"Once you go down, you must _stay_ down." That made me laugh a little bit too hard. Also, I wonder if Japanese singers take pitch into consideration when writing songs.
Not really. Pitch accent is regional, and there is no "correct" regional dialect for songs. The Tokyo dialect is however used in official outlets, such as the news.
@@Thelaretus Chinese composers aren't supposed to ignore tone. Since Chinese is a tone-contour language, what really matters isn't the exact pitch of each tone, but the shape. As long as each word approximates the correct tone-contour, the meaning is obvious from context.
@@amarug I mean what you said was really relatable, like each time I think I’m making progress there’s something else to learn. That’s not a bad thing though since I’m still learning English and I’m a native...🤷🏾♀️
@@impactframes6514 haha yeah... i'm native in swiss german, german and finnish, yet i keep realizing that also there many things are still unknown to me 😁
@@stereotypicalLame intonation (n). - the rise and fall of the voice in speaking 10 seconds on google could've saved you some embarrassment. Intonation and pitch are the same thing.
@@magicstix0r This is actually wrong. Intonation is about volume, stress, power, not pitch. Pitch is frequency. Portuguese has intonation, but no pitch (at least none written out as rules).
Just as a personal anecdote, for those whose native language is a non-pitch / non-tonal language. I could not hear pitch accent *at all* at first, even though I did spend some time studying the terminology and understanding how it worked. The thing that helped me was sitting down and listening to native content *with the intention* of just listening for pitch accent, specifically long strings of 平板 words in a sentence to start (because it sticks out the most obvious to me). I remember using the audio book for ペンギン・ヘイウェイ, and also listening to the movie ラブ&ポップ, and I even still remember phrases with these long 平板 chains like 「唐突に変わるときがある」and 「大人も子供も」- which really stuck out to me. Once I was able to hear this pattern clearly, the other patterns started to become more obvious to me and I could recognize them pretty clearly in just my regular immersion with no extra effort listening for it. "It just clicked", you might say. Just have to get your foot in the door and let your brain do the rest :)
Some are literally tone deaf. In mandarin i cant hear any difference between tones 2,3 and 4. Ive tried. I simply cannot hear it. I never understood the concept of pitch in music. And still dont get it. I understand intonation in english but probably not all of it. I can pick up spiteful tones and the rest is more or less might hear it. Might not. Also most chinese have a genetic marker that enables them to hear tones better. I feel using tones for a word meaning is just god awful for the literal rest of the 2/3s of the human population. Japanese pitch accent isnt so bad. Just copy pitch length vs high or low. Cause i cant keep track
all languages have accent... including english... ask me how I used to pronounce 'schedule' and 'anxiety' before someone kindly explained me the correct pronunciation
@Susanne Eby If you can song to a melody you can do tones and pitch accent. Record youself singing the superman song or the imperial march, or even better Jaws (just the first few second) and compare to the original. You'll be suprise.
For non-Japanese people, since we may not have a pitch accent in our own languages, we often incorrectly hear the Japanese high pitch as "louder" or "given more stress". Your tip about using your abs to change pitch really helps make the high pitch without necessarily changing the stress or volume of the syllables!
It's not exactly difficult to do or learn and is even very helpful in distinguishing homophones. The only problem is that for some reason pitch accent isn't usually denoted in dictionaries. Accent should just be taught alongside the vocabulary to begin with like in any other language.
@@yum2735 i get that it’s useful but i didnt have many opportunities to learn it. ive taken japanese classes from highschool to college and pitch accent was only mentioned in passing, and we never focused on it. also yeah it wasnt in the dictionaries either
Been learning for some months and until now it's the same. Also, there's the hardest part of learning your language too (not native english speaker): the fucking TH sound. How did you guys create a monstruosity like that. That sound is produced in a similar way as V (THE) or F (THIEVE) and may sound as D (THE) for the first case or T (THOR) and even F (THING) for the second. Seriously, How could you come up with that?!
Could you also make a part 2 explaining the "sentence-level pitch accent"? Like, if you have a long sentence and you're speaking in a normal fluent way, how the sentence should sound.
