Please don't send @theimmersionguy any negativity-almost us TH-camrs are guilty of leaning too hard into thumbnails and titles for views, myself included, and he's addressed these points in the top comment. He brings up a lot of great points in this video, and I would encourage everyone to watch any follow-up he makes on this topic, as I'm sure he'll make good arguments against my blind spots on this topic, the same way that he did here. 皆さん冷静に
I do think he was trying to simplify the way people learn Japanese by saying more or less, don't make it too complicated. That's honorable. In the same way some people say don't worry about Kanji early on or ... fill in the blank. It's an effort to lower barriers. Correct or not aside, I don't think he was trying to put people on the wrong path. That said, it is great to hear Dogen's response.
I was once trying to tell a Japanese person I like salmon and she thought I meant alcoholic beverages so that alone tells me Dōgen might be onto something
"Despite my fluent Japanese, Japanese ppl often respond in English or prefer to speak with less fluent Asians": There're comedy videos on TH-cam about this. They don't know Eng-speakers’ Japanese accent is intense, sounding as if words are broken into 3 parts. This is more pronounced than Asian speakers. Pitch accent matters a lot.
Native speakers don't just randomly fluctuate between different regional accents - they either have a consistently mixed accent, or they have acquired multiple accents that they use in different scenarios. But no native speaker will pronounce e.g. 日本語 with two different pitch patters in two consecutive sentences, whereas non native speakers who don't hear pitch will do this all the time. It's this sort of inconsistency that's specific to learners which results in being hard to understand.
That sounds like what the guy in the video (not Dogen) was saying. People won't have an accent that is perfectly consistent with the place they move to even if they're native Japanese, so it's makes no sense to think that a foreigner should necessarily have a perfect accent. I think the main takeaway of the video is that students of Japanese shouldn't be afraid to speak Japanese just because they haven't perfected pitch accent. Over time as they become more exposed to the Japanese of the region they move to, the more they'll adapt to it naturally. It's not something to be studied from afar for years on end, but acquired naturally through repeated exposure. It deliberately gives learners a pass to give themselves time to learn pitch accent without feeling guilty that they haven't perfected their accent. It's the same approach that I think English teachers would have for Japanese people learning English. Most Japanese people won't learn how to speak English like native English speakers from taking lessons in Japan, no matter how much effort they put into it. They can only ever acquire a natural accent by being exposed to it over an extended period of time.
Half an hour into Dogen‘s response and I’m ready to sign up for his Patreon pitch accent thing - not necessarily to learn pitch accent in itself but especially because I LOVE learning and the degree of differentiation, sensory & intellectual granularity with which he approaches and presents this (and other) topics. Just so stimulating to my brain and ears, and it puts me in touch with “Japan” and its lovely people. Ready to sign up with me? Anyway, let’s keep learning languages fun. In recent years, information is around in exponential abundance, and almost everything has become hyper-teachable. Still we have to do the work, in any way that works. No shortcut there ;)
Thank you for the kind words Saraha! Really appreciate it. I took a lot of time creating the series and am proud with how it turned out, so that means a lot. Best of luck with your Japanese studies, pitch-accent and otherwise! 頑張ってね！
I learned Japanese for 10 years before studying pitch accent. It undoubtedly helped my pronunciation and perception of Japanese. After studying pitch accent I began getting compliments from natives about intonation and been told "you don't have an American accent." Before studying pitch accent, I didn't really get those.
I’ve had the same experience, I would imagine every other learner who’s seriously studied it has as well. The improvements to your speaking are tangible and the feedback is surprisingly direct, ie people telling you there’s no ‘American’ (or whatever you’re from) accent where before they said nothing of the sort
Japanese people talk/joke/mock/ each other's "intonation" of certain words all the time. You can see this often on their variety shows on tv. They just misused the word "intonation" for "pitch". So pitch is very much a part of Japanese language, just no one puts into the basic textbooks. It's the same with the English language's requirement for constantly vibrating your vocal cords. Every native speaker does it, but no one puts into our textbooks. So us Asians end up speak English in a very "choppy" manner, because in our language, vocal cords stop vibrating between words or sounds.
well obviously... when you learn and practice pronounciation / accent you get the accent, and when you don't practice you don't get the accent of the language but keep your own It's like if you say "I practiced maths and I got better in math!! I'm so surprised, even my math teacher said I'm good at math!!
@@_capu the distinction here is, studying pitch accent specifically rather than trying to pick it up by osmosis. Judging by the premise of the vid you are commenting on, the efficacy of pitch accent study isn’t obvious to everyone, which is why I chimed in…
Accents are important in English, but if Japanese is spoken with a strong accent, it's hard to understand as well. When people from English-speaking countries say "Tokyo," it basically sounds like "patent."
One difference with English is since it's an international language people are much more used to hearing non-native speakers of English and dealing with weird accents than Japanese speakers are.
Also the fact that English just has so many technically native accents. When people hear my accent in English they usually assume I’m a “native speaker from somewhere else”. The Americans guess that I’m Canadian, Canadians think I’ve spent some time in Britain and so on forth. Now yes Japanese also has dialects but it’s still one geographically small country, there will be less options for “native from somewhere else”. In English everyone truly has an accent, there is always a “native from somewhere else” option where as in Japanese it’s basically either that you sound Japanese or you don’t
Haven’t heard all 3h yet, but love this so far! You respectfully present your points. Loved the point around 35:35, that Jpn native speakers recognize improved fluency, which to me (when I lived in Japan) meant hearing “Nihongo jōzu” less and less! Great video Dogen!!!
It's a very good point to be honest. It's like natives subconsciously go from "This person is a learner, it's normal for them to make mistakes, I'll just whitenoise them" to "Wait no, this person is *good* at Japanese, it makes no sense for them to make this mistake, raise the alarms". Even as a language teacher, there's nuanced mistakes that you wouldn't correct in, say, an A2 course, but you would in a C1 course, because the bar isn't set at the same height in each case.
20 yr resident of Japan, 34 yrs studying Japanese, and I just discovered the pitch accent about a year or 2 ago. Before that, I was baffled that some Japanese didn't understand me. Since I started trying to improve my pitch accent, this happens less often. Learn pitch accent early. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Why not give yourself every advantage by learning pitch accent?
For the average person it's a scam, you've lived and worked there for 20 years, the average person just starting out or who will only ever go to Japan on holiday it's a waste of time.
41:59 Teaching someone anything, especially a subtle repeating pattern like pitch accent, that they were ignorant of unlocks an enhanced awareness of it. What was ignored as background noise suddenly becomes prominent. It's kind of like when someone you know gets a new car, you start to notice that model everywhere. Learning pitch accent earlier will help your brain to look out for it and encode it into memory subconsciously, especially when you're learning new words. Earlier awareness also means less unlearning of incorrect pitch. Telling someone to ignore pitch accent is just going to extend that unlearning period. That doesn't mean one should overwhelm or obsess over pitch accent.
Just to speak to your point at 36:52 about how you won't get corrected until your PA is already getting better: I'm in a primarily JP-EN language exchange Discord, and I've gotten to know dozens of Japanese people there who're interested in learning English. We have a practice in the server that you can add an emote to your name to show that you want people to correct your language mistakes. On paper, this sounds like it would lead to a lot of back and forth where people are consistently correcting each other - and corrections do happen. But largely, even when users with this emote make mistakes, they don't get corrected, and I've chalked that up to two reasons. 1. Basically what you say - even if someone is inviting you to correct them, if they're making a wide variety of mistakes, constantly (more than once per sentence), you lose the motivation to correct them. It's counterproductive to correct them every single time, because that would take too long, and they wouldn't be able to absorb all of it. But more importantly... 2. You're just trying to talk to them - you're not their teacher, you're their friend. Correcting them breaks the flow of a conversation that you're trying to have, and breaking that flow is fine every now and then, but if you correct someone's mistakes every time they open their mouth, you won't actually be able to hold the conversation you're trying to have to begin with. In the end, the people who I find myself correcting the most are the friends who I feel have the BEST English, because they make mistakes the least often, and they're the easiest to explain to, since they have the highest capacity to comprehend what I'm trying to teach them.
I was a bit wary checking out this video, because your comedic persona is a bit arrogant, so I thought it might be something you based on a real trait, but you quickly put my worries to rest by being fair, humble and open in. Thank you for your video. I glad I watched it
As a linguistic nerd, I'm not obsessed with "sounding native" but I still study pitch accent because I think it's a very interesting feature of Japanese. Knowing pitch accent not only makes your Japanese more understandable but also makes Japanese more understandable to you. It's not about vanity, it's about comprehension.
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I just got done watching a segment of this video on stream (it seemed apposite because I'd been meaning to look at it and a beginning Japanese learner in my chat asked what the deal with pitch accent was), and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how you approach this. My association with the Japanese language goes back to the late 80s, and I had already been working for roughly 20 years as a translator and occasional interpreter in Japanese, and getting mistaken (mostly) on the phone for a native speaker before I'd even heard of the concept of pitch accent. My awareness of it was limited to noticing differences before I assumed a word I had only seen in writing was pronounced and how I heard people actually pronouncing it (one early example was -gaoka place names); I overwhelmingly picked it up by hearing the emphasis of certain syllables without actually having a name for the thing I was hearing. I'd basically never heard any theory on the phonology of the language until watching your videos, from which I've learnt quite a lot. It seems to me that what is taken as an 'obsession' with pitch accent is actually just a neglected aspect of Japanese pronunciation actually getting its due for the first time; naturally, there is a massive spike in the attention paid to something that previously had barely been acknowledged. My main problem with The Immersion Guy's take is that a lot of vague terms end up doing a lot of work. What is 'sounding good', for example? Surely, that's an extremely subjective standard. If someone's idea of 'sounding good' does not include reliably accurate pitch accent (or other syllable emphasis patterns depending on language), then obviously it is by definition possible to 'sound good' without acquiring them. That does not, however, mean that acquiring them in one way or another (my recommendation in this case is a combination of conscious awareness of pitch accent and what it sounds like with just listening to people and modelling one's speech on them) is pointless.
A drive-by comment by a japanese-english person. Intonation is the first thing you immediately notice if done poorly (assuming decent vocab/grammar). For example, in western films, you can almost immediately tell who is non-native/not fluent in japanese by how they speak, not what they say.
The same thing is true for English speakers hearing Japanese people speak English. That doesn't mean that Japanese people should spend their time focusing on learning any particular accent. That's something that can only be acquired through consistent exposure to a particular accent. And even then, there will almost always be noticeable indicators that they're not a native English speaker. And that's okay. It doesn't particularly matter to most people.
Having a broken dialect due to moving is actually a good point. When I lived in North Carolina, I lived in Tarboro. Outsiders might pronounce the town's name as "Tar-boh-roh," but people there pronounce it as "Tah-bruh." I often went to another town called Greenville. (We often joked that this town is so small, you'll blink and drive right past it.) Some might pronounce "green-veel," but we pronounced it as "green-vuhl." Meanwhile, on the other side of North Carolina, there's a lighthouse called "Bodie Island." I and everyone I knew, including my parents, say "Boh-dee," but people from there call it "Bah-tee." When I moved to New Jersey, I could not understand anyone. They talked way faster and used different terms to describe things. (Someone from North Carolina might say, "crank up the car, cut that light on, cut out the light," while someone from New Jersey might say, "start the car, turn on the light, turn off the light." I also got a lot of place names wrong. Raritan is "Ray-rih-tuhn," not "Rah-rih-tuhn." Hoboken is "HO-bo-ken," not "ho-BO-ken." Newark is "Nohrk," not "New-ark." Hamilton is "HA-milton," not "ha-MIL-ton." Trenton is "Tren'n," not "Tren-ton." McDonald's is "mehk-donalds," not "maek-donalds." Absecon Lighthouse is "AB-secon," in not "abSEcon." Secaucus is "seh-KAH-kuhs," not "SAE-kah-suhs." I still have to listen very carefully when speaking with someone from New Jersey. When I moved to Pennsylvania, I often got corrected on street names. Schoenersville Rd is "Shay-nerz-veel" and not "Skoh-nerz-veel." Interestingly, video games also shaped my dialect. For years, I pronounced "schedule" as "SHEH-ju-ahl" rather than the American way to pronounce it, "SKEH-ju-ahl," because I played a train simulator from Australia.
@@n8pls543 that's exactly where it comes from yeah. A lot of German taken into English this way, the umlauted vowel unrounds. Same if it's from Pa Dutch, which likewise unrounds front rounded vowels. What's left is something like an eh or ay sound Pronouncing ö as 'er' is more of a American accent in German type thing, which is more likely to pop up in individual accents rather than place names which tend to be either more thoroughly anglicized or dialectal in origin
I've been learning JPN for 6 years now, I was always told my accent was really good, and I've always wondered why. I only discovered PA ~1.5 years ago. After learning about it and testing myself I found out I was already pretty accurate, and I think I know why. I am a musican and have played by ear for many years, basically my ears are already trained at hearing pitch differences, and I subconciously learned the right pitch in JPN from the beginning. Also combined with the fact that I learned mainly from listening. I've spent the last 6 months focusing on ironing out my wrong pitch accent mistakes, and I'm still not perfect, but my JPN friends said wow your Japanese has gotten much more clear! PA is not neccesary if you just want to get by, but for those of us who actually want to get really good at the language it has a huge impact on your pronunciation.
Fascinating stuff. Not too crazy about pitch accent myself but I can tell you're a very intelligent guy. I quite like your comedy but I wish I saw more of your commentary on Japanese learning like this!
Thank you for answering a lot of questions I had about the value of learning pitch accent and reasonably responding to those with somewhat contrary views.
Thanks Dogen 🙏 …for skillfully sharing your linguistic understanding… but I think even more for meeting this critique with so much clarity and focus, inspite of the many snide notes in said critique.
why do english-speaking people on yt argue so much over this? It is a feature of the languge. If you want to speak it well you should pay attention to it, preferably as early as possible. End of the story.
Its also a part of the language saying the correct conjugation for example but i dont care if foreigners or immigrants saying them wrong. If i understood them, why should i point them out for their mistakes when literally every non native speakers make them on regular basis?
