The Pitch Accent Wars

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

Postby leosmith » Fri Jun 04, 2021 12:26 am

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.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Sumisu » Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:08 am

vonPeterhof wrote: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.


Thanks for sharing these. It makes me wonder though, how does katakana fit into this discussion? I often hear native speakers struggling with katakana, although I'm not sure how often it's for pitch accent reasons specifically. There does seem to be a "standard" pitch accent for katakana words though. One word it took me a while to decipher was ボランティア which rises on the second syllable and sounds nothing at all like "volunteer." But every speaker I've ever heard pronounces it the exact same way. :?
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby devilyoudont » Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:58 am

leosmith wrote: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?


It's pretty trendy these days to only learn to recognize kanji, not to write them. There are plenty of people who can't write kanji at all, but they are still clearly in an advanced category in the language.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Saim » Fri Jun 04, 2021 4:17 am

Personally I don't see any reason to de-emphasise pitch accent any more than other aspect of pronunciation. On its own it may not hamper communication much, but phonology is a holistic system and each aspect of it adds up to create comprehensibility. You can also "get away with" not learning sounds like ɸ or ɲ, but if you're going to put any effort into your accent at all there's no sense in avoiding learning them. I think you're going to end up with a better result if you try to imitate the whole system rather than just parts of it, even if the final result still falls off the mark. If you aim for the bullseye, you still might not hit it, but if you go out of your way to not even aim for the bullseye, you might miss the board entirely.

As for my own experience: pitch accent is much less distinctive in Serbian than in Japanese (far fewer minimal pairs; also non-pitch-accent Zagreb speech is much more prestigious and widespread in media than any of the non-pitch-accent varieties of Japanese), and yet I wish I'd looked at it sooner, simply because the task of reassigning pitch to thousands of words you already know takes quite a while.

Another important issue that in my mind often gets conflated is the distinction between whether or not you want to learn it and whether or not it's worth engaging in explicit study specifically. If you want to learn it, and your mother tongue doesn't have pitch accent or tone, you're almost definitely going to need to study it. If you don't care about learning it, that's fine, but you almost definitely won't pick it up just through exposure.

In simpler terms, I'd say we need to ask different questions depending on the needs or goals of learners: 1) do we care about pronunciation at all? and 2) assuming we do care about pronunciation, should we put conscious effort into acquiring pitch accent?
Last edited by Saim on Sat Jun 05, 2021 2:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby devilyoudont » Fri Jun 04, 2021 11:04 am

Saim wrote:In simpler terms, I'd say we need to ask different questions depending on the needs or goals of learners: 1) do we care about pronunciation at all? and 2) assuming we do care about pronunciation, should we put conscious effort into acquiring pitch accent?


I think these are good questions for learners to determine a course for their own goals, but I also want to introduce another idea for people to consider: diminishing returns. It's widely understood in the community, that we eventually hit diminishing returns in our kanji study. Each additional Kanji after a point starts providing less utility than the Kanji before it, eventually providing less utility than the effort to learn it. Where we draw the line depends on our goals, nevertheless most of us aren't going to set our goals at passing the top tier of the kanken even tho in some context (eg historical study using primary documents) all 6000+ have a use. I believe there is an eventual point of diminishing returns on accent... It's possible for us to pursue it in the way that actors and newscasters do. There is a use for doing that for some learners. Nearly all (but not 100%) of learners benefit from focus on it. Most of us will hit a point of diminishing returns before acquiring a near-native status, if the general experience of all learners since time immemorial is any indication.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Dragon27 » Fri Jun 04, 2021 11:39 am