@@GokuAnimePiano If you want to go in depth into Japanese pitch accent, the go to resource is a phonetics/pitch accent series on patreon/youtube by Dougen. The core of the series is like 30 episdoes
Worst thing about this is I had no idea pitch accent existed, but then i saw Dogen's "japanese is flat" video and after that I started practicing it. Thank you for making a lesson on pitch accent!
I find it weird that a lot of Japanese people call it "intonation". You hear all the time "I don't know the intonation". But what they mean is pitch accent. When I first started learning about pitch accent, I asked a Japanese coworker what they called pitch accent in Japanese. They told me "intonation". I know that is wrong, but so many Japanese people call it that now.
As an English speaker, I find pitch accent a little difficult. Since English is a stress-timed language, it's hard for me to not put stress on one mora only. It's hard to go from stress-timed to mora timed with a pitch accent.
Extraordinarily helpful!! I am so grateful for the way you teach!! I have been studying Japanese for a couple of years, and already created a similar color-coding for myself, but had never gotten this pitch-accent explained before!!! thank you!!
I'm glad that talking about and teaching pitch accent has become more common nowadays. Thank you for taking the time to go over stuff like this for Japanese learners. For the learners out there, it may seem intimidating at first, but you'll get used to hearing the pitch accents in words soon after being exposed to the idea. Then, overtime you'll become better and better at recognizing and imitating them in daily speech. I think it's important that everyone is exposed to pitch accent, especially in the beginning, Then, they'll get practice recognizing it from the beginning instead of having to spend a lot of time correcting a bad accent because they didn't know it even existed. To those just finding out about pitch accent late in their studies, don't worry. It's still correctable if you want to, but it may take a bit more time to fix any bad pronunciation habits that have developed.
I actually found this really helpful because I was not taught about the importance of pitch. It made sense now that some Japanese words are spelled the same but the pitch is what made the distinction between the two. ありがとうございます！
Wow, this must be the most useful video on pitch accent I've seen for the last two years I've been trying to understand the topic! Thank you very much!
Thank you for this, I know you said it's more important for advanced learners since it might give people the wrong impression, but I think it's essential to learn early on for learners at least the existence of pitch accent, because we really can't hear the difference unless we know to try listening for it, and thus we won't understand the difference between certain words without at least knowing the basics. I think for people who aren't concerned about having a foreign accent in Japanese it's not necessary to learn every words pitch accent, but to be aware will help you to listen and comprehend at least standard Japanese, and for people who do want to have a decent accent someday as their goal probably would appreciate learning about the existence of pitch accent sooner than many Japanese courses teach, because they'll learn words wrong and then have to go back and reform bad habits in their Japanese, which can be frustrating, especially when you're essentially having to do that anyway coming from English or other non-pitch accent/non tone languages to Japanese, because people from those languages aren't conscious of how they pronounce pitches unless they are a musician or know about pitch accent. Also thanks for teaching us how to pronounce famous memes, this is a very useful and fun video! *One note on the word 二本, it's cylindrical not sylindrical. English spelling is confusing and breaks rules all the time because we have loan words from so many languages with different pronunciation systems and we tend to imitate the spelling rules it's from sometimes.... ^.^' I think for most part Japanese is much more consistent with it's spelling rules than English even though the grammar is more complex. Thanks again for the video Misa-sensei!
I think it is not supposed to be cylindrical either. The word she says in the video is ‘slender’ meaning thin. And the word she is explaining in Japanese (I think) is hon / bon / pon, which is a counter for thin or slender things. So ‘ni hon’ 二本 (にほん) can mean two slender things, like two fingers.