The argument is, that you might not need to learn it deliberately, because you acquire it with replicating a lot of input. So it's the argument over methodology, prioritisation and efficiency. As Dogen mentioned you can arrive at the same place with different paths, but you can do this once per language, so it's hard to compare with your own experience
Japanese is already very hard and people are obsessed with the idea of learning it fast for some reason. A lot of people also claim that you should only study kanji from vocabulary (which disregards radicals and a lot of things that make your life easier), they say that writing and learning individual kanji and their readings is a waste of time etc. As with everything there is some truth in there, but is not as black and white as people made it out to be. At the end of the day the more pitch you know and the better your kanji knowledge is the better you're at Japanese.
"There are other factors, things like your actual pronunciation". THIS. This is what also tells me that they do not understand Japanese phonology AT ALL. Pitch IS part of the pronunciation. Again, it's not a decisive feature in English, but it is in Japanese. It's as important as long-short vowel distinction, but native speakers might not consciously value it as much because it doesn't have an equivalent in writing. It doesn't mean that they don't notice and it doesn't mean that it can't alter their perception of your Japanese. It makes me wonder if this person's pitch accent is *so bad* that natives don't even bother bringing it up, as you mentioned in your example earlier.
I would actually wager it's quite good if he studied pitch accent in the past and also did a mostly immersion based approach! I think his frustrations come more from the perceived 'hype' surrounding pitch accent, if that makes sense. Appreciate the comment!
As a native speaker of Swedish, that has pitch accent, getting the prosody, i.e. the pitch accent, is MORE important than making the correct sounds of the different vowels and consonants. The rhythm of the words are essential to native speakers when we parse what someone is saying. As for Japanese, the basic vowels and consonants are fairly easy (since god did not bless them with 14 different vowel sounds), so why would someone focus on that?
@@XGD5layer Haha, I do feel somewhat insulted, but, that might be true. We also use singular sounds to mean stuff like "aaa" and "mmm" and enjoy passive constructions :).
I think you and Yuda's point at the 1:02:00 mark about Kyoto is *similar* to some things in English, too. For example, if I were to say "I need to go out and buy tiiiiiires..." it would sound like I'm beginning to list out a set of items I need to buy, but if I'm just saying tires in that different way, I could throw the listener off if they were expecting a list and I really just meant, "I need to go out and buy tires." I think a good argument for pitch accent is simply asking how well do you want to communicate and be understood by others, because it doesn't just make you sound "more native" (with the goal of having your ego stroked), but rather how much effort do you wish to put forward to help other Japanese in understanding you and feeling comfortable listening to you. It's making it easier for people to converse with you, i.e. for their benefit.
I think this is an excellent analogy to pitch accent for us English speakers. It definitely can throw the listener off … which sucks when you work hard to have grammar and vocab locked down but still get confused Japanese faces
I'm reminded a bit of a lecture I heard through the JET Program. The speaker was questioning what we define as "native English" giving examples of the differences between the US, England, and India, all of which have English is taught as the official language, but have a great variety of accents, regional dialects, and even vocabulary (e.g. "pants" vs "trousers"). The sort of thesis of the lecture was that "native speaker" is a poor metric to use in education, and that we should encourage variety over the "blonde hair blue eyed foreigners" in the textbooks. I think this perspective makes a lot of sense and is probably close to where immersionguy is coming from. On the flip side, and to Dogen's point, people raised in the same environments (or who start in an environment and then move to a new one) all tend to speak in a similar way and have consistent dialects within their native language, which we could call standard or correct. We could say that Americans who learn Japanese have a consistent and similar "dialect" in Japanese, or that they make similar "mistakes" like over-emphasizing words or using the wrong pitch. I think the key point of contention here is: where is the line between "accent" and "error" when it comes to pronunciation? And I don't know if that question has an objective answer.
As a Texan, what you likely heard was the Southern accent, but among just us, most of us have a more specific texas accent, and its likely that you didn't hear it specifically because you spoke with the west coast accent, which is how we speak in school, even in texas. A few years ago, my wife at the time (she was Hawaiian) noticed when i finally started speaking in my texas accent at home, and she she said it felt like i was finally letting my guard down. Love your content, specifically the knowledgeable humility you approach everything with
Something else that these people probably don't know is that there is a lot of correspondance among the different Japanese accents. What I mean is that it is often possible to predict where the accent will fall in the Kansai accent if you know where it falls in the Tokyo one. Some Japanese are also used to hearing other regional accents, of course. So, to say that "if you have the wrong accent but everything else is great, you'll just sound like you're from another region" is plainly wrong. When foreigners have the wrong pitch, it's all over the place, it doesn't follow a "logic" like it would in Kansai-ben and so on.
I’ve been learning Japanese for 10 years and understanding Pitch Accent helps me to better differentiate between the Tokyo accent and Osaka accent. Rather than mixing the two, my goal is to separate the two clearly so I am conscious of when I’m speaking in Tokyo accent or Osaka accent, and hope to add on other accent later on in my Japanese learning journey. This is also a goal for my Chinese so I can either use standard mandarin or dialect influenced accents.
Regardless of what "The Immersion Guy" was actually trying to say, I found his tone and delivery off-putting and inflammatory. He claims he didn't mean to instigate, yet denigrates "phonetics nerds" and "pitch propagandists" at length, as if his approach was the one true way to do things. Even the title of his video is hyperbole and clickbait; can he really claim pitch accent is "useless?" The irony is that "The Immersion Guy" is the one acting like a propagandist (in a ploy to get more subscribers), no one else. I can't imagine how people who are interested about studying phonetics and pitch accent, much less those who teach it and have studied it intensively, wouldn't be offended by his harsh tone. He also seems to like the word "naughty" for some strange reason.
As a Japanese, I’m glad to see Japanese learners discuss this kind of deep topic. Until I found Dogenさん, I even didn’t know the word, “pitch accent”, which is I assume difficult for Japanese learners to acquire.
I think the idea that foreigners mistakes would ever sound like a native's mix of dialects is kind of absurd. As for tonal patterns, they are often different, but they are consistent. A second language speaker who do not understand them will not sound like a native mixing dialect, but like a foreign accent. Swedish has pitch accent, and the pitches are different in different regions - but they're almost always consistent over the patterns. So, if you make a word dialectal, you must still use the same pattern but different accent on the syllables. This is the same as different dialectal variations, and this is the reason we very quickly can adapt and understand speakers from other places, because we quickly adapt to the correct patterns. If the patterns are wrong, it is going to be meh. Also, I am not sure for Japan, but in Sweden, most people speaking Swedish have no idea we have a pitch accent. Unless given a minimal pair, the concept is entirely foreign to most native speakers. It is not marked in our writing, and it is not taught in school. Thus, a lot of people would be able to say they do not care for the accent. However, I have never heard a Swedish speaker make an error when it comes to pitch accent in a grammatical form or a word they know. It's notoriously hard to sound native like in Swedish as well, and this is because the accents are hard unless you have them in your own language.
Some of my family moved to Österbotten where the Swedish dialects have lost the pitch accent. It's not like I can't understand the locals when I visit, but there's a certain friction to comprehension that requires that bit more extra effort. Though as you point out, since they're internally consistent within their accent, it is still somewhat different from second language speakers.
@@Silk_WD even in finland swedish dialects pitch accent is a thing, there is just no distinction between accent one and two like in most mainland Sweden dialects, or Norwegian ones for that matter
Just as another data point against "immersion will handle everything": I know someone who lived here in Japan for 30+ years, very eloquent and well spoken, even does MCing for local events. His pitch accent is very noticeably foreign. Immersion isn't a cure-all, and you do need to put some work into it.
People think "English has prosody and it's not a big deal, so Japanese must work the same way". That's just wrong. English obviously has pitch, but it's not a phonological difference. It cannot alter the meaning of words. It is a separate phonemic difference in Japanese, so it can create confusion and make natives misunderstand words, just like L and R in English.
Why would you avoid output for the first years of study? Besides one studious PhD in a bar in Thailand, is there any evidence that this has benefits? What benefits?
I’m also learning Albanian because it’s my husband’s native language. They have a few letters like “l” and “ll” that I can’t really hear the difference (to me it just sounds elongated but I still get it wrong). It annoys the hell out of my husband when I get it wrong because to him it’s obvious! So I can empathize with Japanese speakers not hearing the “l”/“r” difference. I can definitely hear the difference in pitch accent, though, and to me that’s something I value getting right.
You never know how intelligible do you sound to a native speaker! My example comes from Swedish, which is a Germanic language, but with a pitch accent. From my experience of learning the language, it was extremely frustrating when I would learn a word, pronounce all the syllables "just fine" (as I thought), but even my Swedish partner would not understand me, despite being used to my Slavic accent in English. After 5-7 failed attempts to pronounce the word at him, he would finally get it, and pronounce it back with a slight pronunciation twist that was apparently making all the difference between being unintelligible and understood. After learning and practicing Swedish for a couple of years, I haven't had any problems with getting people to understand me as of recently, but some days I can hear my own accent, and it pisses me off terribly. I can hear that I sound out of whack, but just can't tune it back in! Long story short, stay humble and don't think you're easy to understand. People might just be really polite and good at guessing things from the context. On top of that, don't underestimate the compound effect that small errors make when they snowball. One fumbled word in a sentence is usually easy to understand, but half a sentence pronounced slightly wrong is just so difficult to make sense of! I must also say that I am annoyed at the argument of "git good and your pitch accent will fall into place", as if getting fluent is a walk in the park. How about using different tools to get fluent, such as both immersion and pitch accent? Not everyone in the learning community picks up and is able to reproduce nuance just from the listening practice, and approaching language learning from different angles is always a good idea. I don't like how OOP is dunking on the "pitch accent cult" while promoting a different "holy grail" approach. Again, from my personal experience with Swedish, I got a huge boost in understanding other people when I started to speak myself, as some things finally "clicked". But then to get better at speaking, I had to both practice speaking, acquire input (that I was finally able to understand better), and review some more formal rules to fine-tune the intuitive understanding that I got. There's zero conflict between formally studying pitch accept and using immersion. Although, if you just want to watch anime and get bored by more formal study forms, then just leave it at that and don't hate on other people providing unique teaching materials. Just letting things happen and hoping that your brain will act like a lint roller is all fun, until that doesn't work out as planned. Work hard where it's due, accept your flaws, and don't get worked up if someone cares about something you don't. I still pronounce consonants too hard for Swedish, so people most often identify my accent as Finnish. If I were to choose to not care, I wouldn't have the moral right to belittle people who work on fixing this flaw in their speech. Especially using all those snarky comments and weird labels that OOP chose for the pitch accent learning community. Anyway, I'm off to submit a petition to make you all say イケア instead of Aykeea, have a good day!
By learning some basics of pitch accent early in your learning you will also see the benefit in your listening skills. Early on it is hard to hear what people are saying in Japanese. This aids in audibly making distinctions in tones and therefore hearing individual words in a sentence that might be a bit blurred together.
I kind of get where he is coming from. When you listen to people teaching pitch accent, you get the impression, that if your pronunciation (including accent) is not perfect, you are bad at Japanese. Witch is not true. I usually tell my students, that they need to get basics right, so their Japanese is easy to listen to, and from that point, it is more beneficial to focus on other stuff. Native Japanese teachers who I spoke to about it, all agreed.
This is probably the most sensible comment here. It's not that pitch accent isn't unnecessary. It is absolutely important to know how Japanese differs from English at a fundamental level so that learners can keep in mind what they need to improve. But the criticism that the guy in the video had about pitch accent fanatics was, while over the top, valid. Language needs to be acquired through exposure. Learners can't be afraid to go out into the world and start applying the language that they've learned so far just because they know their pitch accent isn't perfect. Correcting the pitch accent will come with exposure to the language (and the knowledge that pitch accent something to look out for, even if it's not something that needs to be studied for years on end).
I think perception and personal experience are a big factor. As someone who is haafu and born there, there were a lot of kids who nitpicked everything about me to reinforce that I wasn't really Japanese. I was always gaijin. After spending the majority of my life in the US and not keeping up with my Japanese, I am absolutely gaijin now and I am now more prone to get "jouzu" because I'm good enough to stumble by. But yes. Pitch-accent did matter - if I ever misspoke, I was dogged. But I think it matters more for not being perpetually perceived as a foreigner when you are not a foreigner to begin with. I know Japan has changed a lot though so my opinion is very much based on my experiences in the early 90s.
I came across this video, & am very happy that I did so. The notion that the importance of pitch, cadence, grammar etc is valuable to the speaker is a brilliant observation. In my case this is very true, and it is because I want to demonstrate care and respect of the spoken language so my Sensei and Shihan will know I care enough to make the effort. In our dojo, we’re taught to respect each other, and how we communicate is very important. I assure you, my Sensei cares and is most proud of us when we pay attention to the details, including pitch. For some situations: “good enough…isn’t”
Thanks for the video Dogen. As someone who has studied Japanese for a while (8-10 years), though is weakest in speaking to be fair, I actually don't think "picking up" pitch accent is intuitive for most native English speakers who reach advanced fluency (though how to define "advanced" fluency is a big question in and of itself). The ability to hear and notice the differences between different pitch accents and imitate them definitely improves, but memorizing it and then changing your speech patterns to match it yourself regularly is a different story. I don't personally think that's possible for most of us without deliberate, purposeful practice. All that is to say I actually really do think learning pitch accent is super important, something that I only became very convinced of more recently unfortunately.
I'd argue the pitch accent equivalent in english would be like how we put emphasis on certain syllables in words when speaking. Like when we say the word "banana," there is an emphasis in the middle like ba-NA-na. I'd imagine if someone said ba-na-NA enough times, the person they're talking to would eventually ask why they're saying the word "banana" like that. Another example is "waffle." It's usually said like "WA-ffle," and it would sound weird if someone started saying "wa-FFLE." I would imagine that a native english speaker hearing someone say "wa-FFLE" would give them the same weird feeling a japanese person would feel after hearing "ni-HON-go."
Yes. I can confirm this, because I have taught a lot of ESL students who had this type of problem. Other things to add would be intonation, sentence stress, and weak form.
The example I like to use is that you can tell exactly what I mean when I say pre-*zent* (verb) instead of *pre*-zent (completely unrelated noun with two different meanings). No syllabic stress would make this word even more ambiguous.
What you're describing is stress accent. It's equivalent to pitch accent in that it's how English differentiates meaning between words with the same pronunciation. i.e. "dessert" is a treat; "desert" is dry land full of sand.
