The Pitch Accent Wars

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lichtrausch
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The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby lichtrausch » Wed Jun 02, 2021 11:18 pm

Let's start with a Wikipedia definition: "A pitch-accent language is a language that has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch (linguistic tone) rather than by loudness, as in a stress-accent language."

So there is a long-running debate in the Japanese learner community about whether pitch accent is worth paying special attention to, beyond just trying to imitate how Japanese natives speak. And in recent days it has turned into a (good-humored) clash. It started when George Trombley from Learn Japanese From Zero was so bothered by the advocacy for pitch accent on Youtube that he made this video:



This provoked a scathing response from Matt vs Japan:



Steve Kaufmann also decided to weigh in:



There was also a live-streamed debate between George and Matt about the topic, but that video is almost 4 hours long so I won't bother posting it here.
Last edited by lichtrausch on Mon Jan 10, 2022 6:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:14 am

I don't understand why this issue is polarized.

In depth study of pitch accent is useful depending on your goals. We all have different goals, so the utility of it will vary for each individual person. I think probably everyone benefits from knowing it exists, and what the basic patterns in standard dialect are... Except there are probably some who intend to learn Japanese as a written language only, so I guess there are some people who would receive no benefit from studying it.

There are some who insist that you must have a near-native accent to be an accomplished speaker of a language. It's undeniable that Kaufmann is both an accomplished speaker of Japanese and that his accent is immediately identifiable as foreign. On top of it all, it's even possible for someone like me who is at a lower level than him to catch (apparently fossilized) errors in his Japanese. To me it kind of shows that a lot of the stuff we worry about is just kind of extra. If you want to have a native-like accent, yeah you probably need to do studies of pitch accent. If you don't want that, don't bother. This isn't like insisting on using romaj only or something where you are clearly handicapping your future achievement in every aspect of the language.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Sumisu » Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:39 am

I'm sort of conflicted on this. On the one hand I agree with George that pitch accent is probably just not worth the trouble since you don't really need it to be understood. But I also think Matt is correct that Japanese native speakers notice these mistakes, perhaps unconsciously in many cases. Matt referenced a video where Japanese native speakers highlight or correct each other's pitch accent, which is also worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CGVxpKES3k

I'd love to see a lot more of this type of native content if anyone knows of any other videos. I'm sure that Japanese people are constantly commenting on each other's accents or dialects, but it's probably hard to assemble this into any kind of compilation. And 99% of this kind of discussion would be had "offline" I imagine.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby leosmith » Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:53 am

I've changed my tune on this over the years. Pronunciation is more important to me than it was years ago; I listened to too much advice to the contrary earlier, haha.

I've never studied it, but I regret it somewhat because, even though context will just about always bail me out, I don't like mispronouncing words that are homonyms other than their pitch accents. For example: 橋 (hashi = bridge) vs 箸 (hashi = chopsticks).

So is it worth studying? I agree with devilyoudont - it depends on your goals. The least impact way to learn it is to study it from the beginning. It's going to affect a lot of words, so it won't come cheap. If you do it later on, well, it's pronunciation. Fossilization will definitely make it harder to learn later on. All that being said, if I had to do it all over again, I would learn it. If you don't want to learn it though, you will be in good company. Hardly anyone does.

(edit) I just watched the 3 videos. Very entertaining! After Matt's explanation, I suspect George's and Steve's pronounciations don't sound as attractive as they think, to native speakers. Natives would never admit it, but I personally really take note when a native Chinese speaker applies word-level intonation on our sentence level intonation language, for example.

Per this logic, I need to add myself to the bad-sounding foreign speakers of Japanese list, even though I get compliments about my pronounciation all the time. I'm sure it's bad because I have never gone through a period where I was hyper-sensitive of my tones, watched videos of myself, corrected myself, and carefully imitated native tones in Japanese. I did it in Mandarin and Thai, and it resulted in big improvements and awareness of what I should sound like. The first step was to learn how they work though, which I have never done with Japanese.