This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable (commonsensical, even) position. Acquiring a perfect native-like accent is quite an endeavour that not many people are ready to undertake (many people think they are, but, understandably, eventually change their mind), but putting some amount of work into improving your accent (both in the general and in the specific sense of 'pitch-accent' we're talking about in this thread) is still worthwhile and rewarding. What I find unfair is that many people (again, from the comment sections of the videos that sparked this whole discussion) feel the unnecessity of pitch accent by dismissing it as something that only the perfectionists should worry about, that it should be the last priority and only pursued after you've become a very advanced user of the language, etc. In short, they put it beyond that point of diminishing returns as a whole. You shouldn't think about pitch accent this way. You can work at it at any level, starting from the basics, which are actually quite simple, and continue (later on) all the way into the minute details up until the point where you think it has become more of a trouble than gain.
Matt was pointing it out as well in his videos (and the subsequent live discussion with George).
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby księżycowy » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:28 pm

Part of the whole thing that gets me is, as a self-learner, not too many resources at a beginner level actually cover pitch accent. I have copies of both Minna no Nihongo (the course I'm using) and Genki, both are very popular beginning textbooks. Neither of them really covers pitch accent. MnN does give acknowledgement of pitch accent for a page or two, but it doesn't keep at it throughout the lessons.

How does one learn it under those circumstances? I have found OJAD, but it appears as though not all of the vocabulary is covered. I'm too low level to make much use of the Japanese notes in the pronunciation book I recently bought from 3A (and even then, I'm not sure how much detail it gives on this part of pronunciation). Any suggestions?
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Querneus » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:32 pm

If I made a YouTube video saying that stress in Spanish is not necessary to be understood (native speakers often write Spanish with no acute accents, for example), and that therefore learners don't necessarily need to bother with it...

...how do you guys think it would be taken?

The problem seems about as bad as not learning pitch accent in Japanese... You can be perfectly understood while getting stress very wrong, but I just don't see why anyone wouldn't learn it.

And some of you probably remember my rant that Japanese textbook makers for a Chinese audience generally do include pitch accent from lesson 1, so there also seems to be a subtext of textbook makers thinking English-speaking learners are too incompetent for Japanese pitch accent... E.g. Samuel Martin's textbook mentions pitch accent in the introduction to his textbook, but then doesn't teach it.
Last edited by Querneus on Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby golyplot » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:35 pm

księżycowy wrote:Part of the whole thing that gets me is, as a self-learner, not too many resources at a beginner level actually cover pitch accent. I have copies of both Minna no Nihongo (the course I'm using) and Genki, both are very popular beginning textbooks. Neither of them really covers pitch accent. MnN does give acknowledgement of pitch accent for a page or two, but it doesn't keep at it throughout the lessons.

How does one learn it under those circumstances? I have found OJAD, but it appears as though not all of the vocabulary is covered. I'm too low level to make much use of the Japanese notes in the pronunciation book I recently bought from 3A (and even then, I'm not sure how much detail it gives on this part of pronunciation). Any suggestions?


I heard that Chinese textbooks for Japanese learners tend to cover pitch accent early on since it's easy for Chinese speakers coming from a tonal language.
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Re: The Pitch Accent Wars

Postby Querneus » Fri Jun 04, 2021 3:36 pm

golyplot wrote:I heard that Chinese textbooks for Japanese learners tend to cover pitch accent early on since it's easy for Chinese speakers coming from a tonal language.

Japanese pitch accent simply falls on a mora though. It's really not any worse than Spanish stress... I think it has to do with a bad tradition that developed, probably because pitch accent isn't normally indicated in writing.

księżycowy wrote:How does one learn it under those circumstances? I have found OJAD, but it appears as though not all of the vocabulary is covered. I'm too low level to make much use of the Japanese notes in the pronunciation book I recently bought from 3A (and even then, I'm not sure how much detail it gives on this part of pronunciation). Any suggestions?

Yeah, the OJAD project was explicitly set out to mainly cover verb inflections, not the bulk of nouns. My girlfriend (who is a long-time student of Japanese; I'm not) likes to rely on a physical pitch accent dictionary for nouns, of which there's a fair few in the market. For a lot of proper names and recent English borrowings you just have to pay attention though. No dictionary will tell you the pitch accent of Pokemon names...
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