@@EvaFuji Intonation is variation in pitch to communicate intended nuance/emotion. It has no bearing on the inherent meaning of individual words in a sentence. "You're coming with us," has a flat intonation. "You're coming with us?" has a rising intonation. Japanese is a pitch accent language unlike English, but both use intonation
日本人ですけどpitch-accentはやった方がいいと思いますよ。必須化していいぐらい。I think it really makes your Japanese level higher and for me it’s more comfortable to talk with someone who is paying attention to pitch-accent than someone who isn’t. Understanding weird accented Japanese sometimes makes me annoyed, because it usually doesn’t make sense, actually.
I started learning pitch accent fairly early into my Japanese journey. In fact, I learned pitch accent as I was starting to immerse in the language after having learned the basics and then continued to learn it and acquire it as I went on. Now 6 years into learning Japanese, I don't really need to think about pitch accent when speaking or reading. Occasionally, maybe I forget the accent of a word I dont use all that much or hear very much but it is rare so what I want to say is this: Yes, at first when you start speaking or reading out loud pitch accent is going to be an extra load on your brain, but with time you will acquire it from listening and practicing output so that it comes naturally to you.
I will say, that I was one of those who was told pitch accent isn’t important because even if you say something wrong people will know what you’re saying because of context. But I’ve started trying to make videos of me speaking and it sounds SO awkward! So with each video I hope I can get corrected and work on my pronunciation and accent. I’m in the process of watching your pitch accent series. Thank you for those videos.
I think an underrated aspect of developing a sense of pitch outside of improved pronunciation is that it helps a ton with input comprehension. If your ears are only tuned towards "stress" (that is, a combination of pitch+volume+length), it's probable that you'll have bad filters in the way whilst listening out for what word in a Japanese sentence is being emphasised (which is also in turn important for the intonation aspect as well). To explain what I mean, If I gave you the example of these two sentences "I didn't say HE stole it." and "I didn't SAY he stole it", the emphasis on each word changes the sentence's meaning, and in turn both words need to have higher "stress" values to achieve the emphasis. But what is easy to miss here is that the words that are NOT being emphasised in those sentences sound completely flat, as if they were heiban. Say the sentences out loud to hear what I mean. There's also variable meaning in those flat words as well by contrast. In other words, if that very meaning, and flow of comprehension of an English sentence is intrinsically bound with what words are and are not being emphasised, we have to take our sense of stress seriously, and to understand that it's best to seperate that from our sense of pitch. Because if we hear "SAigo" and don't know that the pitch pattern never changes in that word, and don't know there's no such thing as that word "flattening to reduce emphasis" in Japanese, there's a danger that we would take away a false sense of emphasis from the word before hearing the rest of the sentence, because a stress-accent sense has to make decisions based on, with respect to a sentence's word order, the first word it believes to be stressed, which would mess up our sense of meaning of the rest of the words. It would be like hearing "i DIDn't say HE stole IT": a lot of nuance is gonna slip away. But once you do acquire the sense of pitch and it's set in place in your mind, it gets amazing, because the next level is acquiring what words have a bigger DIFFERENCE in pitch than others, a.k.a intonation. And it's that feeling that gives you a sense of actual per-word emphasis as intended by the Japanese speaker. It's a whole different layer of phonetic sense, and I'm starting to really feel it myself during my listening. The Japanese sounds are much more natural with the emotions behind the words feeling much more authentic. But if you try to acquire the sense of intonation before the sense of pitch, it feels like putting the cart before the horse. I think what makes people ill at the thought of learning pitch is they feel they already have to do a ton per word - kanji, pronounciation, nuances etc. An outside glance of the mountains of info to learn can be intimidating. But the way I see it is it's always better to make the surrounding picture of your puzzle pieces bigger to begin with. The late great philosopher Daniel Dennet made a great a point: if you can easily pronounce the phrase "mundafy the apagastrian", despite the words having zero meaning, there must be something catchy in language besides meaning. The phonetic language systems can operate within their own spheres, so from a comprehensible input point of view it's critical to tune our ears correctly as a fundamental principle, to make everything else easier. Once you reach a good sense of intonation, any word's pitch will become a tiny, puny piece of your greater intuition that you will learn and acquire without even thinking.
Note I'm far from the end of the video while writing this comment, sorry if I say things that have already been said. I've seen native speakers on both sides: some care a lot about pitch, while others don't care at all. Even those who care a lot probably won't criticize Japanese learners, so it's probably okay not to learn pitch. However, I believe that making your speech as clear as possible for your conversation partner is a respectful stance. I can say for sure listening to most skilled strangers in my native language is fatigue-inducing in the long run (at least for me). If all foreigners made the same mistakes, I would be used to those, but it's clearly not the case. They're all inconsistent "by default". The brain is a pattern recognition machine, and it works best with consistency. Each time someone makes a pronunciation/accent mistake, it feels like my brain is auto-fixing the sentence before "I can process the content". Some of my friends don't seem to care at all. The simple fact that I've seen some natives caring about pitch is enough reason for me to put some effort into having an 'okay pitch'.
If you listen to Japanese 10-20k hours you generally can pick it up or autocorrect your own pronunciation and pitch-accent (cuz Japanese is always flowing through your brain), at least that happened to me over spending half my life with the language. But I have also done a bit on Dogens Patreon course a few years ago and it confirmed that I was already solid enough even though I didn’t know some of the technical terminology (just like Japanese people don’t bother studying pitch accent in isolation unless they are linguists) I might do it on occasions cuz living in America nowadays😅 Usually I get words right from intuition , but I can understand that people without thousands of hours hearing the language might benefit a lot by studying it more in isolation. It saves them time and is more zoned in. I also majored in Japanese 15 years ago and there was one advanced pitch accent course that went through a ton of dialects and some quizzes destroyed me. It was a wake up call because I struggled with it then 😂 I can’t remember multiple accents for several dialects , and just know standard and KansaiBen. Hint of Tohoku dialect too. A part of me wants to master a region that most “foreigners” don’t speak just to develop a more unique character. Nowadays Japanese people are used to me using Kansaiben and it’s not super cool anymore. Before, people thought I was a bit more special lmao 😂
2:27:00 how he analogizes to weightlifting he's absolutely correct. Working on pitch accent took me from having native speakers ask me to repeat something to getting actual compliments on my accent that isn't the dreaded 日本語お上手ですね.
Didn't watch yet but one thing comes to my mind: Even while I'm at a very low level when it comes to speaking I get the feeling that when I try to have good pronunciation and pitch-accent Japanese people tend to understand me more easily.
@@diydylana3151 That's right. Even just knowing the 4 patterns makes your immersion a lot more effective. And you can learn about those patterns in half an hour I would say.
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You can use arrow keys on keyboard to navigate in the video, left and right 🙌
I think one important thing missed in his analysis is that the mistakes of a native Japanese speaker are not the same as those of a native English speaker. When I learned Italian, I mispronounced /l/ as dental-alveolar instead of the correct alveolar pronunciation (it is sometimes dental-alveolar, but it’s a special case). The difference is so small to me that I can barely tell them apart. I actually felt proud that I could properly pronounce the Italian l. The Italians, hearing this mistake, would often not know which word I was trying to say and as a result struggled to understand what I was trying to say. (I corrected this mistake, and I now get compliments in Italy for my “perfect” accent [it is not]) Very small details for language learners can easily become significant issues for comprehension.
I never quite understand what people have against pitch accent in Japanese. Like from my perspective, my goal as a language learner is to learn the language as the native speakers speak it. My goal is to ideally sound as close as I can to such a speaker in a way that makes sense If their speech clearly shows evidence of pitch accent, than I'm beholden to learn that, the ins and outs of that, just as any other form of pronunciation. I think of trying my best with that as just being respectful to the language. I'm not going to go out of my way to butcher it, so it doesn't really make sense to me why people might think it's "useless," like I don't think they really have the right to judge it so, that's not their responsibility nor do they have the authority to do so without presumption
I think people who are downplaying pitch accent, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language. You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. We will never sound native, but Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say. Good luck on your journey!
@@kingofthejungle2894 Potentially yeah. There's a tendency for learners of one language to downplay the importance of features that aren't shared in their native language, or and in my thinking this is probably the main one in this context, is to downplay the importance of features with a relatively low functional load. Functional load is essentially how much a particular thing linguistically speaking impacts meaning. As an example the difference between initial P and B in English has a fairly high functional load as it distinguishes many words like pat and bat, and this is a quite common distinction However with initial Th, where there's a similar voicing distinction as between P and B, there isn't a high functional load as there are relatively few words that're distinguished only by voicing starting with Th (this is actually usually considered the phonemic distinction with the lowest functional load) Thus a non native learner whose native language doesn't have Th sounds may not necessarily see the importance between them and go with whichever is easiest at the moment, which will result in a distinctive accent. If they're trying and that's just what they got to work with then that's fine and valid, but it's a different matter altogether if people start trying to actively downplay the importance of th voicing as something not important to care about _to other learners_ since it spreads bad habits. A similar thing I think is happening with pitch accent here in Japanese Actually a personal example, or semi-personal more accurately, as I've just got to the section about L and R getting confused by Japanese speakers being akin to pitch accent mistakes; Pa Dutch a language I speak a bit of has this sound /β˕/ spelt with a W that's half way between English W /w/ and English V /v/ and in Pa Dutch accents of English Or more accurately non native speakers of English whose native language is Pa Dutch and aren't Amish (the conservative anabaptist sects like the Amish learn English very thoroughly from about the age of 7 or so onwards) who are nowadays very rare or even extinct historically would often pronounce their W's *and* their V's with this /β˕/ sound. But what's interesting is what happened in the early 20th century. See that's when many Pa Dutch parents stopped teaching their children the language and started using English exclusively, but they were using this dialectal form of English influenced by their original language And this /β˕/ sound didn't make it into Pa Dutch English, instead they adopt the usual /w/ and /v/ of English buuut they put them in non standard positions. Essentially Pa Dutch speakers who could pronounce the /w/ vs /v/ distinction in English often couldn't do so consistently and these inconsistencies got 'set' so to speak when they passed it on to their kids, becoming lexically coded (i.e. individual speakers at that point were no longer mixing up W and V but rather words were set with one or the other but in nonstandard positions)
So as a kid I went to school in an area that had had a different regional accent than my own. After a couple years I picked up a lot of the local way of talking, and the things is I would switch. But when I switched I switched completely. I wouldn't mix and match, because that felt wrong.
1:34:10 I first thought I misheard but then I saw you reacting. I wonder if he mispoke or meant to say atamabaka instead of atamadaka. If it was a honest mistake, it was still funny.
100% with you on this. I was working with some Japanese coworkers for over a year, and speaking my basic japanese to them when able. And they'd teach me things here and there. Then one time, they taught me a new word which I repeated as i always do. and they laughed REALLY HARD. and I was like wait what was so funny? - I had perfect pitch accent when I said it, randomly. Having never done that before. over 1 year and they never even mentioned it, because of course my accent was wrong.
I was not aware that there was a "pitch-accent craze" or people against it, and I really don't care about it now after watching this, but some of the things in this guy's video triggered me sooo much. 😅 Not only in regard to learning Japanese, but any language really. The way he's phrasing things sounds needlessly hostile, despite what he's written in the description and pinned post... For me personally, this attitude of "when you get good overall, your accent/pronunciation will also naturally get better" is such bs... I struggled so much with English, even though my level was quite good and I had no problems using it for listening, reading and writing. But speaking was hell, because my otherwise high level was clashing with my bad pronunciation. I was aware of my strong accent and some of my bad habits, but couldn't exactly pinpoint and fix them, and it was a constant source of embarrassment, especially when communicating with native speakers for work. Did they understand me? Yes. Did they ever correct me or say something about my pronunciation? Of course not; we got our work done and they didn't care about anything else. But it was bothering ME and getting in the way of MY speaking. So I started recording myself and trying to figure out where I was getting things wrong, but it wasn't until I scheduled classes with a proper speech therapist that I fully understood my mistakes and more importantly - how to fix them. After just a couple of lessons, I felt such a boost in my confidence and I could hear significant changes in the way I spoke; it was amazing and I will never regret the time and money spent on these classes. So it really baffles me that there are people out there criticizing or even attacking those who put emphasis and importance on studying pitch accent, when it's an important part of the Japanese language, it's quite different than the stress accent most of us are used to, and not everyone will have the ears or time to acquire it by immersion. If the video was targeted towards the supposed "pitch accent fanatics", this should've been made way clearer. Being told that it's "useless", or will happen "naturally" in time, or that natives "don't give a f*ck" and thus we don't need to do anything about it, can be a pretty d*ck move. Because I've been the "I've watched a lot of anime and my native Japanese teacher praised me for my pronunciation, so it must be really good" person, until - like with English - I started recording myself and playing it back to my utmost horror and embarrassment. It sounded nothing like what I was hearing while speaking and I really wished my teaches had brought it up, instead of trying to "encourage" me with all the jouzus... I'm still not at the point where I've started actively studying pitch accent, but now I am at least aware of it, I make it a point to pay more attention when I'm listening and speaking, and I intend to give it some proper study time eventually. That should've been this guy's argument if he was addressing the people who obsess with pitch accent needlessly - just a simple "don't overthink it, but be aware of it". Instead, he went on a 20-minute rant with a lot of honestly bad "advice" and a mountain of anecdotal evidence, which can be countered with another mountain of anecdotal evidence... Sorry for the long post. Like I said, it really bugged me, but I don't intend to give his video any extra views and comments, so I'm venting here. 😄
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say. People who are downplaying it, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language. Good idea about recording yourself, I am gonna try that too :D Good luck with your journey!
I’ll be honest, at the beginning of the video I thought it the intro text was deliberate, in that it was up for a while. I made a point to check and make sure I understood it as if there was a major point for it to be there… then I realized we were just waiting 😅. I blame the short dogen “punch line” clips 😅
One thing I've learned about myself is that when I hear people talk about the lack of importance of pitch accent (like the pitch accent is useless video), it takes a weight off my shoulders, whether correctly or not. I think myself and many others perceive the task of learning vocabulary, piecing together sentences, etc., difficult enough already that when someone brings up pitch accent, it feels a bit overwhelming. I think, "Are you telling me many words have patterns in how you're suppose to say them otherwise youre not even going to be understood?!" In the end, I don't want to be delusional and stick my head in the sand and pretend pitch accent isn't important if it is, but for some reason the perceived difficulty of it does pose an obstacle to my motivation of continuing to learn Japanese.
