His reason is basically that he wanted to sound like a native and impress his classmates. He said to stick to one dialect. Mixing them, even if correct, will not sound native as natives will notice.
I heard about that debate, but didn’t really look into it. I watched MattVSJapans video, but he honestly felt like a huge show-off. I haven’t watched other videos by him though, but many of his thumbnails gave off the same vibe.
I have a German accent in English, I know it and I don’t care. The funny thing is, my brain often knows that my prononciation is a bit off, yet I can’t really produce the exact right sound on the spot 
With a lot of practice it would get better, but seriously? I don’t care. I can communicate just fine.
So, what I was getting at: Japanese pitch accent is veeeeeery low on my priority list.
I also think that pitch accent is something that you can pick up unconsciously by listening to a lot of Japanese conversations. Doing “shadowing” also helps a lot.
I actually have the book for this, but I’ve never gotten aroud to it. I wonder how helpful it would really be. Yes, I’m sure it helps, but without someone actively listening to you and correcting you, would this get you basically all the way there?
He made it clear that his own goal was to sound as native as possible, so it makes sense that he did things in line with his goal. He’s telling people that if they share similar goals, he thinks that focusing purely on phonetics and pitch accent for a while is a good idea. He’s saying that it’s very important provided you want to sound native. I think he isn’t wrong. Is it important for Japanese learners in general? Yes, I think so, but not to the same extent.
Having a decent mastery of pitch accent is probably important for being understandable: it’s true that a lot can be worked out using context alone – I speak Mandarin and I can usually understand almost everything even when the wrong tones are used – but there are cases when the wrong pitch accents are so jarring or strange that they throw native speakers off. I know I have more trouble understanding one of my classmates with relatively poor tone mastery in Mandarin as compared to my ex-classmate, who had very good tone mastery after living in China for a year. Many Japanese viewers on YouTube apparently initially have trouble understanding Korone, who’s a Hololive VTuber with an accent that’s very different from the standard Japanese accent, and if you’re used to looking out for tone changes in speech because of the languages you speak (like me), it’s very noticeable. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to understand as that it makes you start and go, ‘Wait, what word was that again?’
However, if you’re already able to pronounce all the sounds correctly, and your pitch variations are already ‘close enough’, then yeah, you probably won’t be too hard for native speakers to understand. Anything beyond that is essentially a matter of personal satisfaction. However…
These things are true. In France, I’ve received admiration and praise because I sound like I’m French (or close enough – some people say I have a light accent), and people are really surprised that I only started learning French at the age of 13: just the other day, my maths teacher was telling me he thought I grew up in France. As a result – with the help of my vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, of course – the quality of my French tends to be praised, and I suspect that also encourages people to see me as more intelligent, or at least good with languages.
Even if you’re someone who doesn’t have a prestige accent (I had a little rant about those a while back because a teacher in France dared to ask me why I called myself a native speaker of English even though I was from Singapore – excuse me? I’ve been speaking English since I was born, and my English tons better than my Mandarin, which is my other native language, so what else should I say my native language is?), you’ll have a tendency to judge others based on their accents: noticing a different accent may make you suspect that someone else has a different background from you, and lead you to question their ability to see things from your perspective. If you go to Singapore with an accent that doesn’t fit into the set of common accents in Singapore, even if you have the local passport, people are going to wonder if you’re a local until you start showing other evidence of your Singaporeanness, like knowledge of local food or attachment to common national pastimes or hobbies. Having a well-known British or American accent in Singapore will often lead to your being perceived as more intelligent, but it’ll also make you seem less local – that’s also why I vary my accent a lot when I’m back home, because I know I’ll be treated strangely in casual contexts if I use my best pronunciation, which gives me a near-British accent, even though it’s helpful in formal contexts where I need to come across as educated, smart and respectable.
Another thing to consider is that speaking to someone with a strong accent can be tiring unless one learns how to decipher their speech, and that can make it less comfortable to talk to them. In the worst case, unless they’re likeable in some other way, the feelings of frustration and discomfort that their speech generates in others can prevent them from deepening their relationship with others.
I’d just like to say that all this is ultimately about mirroring: human beings tend to treat people who seem similar to them more favourably, and failing that, they give preferential treatment to people who fit their ideals. It’s not essential to have a native accent, but having one can help make natives doubt your ability less and see you as someone ‘of their ilk’, which can encourage them to open up to you more quickly. Do you have to push everything else aside just to study pitch accent though? Hm… I’m not so sure. I think it might be better to study it alongside everything else.