I agree as well about learning early, I'm just starting out and trying to pick up on pitch accents since they are difficult to hear. I feel like learning later causes you to form bad habits you have to unlearn
I think it’s good to at least be aware, but stressing about it could stop you from starting haha. Just so you can pay attention and keep it in mind when you mimic words :-)
This video is so helpful!!! I wasn't able to understand what pitch was but your explanation and tips really helped me and I was able to finally repeat some words more correctly. I'm used to stress based languages so it never occured to me that you can use pitch... And that "pitch" is basically making your voice a little higher or lower (I know it must be obvious but I really didn't think of it like that I just felt like pitch is something super complicated and mysterious because I couldn't really register what the pitch really changes in a word I was looking for a wrong thing and got confused lol)
This is so useful, even for beginners like myself who didn't even know there was pitch in the Japanese language. Thank you so much, Misa San. Now i can be aware of pitch, even while i'm learning the basis, and my ear is going to look for those pitch changes that otherwise would have come unnoticed.
Oh my god flexing the abs is such an amazing tip, thank you so much! This makes it so much easier pronouncing the high pitch mora. Amazing video as always!
This was a great surprise. I would have never thought about looking up accent rules. it’ll be so much easier trying to remember how words are pronounced now, trying to hear the pitch changes
There are rules that define the pitch accent for certain kinds of words, but a way of memorising the pitch accent for specific words consists in associating a different colour to each pattern. For example, in my case the heiban pattern is associated with the blue colour, so in this case, for the word for nose ("hana"), I imagine a smurf's blue nose. In the case of the odaka pattern, I use the green colour, so in the case of "hana" when it means flower, I imagine a flower in the middle of a pasture of green grass.
It's worth mentioning the Migaku Japanese (Previously MIA Japanese) Anki Add-on does this as a feature, it also has graphics somewhat similar to what みさ先生 has on screen in this video which I find extremely helpful.
I find this way of learning pitch strange. Recalling the colour associated with a given word before you can produce it seems like it would make fluid speech impossible.
Misa I've been watching your videos for years since you were a small channel. My Japanese has definitely grown thanks to you, I'm honestly so happy you decided to cover pitch accent I struggle with it so much and every time I talk about it no one knows what I'm talking about.
I see those D&D books back there. Have you ever thought about doing a Japanese language D&D stream? That's something I'd love to see. It could be a really good resource/listening exercise for learners! Just a thought...
This is literally the most important video I have ever seen for Japanese. Despite being beginners, no one wants to sound like a foreigner. This is such a good video, thank you, sensei
I am far from getting to this point in my own studies yet, but I'm glad I found this video anyway. It answered a question I had when listening and trying to emulate native speakers. The course I'm learning from pointed out that there is no stress accent in Japanese like I have in my native English, but naturally I noticed the pitches and that there are sort of accents to words and I couldn't figure out what that was about. This answered that question for me so perfectly and made it super easy to understand. Thank you so much for making this. 💕
This was really helpful, I was struggling a lot to link the sound of the particles with the words at their sides, but I feel like I get it now. Thanks!
Omg girl you completely saved my life with this video cause it’s been weeks since I started searching info on this and I couldn’t really understand it. Now I do, thank you Misa!! ありがとうございました！💕✨
I'm glad I was blessed as a Brazilian. In my language, we tend to put the strongest syllable as the last one in words we don't know. So, for me, in the Japanese language there is the word with the "Brazilian accent" and the word with the "Japanese accent". "chopstick", for me, has a Japanese accent and "bridge" has a Portuguese accent.
also, this entire pitch thing is very similar to stress in portuguese, like Rain and Candy are just Áme and Amê. The only thing you need to do is to consider the high pitch as the stressed syllabes and add a higher pitched voice to them.
Great video! Pitch accent is actually one of those things that are easier to learn when exagerated to the extreme, then toned down. Because a lot of people have problems discering more subtle pitch changes. Amime often has extremely exaggerated pitch accents (and accents more generally), so it is useful listening practice. I find it easier to mimick those extremes than, say, a "normal" Japanese speaker. The same is true for news anchors, radio hosts, commercial voice-overs, story narrators, etc. They're easy to immitate. My wife (who is Japanese) hates it when I immitate those voices 😅 But her parents find it hilarious.
Honestly I wished I was taught that since my very first vocabulary lessons. I made the effort to systematically learn the kanji with each word I learnt, I wished I was taught about this and I could've learn what pitch accent was associated with it. Thank you Misa, as always, for your great lessons!!