That's probably the overall message the guy was trying to make with his video. Don't stress over pitch. Get exposure to native speakers. Rather than studying pitch accent for all the words under the sun in a studious fashion, just listen to people and repeat words the way they say them. The message isn't to abandon all sense of improvement in pitch accent, but that learners should be able to accept that they're still in the process of learning and don't need to be perfect in any particular aspect of the language to be considered "good." The fact is that pitch accent is automatically included in the way native Japanese people talk. By exposing yourself to them, you're exposing yourself to pitch accent. It's not to say that you should go to Japan without any understanding of pitch accent, but that you don't need to labor over it for years on end before trying to communicate. Being mindful that pitch accent exists and is something that can be improved is often all one needs to take the steps to correct it. English speakers who are entirely unaware of pitch accent probably won't make any strides in improving pitch accent because they don't even know it's something to look out for, but English speakers who are aware of it and develop an ear for it will be able to improve upon it in their own speech over time even if they didn't do drill after drill to learn pitch accents for all the words before trying to speak the language.
having a "decent" Japanese accent (because I studied pitch accent) has opened so many more doors for me since people just take me more seriously. Having a good accent in any language is VERY underrated by our education systems.
Guy accepts that “even learning a foreign language can affect your accent in subtle ways” but doesn’t seem to accept that the reverse is true and your native language will affect your second language in (almost certainly less subtle) ways that are fundamentally different and identifiable compared to the impact dialects will have within native speakers….
It honestly depends on your learning style. If you're a gestalt learner where you learn to speak by memorizing and scripting entire phrases, learning pitch accent is vital in order to *hear* the different words in the sentence and how to say them exactly and/or change your tone and pitch according to different social contexts. It's a manual learning process for many people who aren't neurotypical. If you're a gestalt learner even learning English as a native speaker is like learning a foreign language and you never feel fully fluent.
Even as a beginner in Japanese, it‘s obvious to me that pitch accent is absolutely important. Who would tell somebody who mispronounces half of their English words „That‘s OK, no need to work on that“? And in Japanese it‘s even worse, because the huge number of homonyms (if they are still called that if accents differ) means that it‘s not just a wrong pronunciation, it‘s an entirely wrong word. In the same manner, as a German, I wouldn‘t tell someone who comes to me speaking a conglomerate of Bavarian, Saxon and Hamburg slang, that his German doesn‘t need some work. I can definitely say that I wouldn‘t be content with that.
I wonder if the remark around 1:59:00 about "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is good" would be better understood as "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is clear". If you speak clearly like an audiobook narrator and enunciate well, then you'll probably almost always be understood regardless of pitch, but if you slur and speak fast and mumble and stumble over or approximate some mora like normal native speakers do at native speed, then not having a correct/recognizable pitch contour would probably make you *impossible* to understand.
Idk, I feel like at the end all this immersion guy is saying is that there are many factors to learning a language and if you hyper focus on one at the expense of all the rest, you're not going to get the results you want, and that being comfortable in the language is important. These are both pretty DUH points to be making, but he's framing it in a pretty weird way by saying pitch accent is purely useless. It depends on your goals, weaknesses, strengths.
I agree, but also see merit in questioning whether or not studying pitch-accent is best for everyone. Think he made a good video talking through a lot of his own experiences related to the phenomena.
Starting to learn Japanese and went to learn pitch accent for 2 main reasons: (1) Accents are part of the language (not as much as Thai or Chinese but still), (2) Pitch accent is like 5% of the workload to learn a word, so why not add it from the start? (for me for a random word, kanji is like 60% of the workload to learn it, mora/pronunciation 20% and meaning like 15%) With those videos, I'm perfectly aware that this knowledge may vary in the long run, but at least I know I will have a good foundation. And I can try to speak without butchering everything. (ah yes output is quite important IMHO, else that's how you end up NOT able to speak after years of learning)
Im on chapter 17 on busuu up to negative verbs and use Japanese from zero/genki am i cooking with right stuff? Also pitch accent isnt that complicated ngl basically just emphasis/how long or short word is dragged out is how i see it/visualize it easier. I also speak spanish and some words in Japanese sound the same and even 見て is close af to mira which is look in spanish and when speaking i sound the same high pitched like when i speak spanish
It's true it's not his place to tell what people should care about, but it's good that the guy tries to put anxieties to rest for some people and bring some mundane reality into the mix. Because some people might inflate the stakes based on what they hear online
Random question: Will you sometime make a pitch accent course for other dialects? Do you speak other dialects or only standard Japanese? I believe you’re living in Kyushu so thought you might pick up the dialect for the prefecture you’re in? Since there’s not a ton of sources on those dialects I think it could be useful too, but maybe pain in the ass to create 😂
If you listen to a lot of Japanese speech you can start to pick up on pitch accent unintentionally, at least for common phrases. I have a strong musical background so pitch of words has always been something that feels like an important aspect of pronunciation. Studying it directly confirmed a lot of intuition I had but it’s important to understand so you can learn new ones you haven’t heard much!
That's exactly what I commented in his video: people started to correct me in both Japanese and pitch accent once I started watching your videos on patreon. The fact that the dude says that no one he knows cares must say a lot about his ability. It's like he focused too much on pitch accent before he got enough input to fully understand it, immersed more, finally ended up getting to an okay level and then came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter. Ironically he probably needs more input. EDIT: They forced my wife to change a lot of her pitch accent when she was a secretary in Tokyo. Even as simple as picking up the phone. Co-workers have also corrected my un-solicited since I worked in customer service myself. They didn't correct any of my non Japanese co workers because they'd straight up say, "We don't feel like they care enough to improve their Japanese for us to correct them". The Japanese people in question had almost flawless English accents and in turn judged Japanese accents. I didn't let them know I had studied pitch accent until after they tried to correct me more. Same thing happens at my new workplace if I make slight unnatural mistakes or miss up pitch. Again, they had no idea I knew about pitch accent and in their case, still don't
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate, I've been picking up pitch accents for my earlier studies while continue ahead with my intermediate studies. so i feel like I'm still making progress. but along this road I've been having a consistent issue with picking up pitch accents for any word that has i り い し and so on, I'm having a great amount of trouble telling if the accent is going up or down, and the same goes for n since the word before seems to just go together too well. do you have any tips for getting over this hurdle? this goes to anyone who is studying pitch accents or if its just me. I have noticed that if its しい together most of the time its going down if it isn't already down the likes of your 新しい 悲しい etc tend to look like hei ban but the い in most instances if not all instances i have encounted always goes down, and this may turn into a bad habbit if this rule is untrue.... this may just mean i need to practice and study more but any help would be much appreciated! Many thanks, V
I only judge those who don't have the mental capacity to simultaneously participate in the conversation like a human being and nitpick people's pronunciation mistakes like a human being.
For my Japanese studies currently pitch accent at the very bottom of my list. Only recently have begin to read, speak and keep up somewhat keep up with Japanese speakers with just my knowledge alone. It's thanks to studying kanji, shadowing, and various type of immersion training (Anime included). I still have only have the basic of Grammar down and I WANT to study that more. Should I study pitch accent too with everything else that I'm currently doing?
At the very least I would encourage you to check out the free lessons I have on youtube, as many of them will allow you to pick up on things you might otherwise take a fair bit of time to start noticing. If you find the information useful, then you may want to consider signing up for my course on Patreon, but of course no pressure either way, and think carefully before spending your money. Here's a good place to start: th-cam.com/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/w-d-xo.html
It's a good dialectic, worth Dogen's 3-hr deep-dive. IG is affording the pitch-a-boo community good opposition to push back against. After all, as an English speaker . . . do I want to sound like that guy?
I found the explanation of "intonation" to be quite off. Intonation isn't about "how far" your pitch goes up and down. It is about the change in pitch on a sentence level, as opposed to word-level (accent). Through intonation, you can indicate a question or what parts in your speech you want to highlight. Note that it's not simply expressed through a higher/lower pitch than usual, but rather through specific intonation patterns. To indicate a question, for example, you'd go up slowly in pitch at the end of the sentence. ５時？ as in "Is it five o'clock?" would have a drop first at ご↓ and go up again after じ↑ (this is called 疑問上昇 = doubtful rise). Another example is the 上昇下降 pattern (rise and fall) which could be used in order to prompt the listener to take a specific action as in 「ちょっとあなた⤴️⤵️。もういい加減に起きてくださいよ。」 This is certainly hard to indicate with just emojis... Anyways, intonation has regional differences too, like in dialects of Nagoya or Kagoshima, where questions are indicated with a falling pitch towards the end. Also, the claim that intonation is somehow much more important than pitch accent to sound native is just an opinion right? I certainly don't believe so, and considering the immersion guy's flawed understanding of the concept of "intonation" suggests that he doesn't really know what he is talking about either.
I agree with this, but didn't point it out because it wasn't really related to the main points of the debate and therefore felt a bit like splitting hairs. Cheers!
@@Dogen I figured so. Thanks for making such a detailed and amicable response to the original video. Not getting hostile and even highlighting some of the good points that are made is certainly the right approach
Many young people watch a lot of comedy on TV that uses Kansai-ben and will switch into a kind of 関西弁風味 when being funny. I tend to switch a lot between Shizuoka-ben, and imitation versions of Tokyo Japanese and Kansai Japanese because I live in Shizuoka but my closest relationships are with people from outside the prefecture. I don't believe that picking up dialectal elements of Japanese first will damage your learning in the long run, as many Japanese people pick up Tokyo Japanese as a kind of adult business voice anyway. As always in language learning the most important thing is to be aware of elements of the language because that's what lets you acquire them.
I think this is REALLY something like the learning style argument, some people might not need it, but for many people it will be necessary. It's like the immersion argument all over really. I do think for English-speakers, pitch accent is something we need to spend some amount of effort on. Also the "native speaking" use different pitch-accent argument is totally wrong. Japanese people are consistent with how they vary. (And there's a flow to how they vary - people in Tokyo from Aomori all sound the same.)
I don't understand why people try to hard to write off pitch accent. "It's not important", "you don't need to study", etc. The same argument can be done to a lot of other aspects of the language. It's a part of the language, why not study it? Study it! Edit: 75% of the video in, and I have to say that the immersion guy is making a lot of moot points. He is generalizing exceptions. Exceptional people are not the norm. We are not them. Also, he seems to be confusing "accent" and "pitch accent". These are not the same thing. Final edit: Finished the video, and I my feelings were true. The guy is finding justifications for himself. He is a "immersion supremacist", and thinks that you can simply learn everything just by immersion... while the many accounts of advanced japanese language students who didn't aquire pitch accent show that that's not so simple. So what does he do about it? Rethinks his position due to new data and tweeks his study method? No, he looks for justifications as to why this aspect of the language is not important, and makes moral judgement on people who say the contrary. Dougen has been really polite with this guy, but truth is most of this guy's conclusions don't follow from his initial observations. He is just trying to not change his ways, and to pretend to be right while doing that.
36:28 Good point and it should be reasonably obvious to anyone in an international environment regardless of specific language. When somebody sounds obviously like a foreigner, you are not going to be an ass and point it out every sentence. You are going to wholeheartedly enjoy that you can communicate at all. But of course you do very clearly notice mistakes in pronunciation of your native language. And you automatically try to classify if the speaker is a foreigner, a native with a strong regional variation, or otherwise is maybe awkward or not good at speaking. Natives commenting they don't care about pronunciation of other natives, well, are probably just being polite.
If JLPT decides to include an oral exam like other language certifications, I think the whole discussion will be different. Dogen might be even richer then :p
Please don't send @theimmersionguy any negativity-almost us TH-camrs are guilty of leaning too hard into thumbnails and titles for views, myself included, and he's addressed these points in the top comment. He brings up a lot of great points in this video, and I would encourage everyone to watch any follow-up he makes on this topic, as I'm sure he'll make good arguments against my blind spots on this topic, the same way that he did here. 皆さん冷静に
"Success is a matter of INtensity, never EXtensity." You were right to specialize.
I do think he was trying to simplify the way people learn Japanese by saying more or less, don't make it too complicated. That's honorable. In the same way some people say don't worry about Kanji early on or ... fill in the blank. It's an effort to lower barriers. Correct or not aside, I don't think he was trying to put people on the wrong path. That said, it is great to hear Dogen's response.
I was once trying to tell a Japanese person I like salmon and she thought I meant alcoholic beverages so that alone tells me Dōgen might be onto something
Been there haha
ha, stories like these make the most elegant examples.
"Despite my fluent Japanese, Japanese ppl often respond in English or prefer to speak with less fluent Asians": There're comedy videos on TH-cam about this. They don't know Eng-speakers’ Japanese accent is intense, sounding as if words are broken into 3 parts. This is more pronounced than Asian speakers. Pitch accent matters a lot.
Native speakers don't just randomly fluctuate between different regional accents - they either have a consistently mixed accent, or they have acquired multiple accents that they use in different scenarios. But no native speaker will pronounce e.g. 日本語 with two different pitch patters in two consecutive sentences, whereas non native speakers who don't hear pitch will do this all the time. It's this sort of inconsistency that's specific to learners which results in being hard to understand.
Everything is correct, but the last sentence I doubt that it is especially hard to understand.
@@tangente00 日本語のネイティブとしては、日本語学習者のピッチアクセントのinconsistencyのせいで理解がしにくくなることは頻繁にあります。ただ、hard to understandというほどでもないので、harder to understandといった方が正確かもしれませんね。
That sounds like what the guy in the video (not Dogen) was saying. People won't have an accent that is perfectly consistent with the place they move to even if they're native Japanese, so it's makes no sense to think that a foreigner should necessarily have a perfect accent.
I think the main takeaway of the video is that students of Japanese shouldn't be afraid to speak Japanese just because they haven't perfected pitch accent. Over time as they become more exposed to the Japanese of the region they move to, the more they'll adapt to it naturally. It's not something to be studied from afar for years on end, but acquired naturally through repeated exposure.
It deliberately gives learners a pass to give themselves time to learn pitch accent without feeling guilty that they haven't perfected their accent. It's the same approach that I think English teachers would have for Japanese people learning English. Most Japanese people won't learn how to speak English like native English speakers from taking lessons in Japan, no matter how much effort they put into it. They can only ever acquire a natural accent by being exposed to it over an extended period of time.