To be fair, you could get away with paying him 10 USD exactly once and potentially have access to his content for quite a while afterwards, so it’s not that expensive: the NHK Pronouncing Dictionary is 40 USD, if I’m not wrong. That aside, you need to remember that there’s almost no other comprehensive information on pitch accent in English, and the comprehensive resources that are available are either more costly or free but extremely obscure. Finally, I think the fact that he makes videos on pitch accent, in which he can demonstrate what he means live, makes his resources much more valuable than most of what’s out there, because the only other comprehensive resource in English I know of is nothing but text, and it’s really hard to find. (I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull it up on Google again, and I don’t think I saved it.)
I just skimmed through the thread, so sorry if someone already said anything I’m about to say. And it’s going to be very long, because I have a lot of thoughts about this, but there’s a summary at the end if you can’t be bothered.
Disclaimer: I am a professional musician so I find hearing pitch patterns and utilizing them in my own speech to be natural and easy, and so the average person will likely have a harder time than me learning pitch accent. (But I still think it’s worth it to learn!)
Regarding pitch accent studies:
Sounding like a native speaker has benefits beyond being understood more easily. It makes your conversation partner more comfortable, and thus allows you to connect with them more. I find this especially important with regards to being part of society in Japan, where it’s hard for foreigners to assimilate. Any tool I can use to break down the 外人 barrier is something I want to have. Of course if you don’t care about connecting with people through the language and you just want to read, write, and/or listen, then don’t bother. But if you are looking to use the language to connect with Japanese people, I think it’s a great tool to have. As someone that would like to work in Japan for at least some period of time, and would like to make Japanese friends during that time, I chose to study pitch accent.
There’s an argument that you can pick up pitch accent from just doing a lot of listening. This is the exact same argument that someone can pick up the grammatical rules of a language just by listening and reading, and so they don’t need a textbook. It is technically true, and it’s indeed how children learn, but it takes way longer. It’s akin to going through Wanikani without doing any lessons, starting each word at the review stage, and if you don’t have someone to tell you the mistakes you’re making and correct you, it’s like doing Wanikani without lessons AND without any feedback about whether your answers were right or wrong. Young children spend their entire day learning, they have private tutors (parents) to correct every mistake along the way, and their brains are more malleable than adult brains are. For me, it would have taken much longer to try to intuit the rules of the language from repeated exposure than to just spend a few weeks watching content that explains the rules in English and doing some focused practice. Once I knew the rules, I still had to engrain them more deeply by repeated exposure and practice, but this is essentially just solidifying knowledge I already had - the hard part of acquiring the knowledge is done. I think that all of the above is true even for adults that don’t have advanced musical training like me, though admittedly I don’t have proof. If anyone isn’t a musician, has done significant pitch accent study, and feels they agree/disagree with me, please elaborate!
Finally, even if you spend time on pitch accent and end up hating it and giving up, it would at least be a lot of good listening and speaking practice!
Regarding Dogen’s Patreon content:
I found his Patreon content invaluable. He has distilled the most important lessons he’s learned from years of pitch accent study, and he explains it clearly in English. You won’t find a resource like it anywhere else. I subscribed for 3 months, during which time I watched several videos a day and took notes on everything he said. He also has very good videos about pronunciation (i.e. vowel and consonant sounds, unrelated to pitch.) In the end it was something like $30 total to learn about 90% of everything I would ever need to know about pitch accent and pronunciation, so I think it was a pretty good deal. I spent about 30 min a day for 3 months learning his content, then the same amount of time for another 3 months doing some pitch-accent-aware shadowing with the Tobira book, and nowadays it’s pretty well integrated into my Japanese, so I only spend about 10 min a day doing it, which is spent learning and reviewing patterns for individual words with an Anki deck. For reference, I spend about 1.5 - 2 hours each day studying Japanese.
The only thing I didn’t like about Dogen’s videos are his explorations/explanations of how Japanese speakers use a more nasal, higher vocal placement than English speakers. I think this is total BS and I ignored it every time he said it. From what I could tell, he got this idea from another Youtuber, rather than from any academic source, and he decided to consciously make his voice more nasal to sound more Japanese, but really it just sounds like he has a cold all the time. My thoughts were confirmed by some comments on his videos by native Japanese speakers, who noted that his voice sounded too nasal. If I remember right, he eventually realized it wasn’t working and decided to stop trying to speak that way, but some of the videos still mention it last I checked (about 9 months ago). Some of his Patreon videos now have a native speaker doing the audio, so you don’t have to hear his nasal voice as much, although the nasal voice does not detract from the educational quality of the content in any way.
