Hello everyone! Thanks again for all your responses. One of my main problems with pitch accent was that I didn't even know where to start, so your input was very useful. Here's a little update on how my pitch accent studies are going. Long story short: it's not as hard as I first thought but it takes a lot of time to sink in.
Personally I found pitch accent frustrating to study at first, because it's not something you can learn to reproduce or even learn to perceive in one study session, and in fact you're not likely to notice any improvements at all in a single session; in that sense it seems like a sort of microcosm of language acquisition in general. You have to gradually soak it up over many months of paying attention to it, or at least that's been my experience. I've come to the point in my pitch accent perception where I honestly can't unhear it and can often tell when I'm pronouncing the wrong pitch in a word, and it's kind of absurd to me that I at some point wasn't able to perceive it. I guess part of the trick to it is that the two accents are not single values on a discrete scale, but two contrasted ranges of values on a continuous scale, so you have to train yourself to reliably categorise speech into that range rather than noticing single discrete tones on a sort of musical scale. This is probably obvious to anyone who's dealt with tones and phonemic pitch before, but starting out I definitely felt like I was trying to catch single tones on a discrete scale rather than retune my ear to hear two ranges on a scale, which made the experience more frustrating than it needed to be.
Now, for Serbo-Croatian specifically, at least in my experience one of the main breakthroughs was being able to notice the
falling accent specifically. I think I had acquired the rising accent as the default form of BSCM intonation and had only acquired the falling accent in certain contexts like vocatives and imperatives, analysing pitch as pragmatic rather than phonemic in nature (and of course I did, I'm an English speaker and that's what we use pitch for). Thus I think a good approach to start with could be to actively train your ear for the falling accent specifically, rather than accurately trying to notice
all of the accents in a given sentence.
One good thing is that I already knew where the stress falls in the negated present forms of most verbs, which gives away the pitch:
prȁtim,
nè pratim (falling accent, the negation takes the accent and makes it rising) and
prìja,
ne prìja (rising accent, the accent stays on the conjugated verb). This made dealing with verbs a bit more straightforward.
Another thing I've observed (maybe I'm wrong) is that when a word takes on sentence-level stress, i.e. the word itself is emphasised, the phonemic pitch is generally more obvious. So when you're talking to BCSM natives it can be good to keep your ears peeled for those moments when they're emphasising individual words. In dubbed cartoons for children they also emphasise the intonation quite a lot so it doesn't make you go crazy it might be useful to listen to something like that (I found clips from Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh on YouTube, for example), it helped me a lot in the early-to-middle stages of training perception.
Now that my perception of pitch is fairly good, my work still isn't done, because you need to assign pitch to a very large amount of lexical items. What I'm going to be doing is:
1. Keep paying attention to pitch when listening to Serbian, occasionally looking things up in the dictionary to test my perception.
2. Get my mum to record a short paragraph from a book I liked 2-4 times a month and note down the pitch, then correct it based on the dictionary. Then listen to the recording several times.
3. Make Anki cards with recordings out of TV shows and YouTube videos, but only out of new words. In most media I don't come across that many new words any more so it's not that much effort, especially since Serbian is my main focus at the moment, and having recordings in my deck that I hear again and again helps quite a lot I think.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like shadowing or chorusing, I like repetitive listening without trying to repeat what they say and then doing self-talk when it comes to me spontaneously. You can't really hear yourself while listening to input so I find it kind of pointless and frustrating. Maybe if I recorded myself while shadowing it would work.
Daniel N. wrote:I don't think anyone in Serbia stresses Jugoslavija on o.
I've been paying a lot of attention to stress and pitch so I've noticed this pronunciation now a number of times. I don't think I've ever heard anyone in real life (other than my grandmother) stress Jugoslavija that way, but it's fairly common on TV. Here the President of Serbia pronounces it this way:
https://youtu.be/3V_8FyTPbqs?t=390, and here the sociologist Jovo Bakić does as well:
https://youtu.be/hJtQEJsm2FY?t=4736. It's an
affected pronunciation, but it seems it's not uncommon among people involved in the media, politics or education.