In my experience with talking to Japanese people about pitch accent, they tend to call it "intonation" or just express that the "foreignness" of your words are due to the "wrong intonation." I've read that Japanese people aren't taught much about pitch accent, and this is why, but I don't know definitively. It does make sense though, because stress is extremely important in English, but we don't "learn" stress, we just do it, and learn vocabulary and grammar and such. The stress comes naturally, and it's very obvious when it's wrong.
{Sorry for rambling as I suddenly decide to remember and sort ideas out as I type which makes it even longer} Idk if it's because I've been on TH-cam too long and ppl around me tend to have *very* varied speaking levels etc. , but I find it somewhat difficult to use the right accent/stress/pitch/intonation in English (I seem to be fine w/ other languages strangely) An example would be like Ts - I'm always like "must pronounce the Ts", but then I might be like "I sound weird", doesn't pronounce the T, "okay, why is this also strange" (Idk, sth like 'better'? Like it can be pronounced as 'bet-tah', 'be-tuh', 'be'er' ... , right? Or like 'this' - 'thuh-i-suh', 'dis'???) I also think I have a slightly deeper English voice (or it could just be from me unconsciously trying to use a deeper voice because I don't have a deep voice) because I tend to sound rushed and/or somewhat monotone - but then again, that could just be from me being tired all the time, but I kinda get the impression that in my non-nervous voice (my voice goes higher/faster when nervous, but apparently other ppl don't notice so maybe it's just my imagination), I sound like I'm very not bothered to do anything or just really sad (I feel like I get asked whether I'm fine or not a lot.....I know I kind of rub my eyes a lot, but when I have watery eyes, ppl *don't* ask so it's kinda strange but I also think my voice is in a 'kinda-nervous-state' so maybe I sound more emotional???).... [Context - if it makes a difference : HK Chinese in UK so I've always been surrounded by English/Mandarin/Cantonese to some capacity + kinda learned French/Spanish ('cuz mandatory lessons @ school - would've been great if our year group could've chosen the language to learn in high school because I changed schools and it became difficult to differentiate them....but y'know, it's not like everyone was annoyed the year below us {and the occasional new students} got to choose when all of us who chose languages {I forgot if it's a mandatory humanities subject along w/ History/Geography/sthelse?} were stuck w/ French for the next few yrs.......rly wanted to learn Spanish at that point in time...) + Japanese/Korean from anime/songs/shows]
@@606aichan7O7 English is difficult because there’s a lot of different accents, and you can mess around with what vowel sounds you use a LOT. Even within one dialect.
Thank you, Misa-sensei, for another great lesson. I was looking for a pitch accent introduction for a while but most of the resources I found are either super convoluted or "you just need to memorize every single word and you're good" type. Plus - poop jokes are always welcome!
The accent is similar to spanish, we use á in the line in top of a letter to pronounce the accent. If I were to write the two あめ in a spanish way it would be like this: áme & amé
@Yossi Hofi You are indeed right my dude, I live in Mexico and we are always taught to use “acentos” to differentiate the words, though in common practice some people use pitch to mark the accent. Going from “Mi papá es el papa y come papa” (my father is the pope and eats potato) to my father is the father and eats father. Though papa and papa are written the same, pitch is implicitly used to differentiate them.
That's how I explained Japanese to my Hispanic friends (I speak both j and Spanish. I wish English had accent marks sometimes lol) Using Spanish syllablary made it a lot easier to explain!
if you haven't worked with a language that emphasizes tones before, yes. however, i feel like most ppl are just too lazy to practice. language learning is all about discipline and there's really no shortcuts.
it doesn't have to be about discipline, the most efficient way is to just talk to native speakers in their language about stuff you like and naturally absorb their way of speaking, it's already a natural impulse the human brain does and your memory is based on emotional attachment, so the stronger emotional connection to the memory, the easier it will be to remember that and to have that affecting you and your behaviour. Being a discipline paranoid studying in books logistically and praticing alone without talking to anyone with no emotional investment is just stupid. Even if you don't have anyone to talk to in the language, emotional investment is just overwhelmingly superior to discipline, that's how humans evolved to work since the development of the neural system.