Half an hour into Dogen‘s response and I’m ready to sign up for his Patreon pitch accent thing - not necessarily to learn pitch accent in itself but especially because I LOVE learning and the degree of differentiation, sensory & intellectual granularity with which he approaches and presents this (and other) topics. Just so stimulating to my brain and ears, and it puts me in touch with “Japan” and its lovely people. Ready to sign up with me?
Anyway, let’s keep learning languages fun.
In recent years, information is around in exponential abundance, and almost everything has become hyper-teachable. Still we have to do the work, in any way that works. No shortcut there ;)
Thank you for the kind words Saraha! Really appreciate it. I took a lot of time creating the series and am proud with how it turned out, so that means a lot. Best of luck with your Japanese studies, pitch-accent and otherwise! 頑張ってね！
I learned Japanese for 10 years before studying pitch accent. It undoubtedly helped my pronunciation and perception of Japanese. After studying pitch accent I began getting compliments from natives about intonation and been told "you don't have an American accent." Before studying pitch accent, I didn't really get those.
I’ve had the same experience, I would imagine every other learner who’s seriously studied it has as well. The improvements to your speaking are tangible and the feedback is surprisingly direct, ie people telling you there’s no ‘American’ (or whatever you’re from) accent where before they said nothing of the sort
Japanese people talk/joke/mock/ each other's "intonation" of certain words all the time. You can see this often on their variety shows on tv. They just misused the word "intonation" for "pitch". So pitch is very much a part of Japanese language, just no one puts into the basic textbooks.
It's the same with the English language's requirement for constantly vibrating your vocal cords. Every native speaker does it, but no one puts into our textbooks. So us Asians end up speak English in a very "choppy" manner, because in our language, vocal cords stop vibrating between words or sounds.
well obviously... when you learn and practice pronounciation / accent you get the accent, and when you don't practice you don't get the accent of the language but keep your own
It's like if you say "I practiced maths and I got better in math!! I'm so surprised, even my math teacher said I'm good at math!!
@@_capu the distinction here is, studying pitch accent specifically rather than trying to pick it up by osmosis. Judging by the premise of the vid you are commenting on, the efficacy of pitch accent study isn’t obvious to everyone, which is why I chimed in…
Accents are important in English, but if Japanese is spoken with a strong accent, it's hard to understand as well. When people from English-speaking countries say "Tokyo," it basically sounds like "patent."
One difference with English is since it's an international language people are much more used to hearing non-native speakers of English and dealing with weird accents than Japanese speakers are.
Also the fact that English just has so many technically native accents. When people hear my accent in English they usually assume I’m a “native speaker from somewhere else”. The Americans guess that I’m Canadian, Canadians think I’ve spent some time in Britain and so on forth. Now yes Japanese also has dialects but it’s still one geographically small country, there will be less options for “native from somewhere else”. In English everyone truly has an accent, there is always a “native from somewhere else” option where as in Japanese it’s basically either that you sound Japanese or you don’t
😮😮😊😮😢
O p p l@@yeontanseyebrows5588😊l p oolo😅l😊😅 plplojky😮okmky 1:45:58 please on your phone 😅
Haven’t heard all 3h yet, but love this so far! You respectfully present your points. Loved the point around 35:35, that Jpn native speakers recognize improved fluency, which to me (when I lived in Japan) meant hearing “Nihongo jōzu” less and less! Great video Dogen!!!
It's a very good point to be honest. It's like natives subconsciously go from "This person is a learner, it's normal for them to make mistakes, I'll just whitenoise them" to "Wait no, this person is *good* at Japanese, it makes no sense for them to make this mistake, raise the alarms". Even as a language teacher, there's nuanced mistakes that you wouldn't correct in, say, an A2 course, but you would in a C1 course, because the bar isn't set at the same height in each case.
20 yr resident of Japan, 34 yrs studying Japanese, and I just discovered the pitch accent about a year or 2 ago. Before that, I was baffled that some Japanese didn't understand me. Since I started trying to improve my pitch accent, this happens less often. Learn pitch accent early. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Why not give yourself every advantage by learning pitch accent?
For the average person it's a scam, you've lived and worked there for 20 years, the average person just starting out or who will only ever go to Japan on holiday it's a waste of time.
41:59 Teaching someone anything, especially a subtle repeating pattern like pitch accent, that they were ignorant of unlocks an enhanced awareness of it. What was ignored as background noise suddenly becomes prominent. It's kind of like when someone you know gets a new car, you start to notice that model everywhere.
Learning pitch accent earlier will help your brain to look out for it and encode it into memory subconsciously, especially when you're learning new words. Earlier awareness also means less unlearning of incorrect pitch. Telling someone to ignore pitch accent is just going to extend that unlearning period.
That doesn't mean one should overwhelm or obsess over pitch accent.
Couldn’t agree more!
Just to speak to your point at 36:52 about how you won't get corrected until your PA is already getting better: I'm in a primarily JP-EN language exchange Discord, and I've gotten to know dozens of Japanese people there who're interested in learning English. We have a practice in the server that you can add an emote to your name to show that you want people to correct your language mistakes.
On paper, this sounds like it would lead to a lot of back and forth where people are consistently correcting each other - and corrections do happen. But largely, even when users with this emote make mistakes, they don't get corrected, and I've chalked that up to two reasons.
1. Basically what you say - even if someone is inviting you to correct them, if they're making a wide variety of mistakes, constantly (more than once per sentence), you lose the motivation to correct them. It's counterproductive to correct them every single time, because that would take too long, and they wouldn't be able to absorb all of it. But more importantly...
2. You're just trying to talk to them - you're not their teacher, you're their friend. Correcting them breaks the flow of a conversation that you're trying to have, and breaking that flow is fine every now and then, but if you correct someone's mistakes every time they open their mouth, you won't actually be able to hold the conversation you're trying to have to begin with.
In the end, the people who I find myself correcting the most are the friends who I feel have the BEST English, because they make mistakes the least often, and they're the easiest to explain to, since they have the highest capacity to comprehend what I'm trying to teach them.
Would you be so kind as to share a link to this server, or is it invite only 😅
I was a bit wary checking out this video, because your comedic persona is a bit arrogant, so I thought it might be something you based on a real trait, but you quickly put my worries to rest by being fair, humble and open in. Thank you for your video. I glad I watched it
ピッチアクセントと、音の長さの違いも重要ですね。難しい日本語を知らなくても、ピッチアクセントが上手だとかなりの上級者か日本育ちのように聞こえます。
As a linguistic nerd, I'm not obsessed with "sounding native" but I still study pitch accent because I think it's a very interesting feature of Japanese. Knowing pitch accent not only makes your Japanese more understandable but also makes Japanese more understandable to you. It's not about vanity, it's about comprehension.
I just got done watching a segment of this video on stream (it seemed apposite because I'd been meaning to look at it and a beginning Japanese learner in my chat asked what the deal with pitch accent was), and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how you approach this.
My association with the Japanese language goes back to the late 80s, and I had already been working for roughly 20 years as a translator and occasional interpreter in Japanese, and getting mistaken (mostly) on the phone for a native speaker before I'd even heard of the concept of pitch accent. My awareness of it was limited to noticing differences before I assumed a word I had only seen in writing was pronounced and how I heard people actually pronouncing it (one early example was -gaoka place names); I overwhelmingly picked it up by hearing the emphasis of certain syllables without actually having a name for the thing I was hearing. I'd basically never heard any theory on the phonology of the language until watching your videos, from which I've learnt quite a lot.
It seems to me that what is taken as an 'obsession' with pitch accent is actually just a neglected aspect of Japanese pronunciation actually getting its due for the first time; naturally, there is a massive spike in the attention paid to something that previously had barely been acknowledged.
My main problem with The Immersion Guy's take is that a lot of vague terms end up doing a lot of work. What is 'sounding good', for example? Surely, that's an extremely subjective standard. If someone's idea of 'sounding good' does not include reliably accurate pitch accent (or other syllable emphasis patterns depending on language), then obviously it is by definition possible to 'sound good' without acquiring them. That does not, however, mean that acquiring them in one way or another (my recommendation in this case is a combination of conscious awareness of pitch accent and what it sounds like with just listening to people and modelling one's speech on them) is pointless.
A drive-by comment by a japanese-english person. Intonation is the first thing you immediately notice if done poorly (assuming decent vocab/grammar). For example, in western films, you can almost immediately tell who is non-native/not fluent in japanese by how they speak, not what they say.
The same thing is true for English speakers hearing Japanese people speak English. That doesn't mean that Japanese people should spend their time focusing on learning any particular accent. That's something that can only be acquired through consistent exposure to a particular accent. And even then, there will almost always be noticeable indicators that they're not a native English speaker. And that's okay. It doesn't particularly matter to most people.
Having a broken dialect due to moving is actually a good point. When I lived in North Carolina, I lived in Tarboro. Outsiders might pronounce the town's name as "Tar-boh-roh," but people there pronounce it as "Tah-bruh." I often went to another town called Greenville. (We often joked that this town is so small, you'll blink and drive right past it.) Some might pronounce "green-veel," but we pronounced it as "green-vuhl."
Meanwhile, on the other side of North Carolina, there's a lighthouse called "Bodie Island." I and everyone I knew, including my parents, say "Boh-dee," but people from there call it "Bah-tee."
When I moved to New Jersey, I could not understand anyone. They talked way faster and used different terms to describe things. (Someone from North Carolina might say, "crank up the car, cut that light on, cut out the light," while someone from New Jersey might say, "start the car, turn on the light, turn off the light."
I also got a lot of place names wrong. Raritan is "Ray-rih-tuhn," not "Rah-rih-tuhn." Hoboken is "HO-bo-ken," not "ho-BO-ken." Newark is "Nohrk," not "New-ark." Hamilton is "HA-milton," not "ha-MIL-ton." Trenton is "Tren'n," not "Tren-ton." McDonald's is "mehk-donalds," not "maek-donalds." Absecon Lighthouse is "AB-secon," in not "abSEcon." Secaucus is "seh-KAH-kuhs," not "SAE-kah-suhs." I still have to listen very carefully when speaking with someone from New Jersey.
When I moved to Pennsylvania, I often got corrected on street names. Schoenersville Rd is "Shay-nerz-veel" and not "Skoh-nerz-veel."
Interestingly, video games also shaped my dialect. For years, I pronounced "schedule" as "SHEH-ju-ahl" rather than the American way to pronounce it, "SKEH-ju-ahl," because I played a train simulator from Australia.
Funny, I would immediately pronounce Schoenersville as Sherh-nas-vill, since Schoener looks like it's an umlaut-less way of spelling Schöner.
@@n8pls543 that's exactly where it comes from yeah. A lot of German taken into English this way, the umlauted vowel unrounds. Same if it's from Pa Dutch, which likewise unrounds front rounded vowels. What's left is something like an eh or ay sound
Pronouncing ö as 'er' is more of a American accent in German type thing, which is more likely to pop up in individual accents rather than place names which tend to be either more thoroughly anglicized or dialectal in origin
I've been learning JPN for 6 years now, I was always told my accent was really good, and I've always wondered why. I only discovered PA ~1.5 years ago. After learning about it and testing myself I found out I was already pretty accurate, and I think I know why. I am a musican and have played by ear for many years, basically my ears are already trained at hearing pitch differences, and I subconciously learned the right pitch in JPN from the beginning. Also combined with the fact that I learned mainly from listening. I've spent the last 6 months focusing on ironing out my wrong pitch accent mistakes, and I'm still not perfect, but my JPN friends said wow your Japanese has gotten much more clear! PA is not neccesary if you just want to get by, but for those of us who actually want to get really good at the language it has a huge impact on your pronunciation.
Fascinating stuff. Not too crazy about pitch accent myself but I can tell you're a very intelligent guy. I quite like your comedy but I wish I saw more of your commentary on Japanese learning like this!
Thank you for answering a lot of questions I had about the value of learning pitch accent and reasonably responding to those with somewhat contrary views.
Your honesty, integrity, and respect of other people’s opinions really impresses me. Videos like these are good for everyone. Keep making them!
Thanks Dogen 🙏 …for skillfully sharing your linguistic understanding… but I think even more for meeting this critique with so much clarity and focus, inspite of the many snide notes in said critique.
why do english-speaking people on yt argue so much over this?
It is a feature of the languge. If you want to speak it well you should pay attention to it, preferably as early as possible. End of the story.
That's so right!
It literally is A FEATURE of the language. It is there. Whether you want to learn it or not.
Its also a part of the language saying the correct conjugation for example but i dont care if foreigners or immigrants saying them wrong. If i understood them, why should i point them out for their mistakes when literally every non native speakers make them on regular basis?
@@jannemakela8107 yeah you don't care but you notice it. That's not the point of learning it.
The argument is, that you might not need to learn it deliberately, because you acquire it with replicating a lot of input. So it's the argument over methodology, prioritisation and efficiency. As Dogen mentioned you can arrive at the same place with different paths, but you can do this once per language, so it's hard to compare with your own experience
Japanese is already very hard and people are obsessed with the idea of learning it fast for some reason. A lot of people also claim that you should only study kanji from vocabulary (which disregards radicals and a lot of things that make your life easier), they say that writing and learning individual kanji and their readings is a waste of time etc. As with everything there is some truth in there, but is not as black and white as people made it out to be. At the end of the day the more pitch you know and the better your kanji knowledge is the better you're at Japanese.
"There are other factors, things like your actual pronunciation". THIS. This is what also tells me that they do not understand Japanese phonology AT ALL. Pitch IS part of the pronunciation. Again, it's not a decisive feature in English, but it is in Japanese. It's as important as long-short vowel distinction, but native speakers might not consciously value it as much because it doesn't have an equivalent in writing. It doesn't mean that they don't notice and it doesn't mean that it can't alter their perception of your Japanese.
It makes me wonder if this person's pitch accent is *so bad* that natives don't even bother bringing it up, as you mentioned in your example earlier.
I would actually wager it's quite good if he studied pitch accent in the past and also did a mostly immersion based approach! I think his frustrations come more from the perceived 'hype' surrounding pitch accent, if that makes sense. Appreciate the comment!
