk to, and I decided I wanted to be able to talk to them and any other people who would make their ways into my life with zero language obstacle. It just so happened that part of that is pitch accent.
For me, my desire for good pronunciation purely came from realizing how bad you sound otherwise to a native ear. I did some basic studying around pronunciation and pitch accent and when playing back my own japanese speech, it really shocked me how bad I was. This isn’t a huge deal for a lot of people, but I find pronunciation and pitch to be a huge factor when it comes to the impression you give people and I know I’m not alone. Hearing my own japanese gave me an impression I didn’t want to give other people, simply enough. Right now the most important thing for me imo is listening to japanese to catch up my listening and input conversational japanese to water down all the literary japanese in my head, and pitch accent studies just happens to compliment that very nicely.
There have been a couple cases like where I said 郊外 with heiban pitch because its 4 mora 2 kanji but its actually atamadaka and it took them a second to process it before telling me that its atamadaka. usually its just a pause.
Yes, but oddly enough not so much for spoken japanese. In fact I’m more surprised that some coworkers dont slow down when they talk to me. Until recently most people got that I was conversational but assumed I couldn’t read. Despite telling them thats how I learned japanese and I never actually practiced speaking before I started working here a few months ago. I think they just didnt believe me because its so weird. But, I started doing my reviews in the staff room as of recently and my coworkers liked to join in and try to do them, but they usually could manage like a 50% at best because my deck is filled with kanken 1 words. After that the questions about if I could read something stopped and usually when I dont know a word they say, theyll just write it in kanji for me rather than explaining it.
Never happened to me really. All my coworkers speak to me in japanese with the exception of the vice principal and principal when they give me a letter from the boe. I think they rehearse a little english beforehand since its not impromptu which I think is cute so I let them and respond in simple english. Impromptu conversations though even they talk to me in japanese.
Hmm, not something Ive really ran into. With some teachers we talk way too much and a 10 minute meeting turns into an hour of us just chatting really, and some other teachers will just start talking to me about non work related stuff right away. I think the conversation would definitely go smoother and be more enjoyable if I was better, though. One thing people don’t think about is being funny in another language is usually not too easy. Its easy to act funny, but saying things that have comedic value beyond being funny because a foreigner said it can be tough. Usually being funny is a lot less about what you’re saying and more about how you’re saying it. Knowing the funniest phrasing for something when you’re retelling a story in a foreign language can be tricky for sure.
Is there SRS for pitch accent? Didn’t see anything in the main post other than I guess adding the data to Anki and maybe modifying the card to require pitch input, but I’m not using Anki. Would be cool if a word was presented and you had to select the correct pitch for each syllable, using interactive versions of the diagrams that KaniWani and the WK plugin use. Probably could make it if such a thing doesn’t exist.
I’m assuming you’re even newer to pitch accent than me, so just a few things about that:
There isn’t a reason to actually select the pitch of each syllable. In my picture, if you know that the final pitch of 疑う is unaccented high on the う, you automatically know the pitch of every other mora in that word because of how the rules of pitch accent play out.
A syllable can contain multiple pitches like はん in 犯人. Syllables can have changes as a whole when its the end of an odaka word, but apart from that moras are usually the more important one of the two.
Pitch is all about how you say the word, so is there a reason you would opt for clicking buttons on a screen to represent pitch rather than just saying it yourself while imagining the drop and comparing that to native audio? Your goal is to naturally and effortlessly reproduce it in full speed speech, so I feel like keeping as close to that in your srs would be beneficial.
So I guess what I’m saying is that no I don’t think that that exists, but theres a reason it doesn’t exist, yknow.
I’d choose individual pitches for the exact same reason tools already exist to visualize the pitch of each syllable – tools which are already linked in this thread. The tools don’t visualize just the final pitch change, after all.
Sure, the reason it doesn’t exist is that no one has made it, as with all things that do not exist – and as with all things that did not exist before I made them.
Anyway, as stated, I’m not interested in Anki decks. I will just work on a personal solution then, now that I know it does not exist.
I guess one advantage to requiring someone to input each mora’s pitch is that it means they have to prove they understand the rules that were mentioned. If they don’t understand the rules, they might input some kind of impossible pattern, which would present a deeper learning opportunity than just asking for the downstep/accent.
That’s certainly an advantage but only applies to people who haven’t learned literally the most fundamental and basic principles of pitch accent. Id hope no one who hasn’t learned those is getting serious about srsing word pitch accents. They only take a couple minutes to go through anyways
To be fair, it’s not a concept that would be limited to individual words. I personally don’t like the idea of SRSing individual words for pitch accent anyway, but that’s just me.
For sentences its definitely less silly, but then it’s not just a matter of high and low anymore. Regardless, seems like a lot of time per card with zero real benefit for people who understand the two most basic rules of pitch accent. So it kinda feels like wasting your time to make a tool that will waste more of your time
I added a link to “Voicevox” because I’ve found it to work at least as good as “Prosody Tutor Suzuki-kun”, but has a nicer interface and sounds a bit more natural.
As far as I can tell you are asking for a standalone SRS and not a WaniKani userscript, but I thought I would mention it anyway:
It seems to be abandoned, but still works. It uses old data from the Pitch Info script (that was scraped from Weblio before they removed pitch info from their search results) before the Pitch Info script was rewritten to use https://github.com/mifunetoshiro/kanjium/blob/master/data/source_files/raw/accents.txt, so it will not support the recently added content and might contain some wrong data.