Native speakers don't know any formal rule if it's not taugh them, they just use all the rules without noticing because they absorbed these speaking manners from society around them. You don't learn how to read to then be instructed in every logical rule to then learn how to speak your language.
@@SimonR4y Tilde is the actual character (´), "acento" is the stress accent, whether it has "tilde" or not. But I agree there's not pitch accent in Spanish.
Thank you so much for what you do. I'll be moving to Japan in a few months, and I can honestly say it never would have happened if I hadn't stumbled across your videos a few years ago. Really, thank you.
This video was incredibly informative! Thank you for all your hard work in editing and explaining this one! I was familiar with pitch accent vaguely but this video taught me so much, especially the abs trick. I felt like I had a workout! Thank you and I'm really looking forward to the next video :)
My native language is Spanish, so is easy for me to understand, we have that change of pitch in the words using this symbol " ´ " in the syllables, for example, rain would be " ame ", and candy would be " amé ". I Love your channel, this is very useful content!! I'll be a japanese speaker in my third trip to Japan!
it's not the same thing. in spanish, the "accents" (these symbols ´ ` ~) are actually called diacritics. They make the syllable longer and louder, but not necessarily higher pitched. you could still change the pitches depending on the sentence. I'll give you an example: if you ask if they (a group) are young, you would say: son jóvenes ?? and the pitch for the word "jóvenes" is actually low high high, and not high low low. So even though the ´ is on the first syllable it's pronounced low pitched.
@@TheTTax I know is not the same, but, I mean that we are used to the change of pitch and tones of the words using these symbols that doesn't exist in english, that's why you don't know if is (read in spanish)"tomeiro" or "tomato". In spanish is written explicitly how the words should be pronounce.
@@benjigoenitz the accents only say the length and stress of the word, it doesn't say what pitch! And in any give sentence, you could pronounce all the pitches all different and no one would notice anything different. Accents in Spanish are irrelevant to pitch
just for her to come in the end and so "oh, no, nobody actually uses this stuff, only in Tōkyō and standard formal japanese, japanese ppl don't actually know or use this"
Don't worry so much, you'll get it with practice and by hearing Japanese enough. It's really shakey to guess what the correct accent is, but once you hear a word used enough, it'll sound weird when someone uses the wrong pitch. For example, try saying some english words with the wrong pitch accent like "wa➚TER" instead of "WA➘ter", "ap➚PLE" instead of "AP➘ple", or "ci➚TY" instead of "CI➘ty" (Most 2-syllable english words have high-low pitch accent.) Or hopefully if you've seen Dragonball Z in english, the main character's name is pronounced "GO➘ku", and if you grew up hearing that, it sounds weird when Japanese people pronounce his name with correct pitch accent "Go➚KUU". Or Vice-versa. English is more of a stress accent language, so words like "Uni-VER-sity" would sound off if someone stresses the wrong syllables like "UNI-versity" or "univer-SITY". Another way of looking at it is how valley girls sound weird for raising the pitch accent of every last word in every sentence, making everything they say sound like a question. "Oh my gosh? Today was really hot?? I got all sweaty??? I can't wait to drink water???" You didn't have to learn any of this in english, you just got it from experience. It's similar with Japanese. It may take some practice to be able to hear the different pitches, but once you learn the rules and become really familar with words, you won't have to think about it. It also really helps if you can refer to a specific character saying a quote in a unique way, kind of like how people remember movie quotes like "GET TO THE CHOPPA!" I have some Japanese quotes in my head like from K-On!, Yui says "a➚RE? MI➘ma➚CHIGAE➘ta!" And I can recreate the exact way she said the phrase in my head. I don't even think about this quote necessarily, I've just mapped the pronunciation of those words to my memory of her saying them, and it sticks. I wouldn't say it with a random pitch accent because I have her example in the back of my mind. With light study and lots of immersion, you'll learn pitch accent, too. 頑張って！
@@adrithmanvik1853 Thanku. One thing I'd like to add is looking up the pitches helps a ton. Since most people don't have the skill to hear pitches, they can confuse them easily. Looking them up in a pitch-accent dictionary clears this problem up and makes pitch easier to remember. So far, I've been making Anki cards to test for pitch and meaning separately, but both decks have the same information. Peoples' intuition to use their native pitch accent is really strong. Japanese pitch cannot be guessed, it must be studied through immersion, and looking up the pitches removes a lot of guessing.