It’s kinda like what actors do when they learn a new accent (Australian native speaker learning New Orleans accent, or American actress learning RP). They have the so-called “dialect tapes”. Sure, an accent coach would be better, but in the absence of one, dialect tapes help a lot.
I can’t/won’t speak for him as a person, but he’s right about pitch accent being important. It’s one of the biggest difference makers in whether or not the other party will have to strain to listen to you, even if you can communicate without it.
I’m not sure about Japanese, but for French, no one ever actively corrected my pronunciation. My major tools were imitation (essentially shadowing with texts or while listening to radio or TV programmes), one page on common French intonation patterns and tutorials on making the sounds represented by IPA symbols for French. My accent has been called native or near-native. As such, it’s workable, but it takes time and also requires you to listen to yourself.
I didn’t start sounding fully native in French until I began dropping the pitch of my voice when speaking, and so I definitely speak a little higher in English and in Mandarin. I think there is a possibility that different languages have different vocal placement: another example would be how American accents tend to be more nasal than British accents. Perhaps Japanese isn’t more nasal (and frankly, you can tell that isn’t the case just based on the wide variety of voices you hear voice actors use in anime), but it’s still possible that Japanese speakers have a higher average speaking pitch than, say, English speakers. Of course, this is something we’ll each have draw our own conclusions about while checking our thoughts against studies, but I’m raising the possibility because I’m certain that the last thing I consciously changed about my French accent was my speaking pitch, because when I recorded myself and listened, the nasality and pitch of my voice was what stood out as unnatural and non-native for me.
Thanks! What you say makes a lot of sense.
I’ll definitely study pitch accent as l want to converse with natives.
How was it like progressing? Was it a constant flow, or does it suddenly click?
I’m worried about this being a massive undertaking in the same way kanji is.
How is it like memorising pitch accent for individual words. Does it make it easier or harder to learn vocabulary?
Did you use any resources other than Dogen?
He’s never mentioned how much was actually paid but judging from his Patron tiers and the fact that it’s his full time gig, I’d guess a few hundred dollars at least.
There’s no harm in trying it out. It’s just $10 a month. If it doesn’t work for you, then you stop paying. It’s very simple.
I know it’s going to help me immensely and so I am going to subscribe and learn how to pronounce things correctly. My aim is not to have a native accent. My aim is to always progress and at least make the best version of me when speaking Japanese!
I know this isn’t directed at me, and I may not be the best person to answer since I have several years of musical study under my belt and I speak a tonal language, but here’s my experience, for what it’s worth:
I don’t get pitch accents right all the time, and I think my accuracy might be related to my Chinese knowledge (which is strange because Japanese doesn’t preserve the tones from Mandarin), but after listening to Japanese for so long, I find that I’m often able to guess the pitch accent for relatively long compounds correctly: when I look the compound up in the dictionary, I’m right 70% of the time, maybe more. You might say that’s not a lot better than 50%, but when you remember that getting the pitch accent right means guessing which mora (i.e. roughly which ‘syllable’ or ‘beat’ in the word) carries the accent… that means that random guessing will only give you the right answer 20-50% of the time, since some compounds are five morae long. In other words, I think it clicks at some point, and there are a few patterns that make guessing easier.
The most common pitch accent of all 平板 (flat), and it’s also the one that foreign learners find the most natural. For longer compounds formed by combining words, the pitch tends to go up until the accented syllable, then go down. (People say it’s へ-shaped.) The key thing then is learning the exceptions i.e. when the pitch accent isn’t 平板.
There’s a script for that on WK. I don’t know if you’ve tried this for English, but you’ll notice that there’s usually at least one accented syllable per word, right? Did you manage to learn which syllable is accented in each word in English? If you did, then it’s going to be the same thing for Japanese, except that the stressed syllable will be replaced by the last high-pitched mora. It’s not much harder than that. In my opinion, it might make it easier to remember vocabulary because you’ll have a fixed way of saying and hearing that word in your head.
