The Pitch Accent Wars

General discussion about learning languages
sirgregory
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby sirgregory » Thu Jun 17, 2021 6:45 am

The old HTLAL language profile seems kind of amusing in light of this discussion.

Japanese pronunciation is dead easy, all the sounds are perfectly natural for the native English speaker, the only new sound is the Japanese R which is nothing like an English R and involves tapping your tongue just behind your teeth, similar to the English L.


http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/japanese/index.html
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Xenops » Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:59 pm

I was browsing the Edx.org course collection, and found a course on Japanese pronunciation and accent: Appropriate pronunciation, accent and intonation to improve your communicative Japanese

It's free if you do it in a five-week period.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby księżycowy » Sun Jun 20, 2021 6:16 pm

Xenops wrote:I was browsing the Edx.org course collection, and found a course on Japanese pronunciation and accent: Appropriate pronunciation, accent and intonation to improve your communicative Japanese

It's free if you do it in a five-week period.

What do I have to lose? I'll give it a shot, thanks!
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby ryanheise » Sun Jun 27, 2021 5:54 am

During last year's annual pitch accent war, Khatz (i.e. from AJATT) also returned to the Internet briefly with a series of short videos sharing his opinion:

VIDEO 1: 【AJATT: Youtube版】Khatzumoto answers about Japanese PITCH accent?
VIDEO 2: 【YT AJATT】Japanese Pitch accent question Part 2 ー日本語のアクセントについて
VIDEO 3: Khatzumoto, Humble One, Prince of Japanese, He Who Braggeth Not, Gives the Last Word on Pitch Accent

Khatz is a strange mix of random tangents, stream of consciousness, and in a contradictory way, sometimes getting to the point rather quickly. It's kind of weird hearing his randomness now in spoken audio format :)

The thing about the pitch accent debate, though, is that different approaches may suit different people. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy imitating movie music themes and TV ad jingles on the piano, and I became quite good at it. But then of course there also exist people who are tone deaf, and depending on their starting point it could take a lot of training to become good at such a skill. I think Khatz probably became good at imitating because he enjoyed doing it(*), just like Richard Simcott stated that he really enjoyed playing a game where he would try to impersonate the accent of a native speaker of some language B who was speaking a foreign language C. So we'd have an Englishman, for fun, trying to speak French with a German accent. I do think this sort of fun activity is a great way to develop good observation and imitation skills, but different people may also enjoy different things.

(*) Also, Khatz was already bilingual before learning Japanese, and his other language is a tonal language.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby leosmith » Mon Jun 28, 2021 2:52 am

ryanheise wrote:During last year's annual pitch accent war, Khatz (i.e. from AJATT) also returned to the Internet briefly with a series of short videos sharing his opinion

I started to listen to the 3rd one, but couldn't make myself get through the whole thing (I think it's an acquired taste), so please correct me if I'm wrong, but his opinion is that you should learn it "naturally", i.e., listening and repeating. Well, that is how George and Steve learned, so I doubt that works well without special attention being payed to pitch accent. If he says as much in his videos, my bad for not listening to them.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Querneus » Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:09 am

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