devilyoudont wrote:Just being real, my knowledge about Japanese intonation has come up less frequently than my knowledge about character stroke order. I don't regret learning either thing at all. I just find it somewhat amazing that one is considered totally useless for a learner and a waste of time, and the other the one that came up substantially less when I lived in Japan is considered super important in the community now.
Is someone saying stroke order is unimportant? Or do you mean people are saying one can get away with just knowing the rules rather than having to study it for each character?
I watched a couple more instructional videos on pitch accent, took a little test along with one video and got 100%. I'm not saying I will be able to recall the correct pronunciation for those words in the wild, but my point is it was very easy for someone with a background in tonal languages. But this was for word level, not sentences unfortunately.
Because I speak some tonal languages, I know to copy everything about a sentence when I listen/repeat sentences. I bet others do what I did before I knew better - just make sure to get the consonant and vowel sounds right. Maybe raise the pitch a bit on the end of a question, but that's it.
2 or 3 years ago I loaded a free deck of 6000 Japanese sentence flashcards into anki. The first month or so that I used it, I noticed that my pronunciation (intonation I think) did not match theirs. I thought that was really strange, since I knew my pronunciation was really good (natives told me so!). After a month, I finally admitted to myself that I was making pronunciation mistakes, so I started truly copying their pronunciation exactly. So I've probably already been working on my pitch accent without realizing it. I clearly need to be more active about it though, because it's still not obvious what I need to do in the wild.