Yeah, and to add to that, even speakers of regional dialects use standard Japanese when speaking more formally.
I remember when I was doing mock interviews at school with middle school students ready to go to high school. I live in Kansai, and so all the people involved in this story speak Kansai-ben pretty much all the time. But I remember the Japanese teacher who was with me during the mock interviews laughing when one of the students started giving her interview answers in Kansai-ben. For better or worse, they are expected to use standard Japanese for serious things, like these interviews or essays at school.
What youâre looking for is very specific. You want to learn the local dialect, so youâre not going to find a lot of materials on YouTube, because the potential audience is very small. You might be able to find a language course near where you live, but it will cost you a lot of money because, again, not very many course takers. But since youâre already living with your family anyway, why not just learn from them by osmosis? Itâs free and itâs 24 hours a day.
Yeah, itâs not quite 24 hours a day, but it is free!
My questions have been answered in the general discussion, but itâs something Iâve wondered in the whole pitch accent debate. It was also something I wondered when Matt critiqued Georgeâs pitch (perhaps George was speaking with an appropriate and perfect but more regional pitch? or was it foreign?) So, thank you to everyone who has contributed to answering my sub-questions.
How well natives can hide their regional dialect is relative plus not everyone makes the same effort either (or has an accent so thick, it makes it difficult). From the true æ±äșŹäșș I spoken with, they can often spot Tokyo transplants despite outside regionals being more convinced of their standard attempts. If anyone could understand anything from the Tsugaru-ben video I posted earlier, congratulations because every native I shared with could not understand anything. So a grain of salt if anyone is pressured to perfect pitch accent based on Dogenâs channel because natives donât get it right either. If there is any pressure, itâs probably because he has as young family and home to support now and has to sell it which is understandable. But if anyone is looking to have a career in Japan, this seems like an invaluable resource to help polish public speaking (which I think was Dogenâs original intent), but I donât have this goal so donât bother, just want to recognize basic rules of pitch accent. Even in English (my native), giving presentations or having an audience is a separate skill set that takes some measure of practice for clean delivery, pacing and conciseness which is why communication courses are taught.
@coicoy , been waiting for this resource to come out next year, it has potential to be comprehensive. There are many YT videos regarding dialect delivered by natives who grew up in those regional areas which is probably most reliable anyways, you just have to do JP searches. My interest is mostly comprehension, not delivery. Here is an example on çŠćł¶ćŒ which happens to have some English translations.
No, it was foreign. It was Japanese with an American accent. Another example is Mr Yabatanâs early videos (listen to the French style ârâ in ăă€ăŹ)
Think of it like Apu from the Simpsonâs.
Itâs an accent thatâs particular to people from a particular region because of how the sounds from their native language map onto English. Itâs perfectly intelligible and an English speaker wouldnât have any problem understanding.
Iâd say just train/learn the ability to hear/distinguish pitch accent, then you should be able to slowly pick up on and learn the local dialect over time through tons of immersion/osmosis
You can see exactly how he did it by starting a new post in this thread and including that particular text as a quoted section. You donât have to actually submit the post, but it lets you see the code used. In this case, itâs:
I think thereâs a forum userscript you can add thatâll streamline the process for you, though I usually type it by hand (and I skip the RP tags too, because keystrokes, ya know?).
Since all these people didnât manage to pick it up unconsciously despite thousands of hours of Japanese conversations, does that mean theyâre stupid? Or that something is wrong with their hearing? (to be clear: I donât think either of these things are the case) Or is it because of a different reason?
My assumption would be that Zellweger spent more time on it, although she may have studied the exact phonetics of British English closer as well - or just be more talented when it becomes to languages/phonetics, obviously completely unrelated to intelligence
Sorry if I came across as too cheeky, my point though is that - contrary to your theory - it doesnât seem like tons of time spent is enough to sound convincingly native in a language like Japanese, since thatâs just not possible if you havenât actually acquired the ability to hear and distinguish pitch accent
As a young child you can hear any&all sounds, but you lose this ability as you grow older - an obvious example of this is how a lot of Japanese people canât hear the difference between L and R in English
I donât think itâs worth it at all to pursue sounding native-like for 99% of Japanese learners though, which Iâm guessing we might agree on. I respect the amount of time and effort people like Dogen&Matt have put in to pursue and (more or less) accomplish it, but there are definitely extreme diminishing returns
Dave Spector on what he has accomplished with the language from what I can see is really impressive, more so than feats of perfect pitch or kanji knowledge (and certainly more than some convincing VR chat videos, lol). Granted I donât live there and sure didnât grow up following him but what I gathered he can cover anything as a commentator from humor to politics. And if you have cultural nuance to pull off televised comedy for the last 30+ years plus discuss serious topics that command alot of nuance and sensitivity to the nation that wants to hear him, that says alot.