The biggest difficulty in learning pitch accents is the fact that individual pitch accents don’t always stay the same when words combine in sentences, and that’s something which I don’t really know how to learn beyond observation and imitation. That’s where Dogen’s videos (or some resource explaining the ‘accent change rules’) could be useful. However, the accent changes usually aren’t huge either, and if you listen to and imitate enough real Japanese (even just reciting lines from your favourite anime or dramas), most of it will come naturally, and you’ll be left with minor mistakes at most. I’m not saying this to boast, but if it reassures you… more than a year ago (and I’m pretty sure I’ve improved since then), my friend pranked me into having a conversation with a half-Japanese girl, and she said「すごい！アクセント結構です。」I don’t think my Japanese accent is excellent at this point, but at the very least, it’s not too bad, and it merited a comment that went beyond「日本語上手」.
This course from Waseda University is excellent and free (though you’ll only have access for a few months):
I didn’t manage to finish it because I didn’t have the time, but the explanations are good, and the examples given should allow you to start seeing patterns quite rapidly.
Another thing you can use to check if your pitch accent is correct is this:
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/phrasing/index
Enter a phrase or sentence and hit 実行, and it’ll tell you how your tone should vary. 作成 should give you a computerised simulation of how to read it, and 再生 will let you hear the computerised voice read it. The pitch accents provided don’t agree 100% with what I have in my dictionary, but almost all of them do, and this tool was produced by the University of Tokyo, so either way, you’re in good hands.
He’s passionate about it so good on him. That being said nope don’t like him, he makes it seem like pitch is more important than it is.
Not saying I won’t learn some, looks fascinating but he and other comes of as a gatekeeping bunch to me, I’m likely wrong in that.
Edited for bad formatting in initial post.
I would say it was a constant flow, but idk, I don’t usually pay attention to that sort of thing. How it felt to me probably means nothing for your own learning experience.
I highly doubt it will be as hard as learning kanji. The time scale for getting really solid pitch accent is probably 6-12 months at 30 min a day. And obviously, nobody could finish WK with that little of a time commitment.
I had a pretty solid vocabulary when I started learning pitch accent. All of Genki 1 & 2, Tobira, and 45 levels of WK. And I’ve found it much easier to learn accents for words I already know, because I’m just learning one thing. If you have to learn the pitch accent AND the meaning, it’s more difficult. I do look up the pitch accent when I learn a new word, but I have separate Anki decks for pitch accent and for vocabulary learning, so I don’t review them together. If a word shows up in my vocab reviews and I feel that I want to know the pitch pattern, I just look it up quickly (takes 3 seconds) and then move on.
My resources are probably not the best, but I’m kind of lazy, so it’s ended up being this:
-This Anki pitch accent deck with a crap ton of vocabulary, of which I probably know 50%. 10 new cards a day. Honestly, this deck isn’t great for a lot of reasons, but it’s easier than manually looking up every word I encounter, or creating my own deck. I’ve adapted my usage of this deck to work pretty well, though, so I could pass on the information about that if you’re interested. This is definitely the weakest part of my resource pool, but there’s basically nothing else out there that is a giant pool of pitch accent patterns for the most common words, unless you want to look up the info for a bunch of individual words.
-I made about 150 of my own anki cards to review the notes I took from Dogen’s class.
-As I mentioned earlier, after going through Dogen’s course I did a lot of shadowing with the files of the Tobira book, using the reading and listening exercises. You can do what I did with any resource where you have a text and an audio file of a native speaker reading the text, but I would search for something that is relatively complex and conforms to 標準語 pitch accent standards. Any intermediate or advanced textbook will probably fit this description. I would go through one sentence at a time, first reading it aloud myself to guess the correct pitch for the sentence, then listening to the native say it, then saying it along with the recording as many times as needed to where I could do it close to perfectly. After doing a paragraph, I would try to say the whole paragraph with the native recording. And after doing a whole article, conversation, or whatever, I would try to say the whole thing back with the recording. Then I would move onto the next recording. I did this for about 3 months, 30 min a day, and then decided I had done enough after getting halfway through the Tobira book. It was quite challenging, but a lot of the common patterns were totally engrained by the end of this, and my ability to speak clearly also improved a lot.
I love Dogen! I have a Patreon subscription to him, because I love his work, but I don’t watch his videos about pitch accent.
My theory is that everybody has some “in” on Japanese. There’s some kind of gate 門 that each person enters into Japanese study by way of, and that because central to their motivational system for achieving success in Japanese.