Learning this just shows me how much more complex Japanese is as a language than most, it's actually incredible, but I am beginning to understand it at least a little bit. I think at least for my learning style it is easier for me to get the bigger picture thinking first and then get into the details, though. Learning all of these ups and downs is confusing but as soon as you pointed out in the bigger context of the sentence that the low-to-high/low-to-high/low-to-high thing was happening and that is the audible separation of words it started to click. Again, this just demonstrates how incredible of a teacher you are, Misa. These kinds of concepts are difficult to learn, even more difficult to master, and then it's probably even more difficult to break it back down and explain it to someone who doesn't even know that it existed in the first place lol. You're so awesome!
I wish I could remember the website I saw back in the day that had recorded differences in pitch accent between various Japanese dialects. I primarily lived i OIta, Japan and hearing some of the drastic differences between the Oita accent and the Saga and Kumamoto accents was pretty interesting/amusing. For those that don't want to use Google, Saga, Oita, and Kumamoto are different prefectures on the Japanese island of Kyushu. If you're looking for a good time get a group of Japanese people together from different parts of the country, introduce alcohol, and get them to start sharing their local dialects with one another. Hilarity ensues.
I have been studying Japanese since April on my own and among all the channels on youtube regarding Japanese lessons you're the best japanese teacher I have found, you're content is perfect
This is where I struggle. I have no problem "hearing" the pitch at all. My problem is I am unable to replicate it. My brain and my mouth won't cooperate.
This is my favorite channel to learn Japanese, arigato gozaimasu. While learning to write kanji is more difficult so learning to speak it is my first goal. Arigato gozaimasu Misa-sensei.
But if you really think of it, 箸 (はし/Chopsticks) are just a 橋 (はし/Bridge) between your plate and your mouth for the food to cross. So was I speaking wrongly, or was I just speaking in metaphor? :3 - My expert advice on how to never get invited to a dinner party ever again
We have something similar in English! For example, the word "contract." The meaning changes depending on which part of the word you emphasize. If you stress the first part (CONtract), its a noun which means a written or spoken agreement that can be enforced by law (e.g. sign the contract) If you stress the last part (conTRACT), its a verb which means to decrease in size, number, or range (e.g. muscles contract)
@@CollMomo1 i know it's pedantic, but it's worth noting that the stressed syllables in English are higher-pitched, so there is at least a slight similarity for shorter words
it is still the exact very same idea, you just have to add a higher pitch to the stressed syllabe and voilà, japanese. You don't have to learn it completely from the scratch like it was something completely and you had never seen anything similar to it.
TY SO MUCH FOR ALL THE EFFORT! I've watched your "Teaching japanese with song" like 10 times! Each! Yep the 1 hour long ones! I liked the videos about japanese history/culture! I'm on a 3-4 ish lvl and I'm lacking a ton vocabulary that's why I love those vids the most!!
Probably the most fascinating thing is that I kinda learned that intuitively just by mimicking natives' pronunciation of the words. Anyways, awesome lesson Misa-sensei!
Japanese does not have tones. What it does have is pitch which is NOT crucial. If you don't get "proper" pitch but you do everything else right the worst that will happen is that you will sound a little "Foreign" which you are.
As she mentions at the very end of the video, she is teaching standard Tokyo pitch accent. The accent in the Kansai area is very different. I learned most of my Japanese when in Osaka so listening to pitch accent rules for standard Japanese just confuses me.