As a native speaker of Swedish, that has pitch accent, getting the prosody, i.e. the pitch accent, is MORE important than making the correct sounds of the different vowels and consonants. The rhythm of the words are essential to native speakers when we parse what someone is saying. As for Japanese, the basic vowels and consonants are fairly easy (since god did not bless them with 14 different vowel sounds), so why would someone focus on that?
@@martinfalkjohansson5204 in Swedish specifically it's helpful because speakers regardless of the dialect tend not to speak in the most clear way
@@XGD5layer Haha, I do feel somewhat insulted, but, that might be true. We also use singular sounds to mean stuff like "aaa" and "mmm" and enjoy passive constructions :).
I think you and Yuda's point at the 1:02:00 mark about Kyoto is *similar* to some things in English, too. For example, if I were to say "I need to go out and buy tiiiiiires..." it would sound like I'm beginning to list out a set of items I need to buy, but if I'm just saying tires in that different way, I could throw the listener off if they were expecting a list and I really just meant, "I need to go out and buy tires."
I think a good argument for pitch accent is simply asking how well do you want to communicate and be understood by others, because it doesn't just make you sound "more native" (with the goal of having your ego stroked), but rather how much effort do you wish to put forward to help other Japanese in understanding you and feeling comfortable listening to you. It's making it easier for people to converse with you, i.e. for their benefit.
I think this is an excellent analogy to pitch accent for us English speakers. It definitely can throw the listener off … which sucks when you work hard to have grammar and vocab locked down but still get confused Japanese faces
I'm reminded a bit of a lecture I heard through the JET Program. The speaker was questioning what we define as "native English" giving examples of the differences between the US, England, and India, all of which have English is taught as the official language, but have a great variety of accents, regional dialects, and even vocabulary (e.g. "pants" vs "trousers"). The sort of thesis of the lecture was that "native speaker" is a poor metric to use in education, and that we should encourage variety over the "blonde hair blue eyed foreigners" in the textbooks.
I think this perspective makes a lot of sense and is probably close to where immersionguy is coming from. On the flip side, and to Dogen's point, people raised in the same environments (or who start in an environment and then move to a new one) all tend to speak in a similar way and have consistent dialects within their native language, which we could call standard or correct. We could say that Americans who learn Japanese have a consistent and similar "dialect" in Japanese, or that they make similar "mistakes" like over-emphasizing words or using the wrong pitch.
I think the key point of contention here is: where is the line between "accent" and "error" when it comes to pronunciation? And I don't know if that question has an objective answer.
The line is consistency. Dōgen said that in the video.
As a Japanese learner from China, pitch accent is included in our factory settings!
Still need tweaks here and there though.
hahah "factory settings"
Thank you Dogen!
I always learn a lot with you
As a Texan, what you likely heard was the Southern accent, but among just us, most of us have a more specific texas accent, and its likely that you didn't hear it specifically because you spoke with the west coast accent, which is how we speak in school, even in texas.
A few years ago, my wife at the time (she was Hawaiian) noticed when i finally started speaking in my texas accent at home, and she she said it felt like i was finally letting my guard down.
Love your content, specifically the knowledgeable humility you approach everything with
Something else that these people probably don't know is that there is a lot of correspondance among the different Japanese accents. What I mean is that it is often possible to predict where the accent will fall in the Kansai accent if you know where it falls in the Tokyo one. Some Japanese are also used to hearing other regional accents, of course. So, to say that "if you have the wrong accent but everything else is great, you'll just sound like you're from another region" is plainly wrong. When foreigners have the wrong pitch, it's all over the place, it doesn't follow a "logic" like it would in Kansai-ben and so on.
I’ve been learning Japanese for 10 years and understanding Pitch Accent helps me to better differentiate between the Tokyo accent and Osaka accent. Rather than mixing the two, my goal is to separate the two clearly so I am conscious of when I’m speaking in Tokyo accent or Osaka accent, and hope to add on other accent later on in my Japanese learning journey. This is also a goal for my Chinese so I can either use standard mandarin or dialect influenced accents.
Regardless of what "The Immersion Guy" was actually trying to say, I found his tone and delivery off-putting and inflammatory. He claims he didn't mean to instigate, yet denigrates "phonetics nerds" and "pitch propagandists" at length, as if his approach was the one true way to do things. Even the title of his video is hyperbole and clickbait; can he really claim pitch accent is "useless?" The irony is that "The Immersion Guy" is the one acting like a propagandist (in a ploy to get more subscribers), no one else.
I can't imagine how people who are interested about studying phonetics and pitch accent, much less those who teach it and have studied it intensively, wouldn't be offended by his harsh tone. He also seems to like the word "naughty" for some strange reason.
As a Japanese, I’m glad to see Japanese learners discuss this kind of deep topic. Until I found Dogenさん, I even didn’t know the word, “pitch accent”, which is I assume difficult for Japanese learners to acquire.
Loved this video, especially the "okay, I'm going to rant on this.....later in the video." teasing.
Hope to be a student soon!
I think the idea that foreigners mistakes would ever sound like a native's mix of dialects is kind of absurd. As for tonal patterns, they are often different, but they are consistent. A second language speaker who do not understand them will not sound like a native mixing dialect, but like a foreign accent. Swedish has pitch accent, and the pitches are different in different regions - but they're almost always consistent over the patterns. So, if you make a word dialectal, you must still use the same pattern but different accent on the syllables. This is the same as different dialectal variations, and this is the reason we very quickly can adapt and understand speakers from other places, because we quickly adapt to the correct patterns. If the patterns are wrong, it is going to be meh.
Also, I am not sure for Japan, but in Sweden, most people speaking Swedish have no idea we have a pitch accent. Unless given a minimal pair, the concept is entirely foreign to most native speakers. It is not marked in our writing, and it is not taught in school. Thus, a lot of people would be able to say they do not care for the accent. However, I have never heard a Swedish speaker make an error when it comes to pitch accent in a grammatical form or a word they know. It's notoriously hard to sound native like in Swedish as well, and this is because the accents are hard unless you have them in your own language.
Some of my family moved to Österbotten where the Swedish dialects have lost the pitch accent. It's not like I can't understand the locals when I visit, but there's a certain friction to comprehension that requires that bit more extra effort. Though as you point out, since they're internally consistent within their accent, it is still somewhat different from second language speakers.
@@Silk_WD even in finland swedish dialects pitch accent is a thing, there is just no distinction between accent one and two like in most mainland Sweden dialects, or Norwegian ones for that matter
Just as another data point against "immersion will handle everything": I know someone who lived here in Japan for 30+ years, very eloquent and well spoken, even does MCing for local events.
His pitch accent is very noticeably foreign. Immersion isn't a cure-all, and you do need to put some work into it.
I remember watching that video by myself when it came out and I thought there were many things wrong with it. I'm glad you reacted to it :D
39:48
When I was in Japan recently, I got like FIVE 上手's. This was how I knew...I sounded like a beginner. 😂
It hurts every time.
@@honeybunbadger I feel you. This is so sad and funny at the same time.
People think "English has prosody and it's not a big deal, so Japanese must work the same way". That's just wrong. English obviously has pitch, but it's not a phonological difference. It cannot alter the meaning of words. It is a separate phonemic difference in Japanese, so it can create confusion and make natives misunderstand words, just like L and R in English.
Which was the video where Dogen changes from a British accent to southern accent in the same sentence
Why would you avoid output for the first years of study?
Besides one studious PhD in a bar in Thailand, is there any evidence that this has benefits? What benefits?
I’m also learning Albanian because it’s my husband’s native language. They have a few letters like “l” and “ll” that I can’t really hear the difference (to me it just sounds elongated but I still get it wrong). It annoys the hell out of my husband when I get it wrong because to him it’s obvious! So I can empathize with Japanese speakers not hearing the “l”/“r” difference. I can definitely hear the difference in pitch accent, though, and to me that’s something I value getting right.
I'm only here because dogen has hair in the thumbnail.
You never know how intelligible do you sound to a native speaker! My example comes from Swedish, which is a Germanic language, but with a pitch accent. From my experience of learning the language, it was extremely frustrating when I would learn a word, pronounce all the syllables "just fine" (as I thought), but even my Swedish partner would not understand me, despite being used to my Slavic accent in English. After 5-7 failed attempts to pronounce the word at him, he would finally get it, and pronounce it back with a slight pronunciation twist that was apparently making all the difference between being unintelligible and understood. After learning and practicing Swedish for a couple of years, I haven't had any problems with getting people to understand me as of recently, but some days I can hear my own accent, and it pisses me off terribly. I can hear that I sound out of whack, but just can't tune it back in!
Long story short, stay humble and don't think you're easy to understand. People might just be really polite and good at guessing things from the context. On top of that, don't underestimate the compound effect that small errors make when they snowball. One fumbled word in a sentence is usually easy to understand, but half a sentence pronounced slightly wrong is just so difficult to make sense of!
I must also say that I am annoyed at the argument of "git good and your pitch accent will fall into place", as if getting fluent is a walk in the park. How about using different tools to get fluent, such as both immersion and pitch accent? Not everyone in the learning community picks up and is able to reproduce nuance just from the listening practice, and approaching language learning from different angles is always a good idea. I don't like how OOP is dunking on the "pitch accent cult" while promoting a different "holy grail" approach. Again, from my personal experience with Swedish, I got a huge boost in understanding other people when I started to speak myself, as some things finally "clicked". But then to get better at speaking, I had to both practice speaking, acquire input (that I was finally able to understand better), and review some more formal rules to fine-tune the intuitive understanding that I got. There's zero conflict between formally studying pitch accept and using immersion. Although, if you just want to watch anime and get bored by more formal study forms, then just leave it at that and don't hate on other people providing unique teaching materials. Just letting things happen and hoping that your brain will act like a lint roller is all fun, until that doesn't work out as planned. Work hard where it's due, accept your flaws, and don't get worked up if someone cares about something you don't. I still pronounce consonants too hard for Swedish, so people most often identify my accent as Finnish. If I were to choose to not care, I wouldn't have the moral right to belittle people who work on fixing this flaw in their speech. Especially using all those snarky comments and weird labels that OOP chose for the pitch accent learning community.
Anyway, I'm off to submit a petition to make you all say イケア instead of Aykeea, have a good day!
By learning some basics of pitch accent early in your learning you will also see the benefit in your listening skills. Early on it is hard to hear what people are saying in Japanese. This aids in audibly making distinctions in tones and therefore hearing individual words in a sentence that might be a bit blurred together.
I was sweating bullets...
I kind of get where he is coming from. When you listen to people teaching pitch accent, you get the impression, that if your pronunciation (including accent) is not perfect, you are bad at Japanese. Witch is not true.
I usually tell my students, that they need to get basics right, so their Japanese is easy to listen to, and from that point, it is more beneficial to focus on other stuff. Native Japanese teachers who I spoke to about it, all agreed.
Very fair!
This is probably the most sensible comment here. It's not that pitch accent isn't unnecessary. It is absolutely important to know how Japanese differs from English at a fundamental level so that learners can keep in mind what they need to improve. But the criticism that the guy in the video had about pitch accent fanatics was, while over the top, valid.
Language needs to be acquired through exposure. Learners can't be afraid to go out into the world and start applying the language that they've learned so far just because they know their pitch accent isn't perfect. Correcting the pitch accent will come with exposure to the language (and the knowledge that pitch accent something to look out for, even if it's not something that needs to be studied for years on end).
I think perception and personal experience are a big factor. As someone who is haafu and born there, there were a lot of kids who nitpicked everything about me to reinforce that I wasn't really Japanese. I was always gaijin. After spending the majority of my life in the US and not keeping up with my Japanese, I am absolutely gaijin now and I am now more prone to get "jouzu" because I'm good enough to stumble by. But yes. Pitch-accent did matter - if I ever misspoke, I was dogged. But I think it matters more for not being perpetually perceived as a foreigner when you are not a foreigner to begin with. I know Japan has changed a lot though so my opinion is very much based on my experiences in the early 90s.
I came across this video, & am very happy that I did so. The notion that the importance of pitch, cadence, grammar etc is valuable to the speaker is a brilliant observation. In my case this is very true, and it is because I want to demonstrate care and respect of the spoken language so my Sensei and Shihan will know I care enough to make the effort. In our dojo, we’re taught to respect each other, and how we communicate is very important. I assure you, my Sensei cares and is most proud of us when we pay attention to the details, including pitch. For some situations: “good enough…isn’t”
Thanks for the video Dogen. As someone who has studied Japanese for a while (8-10 years), though is weakest in speaking to be fair, I actually don't think "picking up" pitch accent is intuitive for most native English speakers who reach advanced fluency (though how to define "advanced" fluency is a big question in and of itself). The ability to hear and notice the differences between different pitch accents and imitate them definitely improves, but memorizing it and then changing your speech patterns to match it yourself regularly is a different story. I don't personally think that's possible for most of us without deliberate, purposeful practice. All that is to say I actually really do think learning pitch accent is super important, something that I only became very convinced of more recently unfortunately.
I'd argue the pitch accent equivalent in english would be like how we put emphasis on certain syllables in words when speaking. Like when we say the word "banana," there is an emphasis in the middle like ba-NA-na. I'd imagine if someone said ba-na-NA enough times, the person they're talking to would eventually ask why they're saying the word "banana" like that. Another example is "waffle." It's usually said like "WA-ffle," and it would sound weird if someone started saying "wa-FFLE." I would imagine that a native english speaker hearing someone say "wa-FFLE" would give them the same weird feeling a japanese person would feel after hearing "ni-HON-go."
Yes. I can confirm this, because I have taught a lot of ESL students who had this type of problem. Other things to add would be intonation, sentence stress, and weak form.
The example I like to use is that you can tell exactly what I mean when I say pre-*zent* (verb) instead of *pre*-zent (completely unrelated noun with two different meanings). No syllabic stress would make this word even more ambiguous.
What you're describing is stress accent. It's equivalent to pitch accent in that it's how English differentiates meaning between words with the same pronunciation. i.e. "dessert" is a treat; "desert" is dry land full of sand.
that's just intonation no?
@@EvaFuji Intonation is variation in pitch to communicate intended nuance/emotion. It has no bearing on the inherent meaning of individual words in a sentence.
"You're coming with us," has a flat intonation. "You're coming with us?" has a rising intonation.