For Dogen, that gate was pronunciation.
For myself, I think the gate is playing Japanese video games, and speaking in Japanese with people, live.
When I feel demotivated, that’s what brings my motivation back.
The person I learn the most from online is Cure Dolly. I just totally dig Cure Dolly’s weird eclectic but heartful style.
But that’s just me.
For Dogen, pronunciation is his gate. And that’s just Dogen. That’s how and who he is. When he thinks about pronunciation, he gets excited. That motor will propel him forever.
I hear the argument that he might be sending students down a false ally for them – that someone might hear him say “It’s best to get pronunciation right, right up from the start.” But I think it’s also really important to let people like Dogen be themselves and say what they think, even if we don’t entirely agree. Rather than trying to get Dogen to stop, or warning people about Dogen, I’d just wait until I saw someone who seemed to be deterred because of what Dogen said, and say, “Well, you know, there are other ways to look at this, … And have you noticed that pronunciation is Dogen’s particular chosen work?”
I watched this Cure Dolly video awhile back (she has good content, if you can get past the uncanny valley avatar), and I couldn’t help but think of Dogen: (First ~7 minutes are really the relevant bit)
She critical of what she calls the “art for art sake” attitude towards learning Japanese - that most people fail because their focus is on “become good at Japanese” itself, rather than on using Japanese as a means to communicate - which leads to an exaggerated fear of mistakes, focusing on inessential parts of learning, and a resulting delaying actual immersion and fluency.
It’s a sort of “hobbyist perfectionism” syndrome, where “perfection” becomes the goal, rather than “getting stuff done” and as a result basically nothing ever gets done. The dangers of this sort of attitude is why “Fail Fast” is a mantra in the hobbyist game design community - because without consciously pushing, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of perfection.
There’s nothing wrong with having a hobby, of course, but if your goal is to actually ship a video game or become proficient with the language, it’s counter-productive.
With Dogen it’s kind of complicated. From what I’ve seen he largely does acknowledge that perfect pitch accent isn’t essential, and that pitch accent is sort of a niche interest that may very well be useful to some people and not others.
It’s sort of a weird “two rights makes a wrong” situation, where there’s nothing wrong with niche interests, and there’s nothing wrong with high quality content… but the fact that he makes such high quality content about such a niche interest I think leads a lot of people to over-value pitch accent and really feeds into the “Japanese as a toy” approach to learning the language.
His content is good, but it’s probably not the content most language learners should be focusing on, and it exacerbates an already unhealthy dynamic in the community.
I don’t see it that way. Having a conversation with someone whose pronunciation is bad can get exhausting. I have met many people who speak in a broken language and it is very hard to understand them. Therefore, after a while I get annoyed and lose interest in any further conversations.
Now, I am not judging anyone nor will I ever judge. I am sure my Japanese will also be broken for quite a long time but I rather do something about it than to ignore pitch accent and just pronounce words like I think they should be pronounced. If someone mispronounces a few words here and there that is fine in my book.
But when someone constantly speaks in a broken language with no intention of getting better at it, to me that is bad. I’m not saying this is bad. I’m just giving you my opinion as others may feel the same way as I do.
I understand your point and agree with it, but I don’t think it applies to Dogen’s pitch accent course. The course is geared towards beginner-intermediate pitch accent learners, and therefore barely scratches the surface of advanced pitch accent. In other words, the beginner concepts he covers are highly practical and show up in every single conversation you will ever have; the more advanced concepts (which is about 1/4 of the total content) may show up in only 1 in 10 conversations, but that’s still significant. It’s also clearly marked which concepts are fundamental and which are more advanced, so you can skip the advanced stuff if you want.
Dogen’s OWN advanced pitch accent knowledge may be considered pointless in the sense that it doesn’t help him communicate in Japanese, but he needs to have that level of education to be qualified to make his income teaching the beginner level concepts. Only by sifting through a massive amount of material, as somewhat of a “hobby”, was he able to distill all of that material down to practical rules for English-speaking Japanese learners.
I’m a big fan of her myself. I totally get what you’re saying, but I think accent is somewhat important if having conversations in Japanese is one of your goals. I want to get past the barrier of coming across as annoying with my accent.
I’ve watched some of Dogen’s Patreon content so far, and it’s very easy to understand. It’s nice information to have in the back of one’s mind.