Not sure if Misa will continue her lessons about JPA, so you can look up Dogen. He has an awesome and detailed explanation of the JPA on his channel, but most of it is for patreons so you will have to search for the videos yourself. They are out there, somewhere. What Misa-sensei talks about is extremely important. You will be surprised by how much it helps understanding and being understood. After some time you should focus on vocabulary, grammar and kanji, preferably at the same time. By that I mean vocab and kanji and with them goes grammar.
as a beginner and have pitch problems most especially in signing, this video is very enlightening. but i must admit, it is hilarious at the same time. thank you so much for all the effort you put into editing. 🥰
We Serbs have pitch accent as well, and even more so then in Japanese so for us it´s easy to comprehend all of that. I feel sorry for my american friends that are struggling with this. :D
thank you for the tips Misa sensei. I am stick to your channel now, every day I follow you to talk alone in front of my laptop. it makes me feel like I am attending real class and even better than any teacher I have met to be honest and English is not my mother language.
It must take forever to create all those graphics on screen, but they're SUPER helpful, thanks!
googleboughtmee Yes, I think so too. I am a creator as well and this takes certainly long... :D And then also,the fantastic color coding...
"Once you go down, you must _stay_ down." That made me laugh a little bit too hard.
Also, I wonder if Japanese singers take pitch into consideration when writing songs.
Not really. Pitch accent is regional, and there is no "correct" regional dialect for songs. The Tokyo dialect is however used in official outlets, such as the news.
They don’t
I thought the rule was "Fall seven times, rise eight."
@@kappa_ferro It has nothing to do with regional dialects.
@@Thelaretus Chinese composers aren't supposed to ignore tone. Since Chinese is a tone-contour language, what really matters isn't the exact pitch of each tone, but the shape. As long as each word approximates the correct tone-contour, the meaning is obvious from context.
everytime i start gaining some little bit of confidence in my Japanese, a new monster waits around the corner... 😂
If that isn't the biggest mood ever Idk what is
Lol right😂
@@impactframes6514 what do you mean?
@@amarug I mean what you said was really relatable, like each time I think I’m making progress there’s something else to learn. That’s not a bad thing though since I’m still learning English and I’m a native...🤷🏾♀️
@@impactframes6514 haha yeah... i'm native in swiss german, german and finnish, yet i keep realizing that also there many things are still unknown to me 😁
CORRECTION!!
12:18 もう should be "HIGH - LOW" (atama-daka-gata).
(My pitch accent was fine, it's just wrong in the subtitles.)
Thank god, I was watching this thinking my ears were bad because I heard “high-low” haha
Same haha, thanks for clearing that up! I thought I was pronouncing mou wrong this entire time!
@@marksutherin1987 When it means "already" it's high-low. When it means "another" it's low-high.
Ohh thanks!! That cleared up a lot of confusion for me.
ナニ
Japanese teachers: "Japanese is a flat language."
Also Japanese teachers: This video.
Intonation is pretty flat. All syllables have the same stress.
@@stereotypicalLame were you even watching the video? No, intonation isn't flat in Japanese.
@@magicstix0r you're doing just like she said in the video and conflating pitch with intonation
@@stereotypicalLame intonation (n). -
the rise and fall of the voice in speaking
10 seconds on google could've saved you some embarrassment.
Intonation and pitch are the same thing.
@@magicstix0r This is actually wrong. Intonation is about volume, stress, power, not pitch. Pitch is frequency. Portuguese has intonation, but no pitch (at least none written out as rules).
Every time I hear the phrase “japanese pitch accent”, I only think of Dogen
残念ですね
日本語上手😂😂
マジでそれな
日本語はフラットですか？ *hand gesture*
私も。😭😂
Finally! A pitch accent lesson from Misa sensei! Was hoping for one for ages,ever since I found Dougen!
Your pfp scares me
This is what I needed. I wish there was more on phoenics.
@@prizmarvalschi1319 Heeeeeey what's going on!
- Dugtrio
Just as a personal anecdote, for those whose native language is a non-pitch / non-tonal language.