Incidentally, after those exercises, tone mistakes in Thai and Mandarin really jump out at me. It may make listening to fellow learners less pleasant for you, so if you don't want that to happen, you may want to reconsider getting too serious about tones.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jun 03, 2021 4:00 am

devilyoudont wrote:If you want to have a native-like accent, yeah you probably need to do studies of pitch accent. If you don't want that, don't bother.

Disagree. Just because you don't need a native-like accent doesn't mean that you should forgo pitch accent. It should be a relatively independent decision that you should take depending on your stance of what parts of the phonology of the target language feel important enough to you to try and pick them up.
I personally think that pitch accent is an integral part of Japanese phonology and I will pay attention to it when I finally get around to studying the language. Pitch accent reflects the fact that every word in Japanese has a certain syllable (actually, mora) where the pitch drops - as simple as that (although it is complicated by the fact that some words change their pitch accent patterns in combination with other words in certain ways; plus many words don't have akusento at all). Which is analogous to how every word in English has a stressed syllable. I figure if I have to remember the stress placement for every English word, I might as well have to remember akusento for every Japanese word.
Last edited by Dragon27 on Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Xenops » Thu Jun 03, 2021 4:12 am

Thanks for bringing these up! It reminds me, I probably should work on this. ;)

One time I said "じゃあ、また" (see you later), and I was being a little creative with the intonation...And the Japanese people were very confused. I then reverted to the pronunciation learned on Pimsleur, and they understood it. This instance was enough to convince me.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:54 am

Sumisu wrote:I'd love to see a lot more of this type of native content if anyone knows of any other videos. I'm sure that Japanese people are constantly commenting on each other's accents or dialects, but it's probably hard to assemble this into any kind of compilation.


I immediately thought of the vtuber Inugami Korone, who speaks with rather peculiar pitch patterns due to a combination of having family from two different regions and very few peer interactions growing up.


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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:33 pm

Just to clarify some things about pitch:
1) supposedly accentless words have a rising accent, they just do not have a down step.
2) it is not particularly like English stress because pitch changes tend to be totally lost in sentence level prosody... This is part of why there are fluent foreigners who are living lives entirely in Japanese who don't understand what pitch accent really is. If you work thru the Dogen course, one of the last lessons is that pitch accent explains the reality that often pitch will only be detectable on a single emphasized word in an entire sentence, if that.

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.

If someone was going to treat you badly for your understandable accent, they are going to find another reason. One time when pronunciation and intonation in Japan came up, a girl said that the foreigner with perfect intonation was "creepy" because of it. Some people just suck.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jun 03, 2021 6:44 pm

devilyoudont wrote:Just to clarify some things about pitch:
1) supposedly accentless words have a rising accent, they just do not have a down step.

It basically goes like this: _----
First mora is low, the rest flats out.
The general pattern (of isolated words) is pretty straightforward: first mora is low, then it goes high, until it reaches the accented mora, after which it drops down. So, for example: _--__ (third mora is accented). If the first mora is accented it starts high immediately and then falls down (from the second mora onwards): -___. If the last mora is accented then it is stays high like in the accentless word, but it falls down afterwards if a particle is attached immediately after the word (so a word with last accented mora is indistinguishable from an accentless word in isolation).

devilyoudont wrote:2) it is not particularly like English stress because pitch changes tend to be totally lost in sentence level prosody...

Does it? It is still there, it is just juxtaposed with the intonation of an entire utterance. So if it is a question with a rising pitch at the end, the last mora will sound a bit higher-pitched, even if it's low in the pitch accent pattern. So the pitch accent should still be recognizable, when your brain (automatically) factors in the sentence intonation. Or, at least, that's what I've come to believe from phonological descriptions.
It should work the same in pure tonal language (like Chinese). The tone of the syllable is affected by (superimposed with) the sentence prosody.

devilyoudont wrote: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.