That looks awesome, thanks. I’ll take a closer look soon. I already have a local database of all the pitches so I could probably update it if necessary.
So as I mentioned before, I’ve gone through and first learned all general patterns for pitch accent and moved on to single words now. There has been a notable issue, though. Patterns are very easy to apply to words with one pitch accent, but what do you do when they have more than one pitch accent? The obvious answer is to just apply the relevant pitch accent of the word…but figuring out which one that is has kinda been a pain. Available pitch accent resources is pretty limited online.
Even if you manage to figure out that 日(ひ) can be atamadaka or heiban, figuring out which meaning uses which can be a pain with just google (not to mention some pitch accent dictionaries don’t even list the atamadaka one). And even in cases where it doesn’t actually matter like noun combination (since atamadaka and heiban fall into the same category for 3-4 mora and the other categories are non definite) you can’t be sure about 日’s properties because its only 1 mora. Finding out that its 前部末型 is a pain because its like you’re 90% sure thats it but you still gotta check dictionary entries for it because theres no info online.
All this obscurity around the freaking word 日, which is probably one of the most basic ones out there. The rules aren’t hard, but theres just not a lot of available info out there on the internet for free when you start diving into things pretty intensely. And sometimes its straight misleading. Like 下 and 人 both go from heiban to odaka when modified, but for some reason free dictionaries are all over the place. Hell OJAD includes both for 下 but then just 平板 for 人 despite that its odaka under basically the same condition lol. Luckily, for 人 you can find the info elsewhere (like in the git file I linked), but still.
So anyways, it became very clear very fast that I needed better reference materials, so I went ahead and bought the 日本語発音アクセント新辞典 and 新明解日本語アクセント辞典. All the info I can find online about these sorts of things are stuff people have taken from these two books so it just makes sense to me to cut out the middle man and not rely on only the info that people choose to post online. The former came today and the latter should be getting here tomorrow so am pretty excited. Looking through it and checking info that seemed to be lacking elsewhere online, it seems like a very good addition to my reference materials.
I personally don’t mind it, but it really shows you the state of pitch accent learning materials that I needed to buy two books that total about 3000 pages as reference materials to study it. I feel like we really take things for granted when it comes to how far digital study materials and info online for japanese have come. Crazy to think I would have a harder time figuring out how to say 優しい人だね than finding the meaning to archaic grammar my coworkers have never heard of online, but it makes sense when you think about it.
As I said before, sometimes its hard to find answers online for why multiple pitch accents are listed and what pitch accent is right for certain situations. So, if anyone ever has a question on a word or rule, just @ me and I’ll check for you and translate anything if you need it. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to find it, but I’ll look for you.
If I remember correctly, the price is about 40 USD. I told myself I might buy it some day if I got serious about studying pronunciation. (That was back when I wasn’t aware that pitch accent wasn’t fixed for each word, and I had just done a quick search for more information.) I don’t know if all the content from the book is in there, but hopefully most of it is.
Anyway, it’s really cool to see that you’ve got all your books. Happy reading.
By the way, I’m pretty sure all (specific) colors ending in いろ are heiban, which is a pattern neither of the two links you posted before mention. I went through several pages of colors on jisho and couldn’t find any exceptions. There are bound to be patterns like this that are less well known.
@Vanilla I have a question about the pitch accent of 一点（いってん）。
I did try to look it up in the Appendix of NHK 日本語発音アクセント新辞典 (Appendix p 140).
There are two columns giving the pitch accent of 点 after numbers from 1 to 10:
点 (個数) and 点 (得点数).
There is also a footnote on the same page, at the bottom of the second column:
副詞的用法の場合は、平板型（２単位語の場合は、後部要素が平板型）になる。
I don’t really understand the meaning of the two columns, or the footnote.
Worse yet, it turns out that there is a third possibility for the pitch accent of 一点 in the context where I saw it (from 新完全マスター文法 N2, p 56):
「こんな下手なチームでは、何度試合をしても一度も勝てないどころか、 1点も入れられないだろう。」
My Japanese teacher tells me that in this context 一点 is 平板.
I’m guessing that this is because it is followed by も + negative verb
(in the same way that question words like 何（なに）and 誰（だれ）
change from 頭高 to 平板 when followed by も + negative verb).
Unfortunately, my reading level is woefully inadequate for Japanese reference books, so I’m struggling to understand the information available.
I would be grateful for any light you could shed on this.
Unfortunately I actually am sick and had to take off from work today which is where I have the two books placed.
Fortunately, I don’t think I actually need them for this question.
So 点 can be used for counting items and such. It’s 全部末型 as that counter which means it drops on the last mora of whatever comes before it save for general relucance for the drop to be on an ん or long vowel and stuff.
So 一点 for counting the number of items is い\ってん
As a point counter, however, it is いってん when modifying a verb
So, yes in that example it’s used as one point so it should be heiban like your teacher said.
And then when it’s used as a noun, the drop is on the て いって\んを取る
It might seem hard, but really it’s two separate cases. And it just happens that when you have quantities modifying verbs like an adverb, the quantity usually turns heiban if it’s drop is at the end.
One easy example is 二つ. Its odaka so its ふたつ\.
～二つある, however, is ふたつあ\る because its being used as an adverb.