Someone mentioned he may have some southern dialect influence which I can sort of hear but not certain (which was supposedly vetted out in the OP note, IDK). If I had to guess, he probably knows exactly what he sounds like and no one has any trouble following (certainly palatable enough for an audience to accept as a top commentator even among natives). Nonetheless, something like this makes me even less interested in a pursuit towards a perfected standard pitch accent.
I donât think thatâs true in a general case. I think it only holds true for cases where your exposure to different ways of speaking is limited, at least for people who arenât naturally gifted in that area.
Thatâs a great point. Being a great speaker is a separate skill altogether.
Again my point wasnât the importance (or lack thereof) of pitch accent, but rather the difficulty of naturally picking up on it for an adult native speaker of a non-pitch-accent-language.
Thereâs a reason why itâs hard to pick up on naturally - because you donât need to be able to hear it to completely fluently understand Japanese. For pretty much the same reason tons of native/fluent English speakers donât know the difference between things like âtheyâreâ and âtheirâ or âyouâreâ and âyourâ - it doesnât make a big enough impact on their understanding of the language for them to actually ever have to learn/understand the difference between them and compartmentalize them.
My gripe is with how people, without even being able to provide a single instance of it ever happening and despite contrary evidence, will claim something along the lines of âmost people can just pick it up naturallyâ and that to aquire it thereâs no need for things like knowledge of pitch accent, an ear for musical pitch or exposure to the language at a young age
Or even claiming that thereâs somehow TONS of cases of it happening, even though people have demonstrated that this isnât the case when it comes to 99% of Westerners who are big YouTubers or celebrities in Japan and extremely proficient in the language (like Dave Spector certainly is!)
Chinese speakers, however, actually do have a significantly higher chance of being able to pick up on it naturally, since in Chinese tones can actually change the meanings of words, much like pitch accent can change the meanings of words in Japanese - while in English stress can only slightly change the implication of a word, but not the actual meaning
I also completely agree with what morte wrote: that you never completely lose the ability to hear all sounds. It just gets significantly harder - as an adult you will most likely need to practice and train the ability to hear and distinguish these sounds, be it English âLâ & âRâ or Japanese pitch accent.
To clarify, to quote a linguist with pretty much what I meant:
Infants can reliability perceive contrasts between sounds in various languages. However, by the age of 10-12 months, babiesâ ability to distinguish between contrasts important for their native language(s) continues to improve while the ability to hear non-native contrasts declines.
Letâs start at age 5, where you have facility with whatever your native language is. Then, grow up in an environment where you are constantly exposed to different accents and languages and you constantly exercise that facility to distinguish contrast.
Thatâs the study Iâm interested in and thatâs the postulation I made.
Ah, sorry, I think I get what you mean now. This quote from this study would be more relevant to exactly what youâre talking about, right? Specifically the part in bold:
On a more subtle level, the phonetic structure of the language an individual hears during early life shapes both the perception and production of speech. Many of the thousands of human languages and dialects use appreciably different repertoires of speech elements called phonemes to produce spoken words (examples are the phonemes âbaâ and âpaâ in English). Very young human infants can perceive and discriminate between differences in all human speech sounds, and are not innately biased towards the phonemes characteristic of any particular language. However, this universal appreciation does not persist. For example, adult Japanese speakers cannot reliably distinguish between the /r/ and /l/ sounds in English, presumably because this phonemic distinction is not present in Japanese. Nonetheless, 4-month-old Japanese infants can make this discrimination as reliably as 4-month-olds raised in English-speaking households (as indicated by increased suckling frequency or head turning in the presence of a novel stimulus). By 6 months of age, however, infants show preferences for phonemes in their native language over those in foreign languages, and by the end of their first year no longer respond to phonetic elements peculiar to non-native languages. The ability to perceive these phonemic contrasts evidently persists for several more years, as evidenced by the fact that children can learn to speak a second language without accent and with fluent grammar until about age 7 or 8. After this age, however, performance gradually declines no matter what the extent of practice or exposure
I think thereâs some nuance thatâs still retained. I think that even if you donât acquire facility with a second language within that timeframe even being exposed to multiple languages during those years gives you a better ear when distinguishing tonal languages even if you canât replicate it.
I like your points as well, would be interesting to hear from people who grew up in the bilingual households on this topic. I read the notes in the YT and think they put it delicately to make a point here but itâs still delivered as a âshortcomingâ which Iâm not entirely convinced on. Iâm not acclimated enough with MvJ or Refold to know if there is a product behind their message here or not to âcorrectâ this.
Another aspect are that the intangibles beyond intonation such body language and mannerisms which tends to fall under this perfect pitch accent approach to be âconvincingâ, Does anyone find that it starts becoming a caricature impersonation which is sort of disingenuous if too contrived? I think Dogen threads the needle here by actually making comedy skits which is different when he speaks normal. Of course much of this is unavoidable given respecting cultural aspects and mechanics of the language itself (plus we tend to mirror/shadow as learners).