These are changing times.
Anyways, for me personally, it's not about usefulness, and whether it prevents/hinders understanding or anything like that. For me it's just part of the language. Learning it is a way of getting closer to the essence of the language. And it's a very concrete phenomenon, clearly detectable and easily describable. I don't see any reasons for me not to learn it. Many people in the comments of these videos like to repeat the mantra "language is about communication, not perfection". I understand, of course, the importance of seeing the language as a tool for communication, but I'm not convinced that you should consider it as an ultimate guiding principle (be-all and end-all), and that everything that doesn't directly contribute to communication (of course, pitch accent does contribute to communication, just not to the extent people find worth bothering about) should be discarded. Pitch accent is nice and simple in principle, why not just learn some of it?
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jun 03, 2021 10:38 pm

The actual realization of pitch in Japanese is not binary, and it is not like English or Chinese. Instead, pitch changes are relative, and only a change in direction is considered relevant by dictionaries.

Here is what happens in a nakadaka or odaka word: first mora low, second mora high with a significant change in pitch, third mora slightly higher, fourth mora yet slightly higher... until pitch reaches it's absolute height at the mora before the downstep. What this means is that, when a word is spoken in isolation, there is a noticeable step up after the first mora, and then a general upward trend until the mora before the downstep. Then the downstep happens and this is more extreme than any upward movement that happened previously in the word.

A technical description of Japanese will only note where the initial upward movement starts (and this will be more prominent than all subsequent upwards movement), and where the downstep happens.

I explained the above because I think accentless is easier to understand when you have the above in mind. What happens in an "accentless" word is that there is the initial upstep, but then there is an similar upwards trend which occurs which never reaches the height of the mora before a downstep in a nakadaka or odaka word. If a word is long enough, it levels off completely, because it is never allowed to reach the max height of a nakadaka or odaka word. I consider this to itself be an accent, Japanese people consider this to be "flat pitch."

We could make an argument, I suppose, that Japanese words have a general upward trend until they hit a downstep, which is much more prominent than any of the micro upsteps which preceeded it, including the initial upstep at the start of the word. The problem with this argument is that words are generally not actually spoken in isolation, and full sentences have the exact opposite trend, they go downward except in questions. This doesn't cancel out and result in flat, but means that all non-questions have a gradually falling pitch after the very first time the pitch goes up, which then has further downsteps sprinkled in. The downsteps get less extreme if the speaker has low energy or if the sentence is extremely long or if the person is just droning on and on and on, eventually to a point where downsteps effectively disappear. This just doesn't happen in English. No sentence is long enough, no speaker boring enough, that stress just disappears off of words.

None of this is to say that there's no benefit to studying this. In fact, I have studied this, and think that there are clear benefits to studying it. All learners have different goals, and depending on what your goal is, the above may be extremely relevant for you, or extremely irrelevant. Detailed knowledge isn't enough, noting pitch on flash cards isn't enough. Both Dogen and MattvsJapan advocate extensive shadowing to learn correct intonation. For me personally, I will someday start doing extensive shadowing exercises, but for now the most effective thing I can do with my time is reading, and the Japanese writing system does not reveal pitch.

My basic experience is that absolutely everything we learn about our target languages is in some way, in some context, at some time useful. Unfortunately our time is finite, and we each need to do a cost benefit analysis for every area that we learn. By focusing on shadowing and flashcards, we give up an opportunity somewhere else. We also need to balance making progress vs burn out. For some, there is nothing exhausting about watching a movie over and over until you learn every line of dialog down to its exact intonation. Me, I'm tired just thinking about it.

Dragon27 wrote:I understand, of course, the importance of seeing the language as a tool for communication, but I'm not convinced that you should consider it as an ultimate guiding principle (be-all and end-all), and that everything that doesn't directly contribute to communication (of course, pitch accent does contribute to communication, just not to the extent people find worth bothering about) should be discarded.


This is perhaps the fundamental difference between our positions. I fully believe that every learner has a different "be all and end all" and I see no need to define it for them. For some learners, the be all and end all is being able to communicate accurately and fluently. For some learners, it's watching weird anime. For other learners, it's more about a journey and a process of self improvement. There's another category which is interested in it for employment, and yet another category which is attempting to connect to their family history. I consider no end to be more or less valid than any of the others. Pitch will be a more important factor for some of them than for others.
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