Japanese is a pitch accent language unlike English, but both use intonation
日本人ですけどpitch-accentはやった方がいいと思いますよ。必須化していいぐらい。I think it really makes your Japanese level higher and for me it’s more comfortable to talk with someone who is paying attention to pitch-accent than someone who isn’t. Understanding weird accented Japanese sometimes makes me annoyed, because it usually doesn’t make sense, actually.
I started learning pitch accent fairly early into my Japanese journey. In fact, I learned pitch accent as I was starting to immerse in the language after having learned the basics and then continued to learn it and acquire it as I went on. Now 6 years into learning Japanese, I don't really need to think about pitch accent when speaking or reading. Occasionally, maybe I forget the accent of a word I dont use all that much or hear very much but it is rare so what I want to say is this: Yes, at first when you start speaking or reading out loud pitch accent is going to be an extra load on your brain, but with time you will acquire it from listening and practicing output so that it comes naturally to you.
I will say, that I was one of those who was told pitch accent isn’t important because even if you say something wrong people will know what you’re saying because of context. But I’ve started trying to make videos of me speaking and it sounds SO awkward! So with each video I hope I can get corrected and work on my pronunciation and accent. I’m in the process of watching your pitch accent series. Thank you for those videos.
My pleasure! Best of luck with your pitch-accent studies!
3時間もあるのでまだ全部視聴してないけど、まず学習者がピッチアクセント(要は日本語における音の高低、高低の流れ、節(ふし))を聞き取れないとどうにもならないかと思う。
この音の高低が聞き取れれば、ネイティブの日本語話者がしゃべった音声を聞こえた通りに真似る作業を重ねるだけ。
発声が初めは下手でもちゃんと聞こえているならば練習を重ねて少しずつネイティブの音に近づいていくだろう。
音の高低が聞こえないならば、「なにやら◯◯という言葉は平板で言うらしい」みたいな神秘的な話に終始する。
じゃあ聞こえるようになるためにはどうするのかと言うと正直わからないが、根本的には、まずは2文字や3文字レベルの極短い日本語の音声を何度も真剣に聞いてそれを自分で発声し、それを録音する、それを聞いてみてお手本の日本語と聴き比べ、発音、音の長さ、リズム、そして高低が合ってるかを確認する、という作業を愚直にするしかないのではないか。これをいろんな単語でひたすら繰り返し、この単語に関してはokとなったら少しずつそのお手本の日本語の文字数を長くする(長くなるほど再現が難しくなるから)。
I think an underrated aspect of developing a sense of pitch outside of improved pronunciation is that it helps a ton with input comprehension. If your ears are only tuned towards "stress" (that is, a combination of pitch+volume+length), it's probable that you'll have bad filters in the way whilst listening out for what word in a Japanese sentence is being emphasised (which is also in turn important for the intonation aspect as well).
To explain what I mean, If I gave you the example of these two sentences "I didn't say HE stole it." and "I didn't SAY he stole it", the emphasis on each word changes the sentence's meaning, and in turn both words need to have higher "stress" values to achieve the emphasis. But what is easy to miss here is that the words that are NOT being emphasised in those sentences sound completely flat, as if they were heiban. Say the sentences out loud to hear what I mean. There's also variable meaning in those flat words as well by contrast.
In other words, if that very meaning, and flow of comprehension of an English sentence is intrinsically bound with what words are and are not being emphasised, we have to take our sense of stress seriously, and to understand that it's best to seperate that from our sense of pitch. Because if we hear "SAigo" and don't know that the pitch pattern never changes in that word, and don't know there's no such thing as that word "flattening to reduce emphasis" in Japanese, there's a danger that we would take away a false sense of emphasis from the word before hearing the rest of the sentence, because a stress-accent sense has to make decisions based on, with respect to a sentence's word order, the first word it believes to be stressed, which would mess up our sense of meaning of the rest of the words. It would be like hearing "i DIDn't say HE stole IT": a lot of nuance is gonna slip away.
But once you do acquire the sense of pitch and it's set in place in your mind, it gets amazing, because the next level is acquiring what words have a bigger DIFFERENCE in pitch than others, a.k.a intonation. And it's that feeling that gives you a sense of actual per-word emphasis as intended by the Japanese speaker. It's a whole different layer of phonetic sense, and I'm starting to really feel it myself during my listening. The Japanese sounds are much more natural with the emotions behind the words feeling much more authentic.
But if you try to acquire the sense of intonation before the sense of pitch, it feels like putting the cart before the horse. I think what makes people ill at the thought of learning pitch is they feel they already have to do a ton per word - kanji, pronounciation, nuances etc. An outside glance of the mountains of info to learn can be intimidating. But the way I see it is it's always better to make the surrounding picture of your puzzle pieces bigger to begin with. The late great philosopher Daniel Dennet made a great a point: if you can easily pronounce the phrase "mundafy the apagastrian", despite the words having zero meaning, there must be something catchy in language besides meaning. The phonetic language systems can operate within their own spheres, so from a comprehensible input point of view it's critical to tune our ears correctly as a fundamental principle, to make everything else easier.
Once you reach a good sense of intonation, any word's pitch will become a tiny, puny piece of your greater intuition that you will learn and acquire without even thinking.
Some people may find pitch accent useless or not serving their own personal goals when it comes to language learning. But it's definitely not a scam
55:13; f/e no one is going to go into a candy store, ask for "ame" in the wrong pitch, and get rain.
Note I'm far from the end of the video while writing this comment, sorry if I say things that have already been said.
I've seen native speakers on both sides: some care a lot about pitch, while others don't care at all. Even those who care a lot probably won't criticize Japanese learners, so it's probably okay not to learn pitch. However, I believe that making your speech as clear as possible for your conversation partner is a respectful stance.
I can say for sure listening to most skilled strangers in my native language is fatigue-inducing in the long run (at least for me). If all foreigners made the same mistakes, I would be used to those, but it's clearly not the case. They're all inconsistent "by default". The brain is a pattern recognition machine, and it works best with consistency. Each time someone makes a pronunciation/accent mistake, it feels like my brain is auto-fixing the sentence before "I can process the content".
Some of my friends don't seem to care at all.
The simple fact that I've seen some natives caring about pitch is enough reason for me to put some effort into having an 'okay pitch'.
If you listen to Japanese 10-20k hours you generally can pick it up or autocorrect your own pronunciation and pitch-accent (cuz Japanese is always flowing through your brain), at least that happened to me over spending half my life with the language. But I have also done a bit on Dogens Patreon course a few years ago and it confirmed that I was already solid enough even though I didn’t know some of the technical terminology (just like Japanese people don’t bother studying pitch accent in isolation unless they are linguists)
I might do it on occasions cuz living in America nowadays😅
Usually I get words right from intuition , but I can understand that people without thousands of hours hearing the language might benefit a lot by studying it more in isolation.
It saves them time and is more zoned in.
I also majored in Japanese 15 years ago and there was one advanced pitch accent course that went through a ton of dialects and some quizzes destroyed me. It was a wake up call because I struggled with it then 😂
I can’t remember multiple accents for several dialects , and just know standard and KansaiBen. Hint of Tohoku dialect too.
A part of me wants to master a region that most “foreigners” don’t speak just to develop a more unique character. Nowadays Japanese people are used to me using Kansaiben and it’s not super cool anymore. Before, people thought I was a bit more special lmao 😂
2:27:00 how he analogizes to weightlifting he's absolutely correct. Working on pitch accent took me from having native speakers ask me to repeat something to getting actual compliments on my accent that isn't the dreaded 日本語お上手ですね.
Polish (someone from Poland) and polish (your boots) sound weird in English if you mix them up.
Lead and lead as well. That's actually why Led Zeppelin didn't call themselves Lead Zeppelin.
Didn't watch yet but one thing comes to my mind:
Even while I'm at a very low level when it comes to speaking I get the feeling that when I try to have good pronunciation and pitch-accent Japanese people tend to understand me more easily.
@@diydylana3151 That's right. Even just knowing the 4 patterns makes your immersion a lot more effective. And you can learn about those patterns in half an hour I would say.
You can use arrow keys on keyboard to navigate in the video, left and right 🙌
I think one important thing missed in his analysis is that the mistakes of a native Japanese speaker are not the same as those of a native English speaker. When I learned Italian, I mispronounced /l/ as dental-alveolar instead of the correct alveolar pronunciation (it is sometimes dental-alveolar, but it’s a special case). The difference is so small to me that I can barely tell them apart. I actually felt proud that I could properly pronounce the Italian l. The Italians, hearing this mistake, would often not know which word I was trying to say and as a result struggled to understand what I was trying to say. (I corrected this mistake, and I now get compliments in Italy for my “perfect” accent [it is not]) Very small details for language learners can easily become significant issues for comprehension.
I never quite understand what people have against pitch accent in Japanese.
Like from my perspective, my goal as a language learner is to learn the language as the native speakers speak it. My goal is to ideally sound as close as I can to such a speaker in a way that makes sense
If their speech clearly shows evidence of pitch accent, than I'm beholden to learn that, the ins and outs of that, just as any other form of pronunciation. I think of trying my best with that as just being respectful to the language. I'm not going to go out of my way to butcher it, so it doesn't really make sense to me why people might think it's "useless," like I don't think they really have the right to judge it so, that's not their responsibility nor do they have the authority to do so without presumption
I think people who are downplaying pitch accent, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language.
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. We will never sound native, but Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say.
Good luck on your journey!
@@kingofthejungle2894 Potentially yeah. There's a tendency for learners of one language to downplay the importance of features that aren't shared in their native language, or and in my thinking this is probably the main one in this context, is to downplay the importance of features with a relatively low functional load.
Functional load is essentially how much a particular thing linguistically speaking impacts meaning.
As an example the difference between initial P and B in English has a fairly high functional load as it distinguishes many words like pat and bat, and this is a quite common distinction
However with initial Th, where there's a similar voicing distinction as between P and B, there isn't a high functional load as there are relatively few words that're distinguished only by voicing starting with Th (this is actually usually considered the phonemic distinction with the lowest functional load)
Thus a non native learner whose native language doesn't have Th sounds may not necessarily see the importance between them and go with whichever is easiest at the moment, which will result in a distinctive accent.
If they're trying and that's just what they got to work with then that's fine and valid, but it's a different matter altogether if people start trying to actively downplay the importance of th voicing as something not important to care about _to other learners_ since it spreads bad habits.
A similar thing I think is happening with pitch accent here in Japanese
Actually a personal example, or semi-personal more accurately, as I've just got to the section about L and R getting confused by Japanese speakers being akin to pitch accent mistakes; Pa Dutch a language I speak a bit of has this sound /β˕/ spelt with a W that's half way between English W /w/ and English V /v/ and in Pa Dutch accents of English
Or more accurately non native speakers of English whose native language is Pa Dutch and aren't Amish (the conservative anabaptist sects like the Amish learn English very thoroughly from about the age of 7 or so onwards) who are nowadays very rare or even extinct
historically would often pronounce their W's *and* their V's with this /β˕/ sound.
But what's interesting is what happened in the early 20th century.
See that's when many Pa Dutch parents stopped teaching their children the language and started using English exclusively, but they were using this dialectal form of English influenced by their original language
And this /β˕/ sound didn't make it into Pa Dutch English, instead they adopt the usual /w/ and /v/ of English buuut they put them in non standard positions.
Essentially Pa Dutch speakers who could pronounce the /w/ vs /v/ distinction in English often couldn't do so consistently and these inconsistencies got 'set' so to speak when they passed it on to their kids, becoming lexically coded (i.e. individual speakers at that point were no longer mixing up W and V but rather words were set with one or the other but in nonstandard positions)
So as a kid I went to school in an area that had had a different regional accent than my own. After a couple years I picked up a lot of the local way of talking, and the things is I would switch. But when I switched I switched completely. I wouldn't mix and match, because that felt wrong.
1:34:10 I first thought I misheard but then I saw you reacting. I wonder if he mispoke or meant to say atamabaka instead of atamadaka. If it was a honest mistake, it was still funny.
100% with you on this. I was working with some Japanese coworkers for over a year, and speaking my basic japanese to them when able. And they'd teach me things here and there. Then one time, they taught me a new word which I repeated as i always do. and they laughed REALLY HARD. and I was like wait what was so funny? - I had perfect pitch accent when I said it, randomly. Having never done that before. over 1 year and they never even mentioned it, because of course my accent was wrong.
I was not aware that there was a "pitch-accent craze" or people against it, and I really don't care about it now after watching this, but some of the things in this guy's video triggered me sooo much. 😅 Not only in regard to learning Japanese, but any language really. The way he's phrasing things sounds needlessly hostile, despite what he's written in the description and pinned post...
For me personally, this attitude of "when you get good overall, your accent/pronunciation will also naturally get better" is such bs... I struggled so much with English, even though my level was quite good and I had no problems using it for listening, reading and writing. But speaking was hell, because my otherwise high level was clashing with my bad pronunciation. I was aware of my strong accent and some of my bad habits, but couldn't exactly pinpoint and fix them, and it was a constant source of embarrassment, especially when communicating with native speakers for work. Did they understand me? Yes. Did they ever correct me or say something about my pronunciation? Of course not; we got our work done and they didn't care about anything else. But it was bothering ME and getting in the way of MY speaking. So I started recording myself and trying to figure out where I was getting things wrong, but it wasn't until I scheduled classes with a proper speech therapist that I fully understood my mistakes and more importantly - how to fix them. After just a couple of lessons, I felt such a boost in my confidence and I could hear significant changes in the way I spoke; it was amazing and I will never regret the time and money spent on these classes.
So it really baffles me that there are people out there criticizing or even attacking those who put emphasis and importance on studying pitch accent, when it's an important part of the Japanese language, it's quite different than the stress accent most of us are used to, and not everyone will have the ears or time to acquire it by immersion. If the video was targeted towards the supposed "pitch accent fanatics", this should've been made way clearer. Being told that it's "useless", or will happen "naturally" in time, or that natives "don't give a f*ck" and thus we don't need to do anything about it, can be a pretty d*ck move. Because I've been the "I've watched a lot of anime and my native Japanese teacher praised me for my pronunciation, so it must be really good" person, until - like with English - I started recording myself and playing it back to my utmost horror and embarrassment. It sounded nothing like what I was hearing while speaking and I really wished my teaches had brought it up, instead of trying to "encourage" me with all the jouzus... I'm still not at the point where I've started actively studying pitch accent, but now I am at least aware of it, I make it a point to pay more attention when I'm listening and speaking, and I intend to give it some proper study time eventually. That should've been this guy's argument if he was addressing the people who obsess with pitch accent needlessly - just a simple "don't overthink it, but be aware of it". Instead, he went on a 20-minute rant with a lot of honestly bad "advice" and a mountain of anecdotal evidence, which can be countered with another mountain of anecdotal evidence...
Sorry for the long post. Like I said, it really bugged me, but I don't intend to give his video any extra views and comments, so I'm venting here. 😄
You are on the right path. It's not about perfection, but about getting better. Pitch is a part of the Japanese language and it is a kindness towards Japanese people to try to improve it. Because they have a better understanding of what you say.
People who are downplaying it, are trying to make themselves feel better about not paying attention to it, as Japanese is already a very difficult language.
Good idea about recording yourself, I am gonna try that too :D Good luck with your journey!
Didnt know you were at the University of Washington! I graduated from the tacoma campus. Heh
I’ll be honest, at the beginning of the video I thought it the intro text was deliberate, in that it was up for a while. I made a point to check and make sure I understood it as if there was a major point for it to be there… then I realized we were just waiting 😅. I blame the short dogen “punch line” clips 😅
One thing I've learned about myself is that when I hear people talk about the lack of importance of pitch accent (like the pitch accent is useless video), it takes a weight off my shoulders, whether correctly or not. I think myself and many others perceive the task of learning vocabulary, piecing together sentences, etc., difficult enough already that when someone brings up pitch accent, it feels a bit overwhelming. I think, "Are you telling me many words have patterns in how you're suppose to say them otherwise youre not even going to be understood?!"
In the end, I don't want to be delusional and stick my head in the sand and pretend pitch accent isn't important if it is, but for some reason the perceived difficulty of it does pose an obstacle to my motivation of continuing to learn Japanese.
That's probably the overall message the guy was trying to make with his video. Don't stress over pitch. Get exposure to native speakers. Rather than studying pitch accent for all the words under the sun in a studious fashion, just listen to people and repeat words the way they say them. The message isn't to abandon all sense of improvement in pitch accent, but that learners should be able to accept that they're still in the process of learning and don't need to be perfect in any particular aspect of the language to be considered "good."
The fact is that pitch accent is automatically included in the way native Japanese people talk. By exposing yourself to them, you're exposing yourself to pitch accent. It's not to say that you should go to Japan without any understanding of pitch accent, but that you don't need to labor over it for years on end before trying to communicate. Being mindful that pitch accent exists and is something that can be improved is often all one needs to take the steps to correct it. English speakers who are entirely unaware of pitch accent probably won't make any strides in improving pitch accent because they don't even know it's something to look out for, but English speakers who are aware of it and develop an ear for it will be able to improve upon it in their own speech over time even if they didn't do drill after drill to learn pitch accents for all the words before trying to speak the language.
@@annojance yea good point
having a "decent" Japanese accent (because I studied pitch accent) has opened so many more doors for me since people just take me more seriously. Having a good accent in any language is VERY underrated by our education systems.
this is like a three hour version of the video of the other vtubers making fun of korone speaking with the wrong pitch for haagen dazs
Guy accepts that “even learning a foreign language can affect your accent in subtle ways” but doesn’t seem to accept that the reverse is true and your native language will affect your second language in (almost certainly less subtle) ways that are fundamentally different and identifiable compared to the impact dialects will have within native speakers….
It honestly depends on your learning style. If you're a gestalt learner where you learn to speak by memorizing and scripting entire phrases, learning pitch accent is vital in order to *hear* the different words in the sentence and how to say them exactly and/or change your tone and pitch according to different social contexts. It's a manual learning process for many people who aren't neurotypical. If you're a gestalt learner even learning English as a native speaker is like learning a foreign language and you never feel fully fluent.
Even as a beginner in Japanese, it‘s obvious to me that pitch accent is absolutely important. Who would tell somebody who mispronounces half of their English words „That‘s OK, no need to work on that“? And in Japanese it‘s even worse, because the huge number of homonyms (if they are still called that if accents differ) means that it‘s not just a wrong pronunciation, it‘s an entirely wrong word.
In the same manner, as a German, I wouldn‘t tell someone who comes to me speaking a conglomerate of Bavarian, Saxon and Hamburg slang, that his German doesn‘t need some work.
I can definitely say that I wouldn‘t be content with that.
I wonder if the remark around 1:59:00 about "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is good" would be better understood as "Nobody cares about pitch if your pronunciation is clear". If you speak clearly like an audiobook narrator and enunciate well, then you'll probably almost always be understood regardless of pitch, but if you slur and speak fast and mumble and stumble over or approximate some mora like normal native speakers do at native speed, then not having a correct/recognizable pitch contour would probably make you *impossible* to understand.
Idk, I feel like at the end all this immersion guy is saying is that there are many factors to learning a language and if you hyper focus on one at the expense of all the rest, you're not going to get the results you want, and that being comfortable in the language is important. These are both pretty DUH points to be making, but he's framing it in a pretty weird way by saying pitch accent is purely useless. It depends on your goals, weaknesses, strengths.
I agree, but also see merit in questioning whether or not studying pitch-accent is best for everyone. Think he made a good video talking through a lot of his own experiences related to the phenomena.
Starting to learn Japanese and went to learn pitch accent for 2 main reasons:
(1) Accents are part of the language (not as much as Thai or Chinese but still),
(2) Pitch accent is like 5% of the workload to learn a word, so why not add it from the start?
(for me for a random word, kanji is like 60% of the workload to learn it, mora/pronunciation 20% and meaning like 15%)
With those videos, I'm perfectly aware that this knowledge may vary in the long run, but at least I know I will have a good foundation.
And I can try to speak without butchering everything.
(ah yes output is quite important IMHO, else that's how you end up NOT able to speak after years of learning)
Im on chapter 17 on busuu up to negative verbs and use Japanese from zero/genki am i cooking with right stuff? Also pitch accent isnt that complicated ngl basically just emphasis/how long or short word is dragged out is how i see it/visualize it easier. I also speak spanish and some words in Japanese sound the same and even 見て is close af to mira which is look in spanish and when speaking i sound the same high pitched like when i speak spanish
HAHAHAHA you need to work on that southern drawl a bit LOL :). "Kore wa 'Peen' desu."
It's true it's not his place to tell what people should care about, but it's good that the guy tries to put anxieties to rest for some people and bring some mundane reality into the mix. Because some people might inflate the stakes based on what they hear online
Random question: Will you sometime make a pitch accent course for other dialects? Do you speak other dialects or only standard Japanese? I believe you’re living in Kyushu so thought you might pick up the dialect for the prefecture you’re in? Since there’s not a ton of sources on those dialects I think it could be useful too, but maybe pain in the ass to create 😂
Probably not, as I think that it's definitely best to study standard Japanese. I understand Oita dialect perfectly, however.
If you listen to a lot of Japanese speech you can start to pick up on pitch accent unintentionally, at least for common phrases. I have a strong musical background so pitch of words has always been something that feels like an important aspect of pronunciation. Studying it directly confirmed a lot of intuition I had but it’s important to understand so you can learn new ones you haven’t heard much!
This is not true of most people. That's the whole point.
Me: Ain't no way I'm watching a 3-hour video
People who fell asleep with autoplay on:
That guy claims he learned entirely by listening, so he is a liar who should be ignored.
Pitch accent is not a scam. I wish I could afford your service because I think it would help me tremendously.
For the time being I'd encourage you to check out the free content on TH-cam! Here is a good place to start: th-cam.com/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/w-d-xo.html
@@Dogen Thank you.
That's exactly what I commented in his video: people started to correct me in both Japanese and pitch accent once I started watching your videos on patreon.
The fact that the dude says that no one he knows cares must say a lot about his ability. It's like he focused too much on pitch accent before he got enough input to fully understand it, immersed more, finally ended up getting to an okay level and then came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter.
Ironically he probably needs more input.
EDIT: They forced my wife to change a lot of her pitch accent when she was a secretary in Tokyo. Even as simple as picking up the phone. Co-workers have also corrected my un-solicited since I worked in customer service myself.
They didn't correct any of my non Japanese co workers because they'd straight up say, "We don't feel like they care enough to improve their Japanese for us to correct them". The Japanese people in question had almost flawless English accents and in turn judged Japanese accents. I didn't let them know I had studied pitch accent until after they tried to correct me more.
Same thing happens at my new workplace if I make slight unnatural mistakes or miss up pitch. Again, they had no idea I knew about pitch accent and in their case, still don't
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate, I've been picking up pitch accents for my earlier studies while continue ahead with my intermediate studies. so i feel like I'm still making progress.
but along this road I've been having a consistent issue with picking up pitch accents for any word that has i
り い し and so on, I'm having a great amount of trouble telling if the accent is going up or down, and the same goes for n since the word before seems to just go together too well. do you have any tips for getting over this hurdle? this goes to anyone who is studying pitch accents or if its just me.
I have noticed that if its しい together most of the time its going down if it isn't already down the likes of your 新しい 悲しい etc tend to look like hei ban but the い in most instances if not all instances i have encounted always goes down, and this may turn into a bad habbit if this rule is untrue....
this may just mean i need to practice and study more but any help would be much appreciated!
Many thanks,
V
I only judge those who don't have the mental capacity to simultaneously participate in the conversation like a human being and nitpick people's pronunciation mistakes like a human being.
For my Japanese studies currently pitch accent at the very bottom of my list. Only recently have begin to read, speak and keep up somewhat keep up with Japanese speakers with just my knowledge alone. It's thanks to studying kanji, shadowing, and various type of immersion training (Anime included). I still have only have the basic of Grammar down and I WANT to study that more. Should I study pitch accent too with everything else that I'm currently doing?
At the very least I would encourage you to check out the free lessons I have on youtube, as many of them will allow you to pick up on things you might otherwise take a fair bit of time to start noticing. If you find the information useful, then you may want to consider signing up for my course on Patreon, but of course no pressure either way, and think carefully before spending your money. Here's a good place to start:
th-cam.com/video/mxLwyrfRxEM/w-d-xo.html
It's a good dialectic, worth Dogen's 3-hr deep-dive. IG is affording the pitch-a-boo community good opposition to push back against.
After all, as an English speaker . . . do I want to sound like that guy?
I found the explanation of "intonation" to be quite off. Intonation isn't about "how far" your pitch goes up and down. It is about the change in pitch on a sentence level, as opposed to word-level (accent). Through intonation, you can indicate a question or what parts in your speech you want to highlight. Note that it's not simply expressed through a higher/lower pitch than usual, but rather through specific intonation patterns. To indicate a question, for example, you'd go up slowly in pitch at the end of the sentence. ５時？ as in "Is it five o'clock?" would have a drop first at ご↓ and go up again after じ↑ (this is called 疑問上昇 = doubtful rise). Another example is the 上昇下降 pattern (rise and fall) which could be used in order to prompt the listener to take a specific action as in 「ちょっとあなた⤴️⤵️。もういい加減に起きてくださいよ。」
This is certainly hard to indicate with just emojis...
Anyways, intonation has regional differences too, like in dialects of Nagoya or Kagoshima, where questions are indicated with a falling pitch towards the end.
Also, the claim that intonation is somehow much more important than pitch accent to sound native is just an opinion right? I certainly don't believe so, and considering the immersion guy's flawed understanding of the concept of "intonation" suggests that he doesn't really know what he is talking about either.
I agree with this, but didn't point it out because it wasn't really related to the main points of the debate and therefore felt a bit like splitting hairs. Cheers!
@@Dogen I figured so. Thanks for making such a detailed and amicable response to the original video. Not getting hostile and even highlighting some of the good points that are made is certainly the right approach
Many young people watch a lot of comedy on TV that uses Kansai-ben and will switch into a kind of 関西弁風味 when being funny. I tend to switch a lot between Shizuoka-ben, and imitation versions of Tokyo Japanese and Kansai Japanese because I live in Shizuoka but my closest relationships are with people from outside the prefecture. I don't believe that picking up dialectal elements of Japanese first will damage your learning in the long run, as many Japanese people pick up Tokyo Japanese as a kind of adult business voice anyway. As always in language learning the most important thing is to be aware of elements of the language because that's what lets you acquire them.
I think this is REALLY something like the learning style argument, some people might not need it, but for many people it will be necessary. It's like the immersion argument all over really.
I do think for English-speakers, pitch accent is something we need to spend some amount of effort on.
Also the "native speaking" use different pitch-accent argument is totally wrong. Japanese people are consistent with how they vary. (And there's a flow to how they vary - people in Tokyo from Aomori all sound the same.)
I don't understand why people try to hard to write off pitch accent. "It's not important", "you don't need to study", etc. The same argument can be done to a lot of other aspects of the language. It's a part of the language, why not study it? Study it!
Edit: 75% of the video in, and I have to say that the immersion guy is making a lot of moot points. He is generalizing exceptions. Exceptional people are not the norm. We are not them. Also, he seems to be confusing "accent" and "pitch accent". These are not the same thing.
Final edit: Finished the video, and I my feelings were true. The guy is finding justifications for himself. He is a "immersion supremacist", and thinks that you can simply learn everything just by immersion... while the many accounts of advanced japanese language students who didn't aquire pitch accent show that that's not so simple. So what does he do about it? Rethinks his position due to new data and tweeks his study method? No, he looks for justifications as to why this aspect of the language is not important, and makes moral judgement on people who say the contrary. Dougen has been really polite with this guy, but truth is most of this guy's conclusions don't follow from his initial observations. He is just trying to not change his ways, and to pretend to be right while doing that.
36:28 Good point and it should be reasonably obvious to anyone in an international environment regardless of specific language. When somebody sounds obviously like a foreigner, you are not going to be an ass and point it out every sentence. You are going to wholeheartedly enjoy that you can communicate at all.
But of course you do very clearly notice mistakes in pronunciation of your native language. And you automatically try to classify if the speaker is a foreigner, a native with a strong regional variation, or otherwise is maybe awkward or not good at speaking.
Natives commenting they don't care about pronunciation of other natives, well, are probably just being polite.
If JLPT decides to include an oral exam like other language certifications, I think the whole discussion will be different. Dogen might be even richer then :p
1:35:34 TIL that ha-TSU-on wasn't a mistake, but something subtly different from ha-TSU-ON