I could not hear pitch accent *at all* at first, even though I did spend some time studying the terminology and understanding how it worked. The thing that helped me was sitting down and listening to native content *with the intention* of just listening for pitch accent, specifically long strings of 平板 words in a sentence to start (because it sticks out the most obvious to me). I remember using the audio book for ペンギン・ヘイウェイ, and also listening to the movie ラブ&ポップ, and I even still remember phrases with these long 平板 chains like 「唐突に変わるときがある」and 「大人も子供も」- which really stuck out to me. Once I was able to hear this pattern clearly, the other patterns started to become more obvious to me and I could recognize them pretty clearly in just my regular immersion with no extra effort listening for it. "It just clicked", you might say. Just have to get your foot in the door and let your brain do the rest :)
Thank you for the advice! This is encouraging
Some are literally tone deaf. In mandarin i cant hear any difference between tones 2,3 and 4. Ive tried. I simply cannot hear it. I never understood the concept of pitch in music. And still dont get it. I understand intonation in english but probably not all of it. I can pick up spiteful tones and the rest is more or less might hear it. Might not. Also most chinese have a genetic marker that enables them to hear tones better. I feel using tones for a word meaning is just god awful for the literal rest of the 2/3s of the human population. Japanese pitch accent isnt so bad. Just copy pitch length vs high or low. Cause i cant keep track
all languages have accent... including english... ask me how I used to pronounce 'schedule' and 'anxiety' before someone kindly explained me the correct pronunciation
@Susanne Eby If you can song to a melody you can do tones and pitch accent.
Record youself singing the superman song or the imperial march, or even better Jaws (just the first few second) and compare to the original. You'll be suprise.
@@danielnoriega6655 but that is not pitch accent. That is what is called stress accent. Some languages have pitch accent and some have stress accent.
For non-Japanese people, since we may not have a pitch accent in our own languages, we often incorrectly hear the Japanese high pitch as "louder" or "given more stress". Your tip about using your abs to change pitch really helps make the high pitch without necessarily changing the stress or volume of the syllables!
Been learning Japanese for 4 years and I swear pitch accent is the hardest part for me
same
It's not exactly difficult to do or learn and is even very helpful in distinguishing homophones. The only problem is that for some reason pitch accent isn't usually denoted in dictionaries. Accent should just be taught alongside the vocabulary to begin with like in any other language.
@@yum2735 i get that it’s useful but i didnt have many opportunities to learn it. ive taken japanese classes from highschool to college and pitch accent was only mentioned in passing, and we never focused on it. also yeah it wasnt in the dictionaries either
@@yum2735 The pitch accent is noted in pretty much all Japanese dictionaries (except for 広辞苑 because 広辞苑 is garbage).
Been learning for some months and until now it's the same. Also, there's the hardest part of learning your language too (not native english speaker): the fucking TH sound. How did you guys create a monstruosity like that. That sound is produced in a similar way as V (THE) or F (THIEVE) and may sound as D (THE) for the first case or T (THOR) and even F (THING) for the second. Seriously, How could you come up with that?!
Could you also make a part 2 explaining the "sentence-level pitch accent"? Like, if you have a long sentence and you're speaking in a normal fluent way, how the sentence should sound.
I second this
I made a lot of research about it, but i didn't found any great video about sentence-level pitch accent. If you found something please tell me.
@@GokuAnimePiano If you want to go in depth into Japanese pitch accent, the go to resource is a phonetics/pitch accent series on patreon/youtube by Dougen. The core of the series is like 30 episdoes
Worst thing about this is I had no idea pitch accent existed, but then i saw Dogen's "japanese is flat" video and after that I started practicing it. Thank you for making a lesson on pitch accent!
So happy that you've put out a video about pitch accent, it's something I've been trying to work on recently!
Me: Japanese pitch accent is weird.
Chinese (4-6 tones) : “Hold my TsingTao 🍺”
Wobé (14 tones): Hold my ivories
@Mehmet Volintine kay(f)bop(t): Hold my hats
@@DoctorDeath147 ubykh: "hold my 49 consonant phonemes"
@@iphily20 Tsez: hold my 64 grammar cases
@@DoctorDeath147 french: "hold my gender-specific lexicon"
I find it weird that a lot of Japanese people call it "intonation". You hear all the time "I don't know the intonation". But what they mean is pitch accent. When I first started learning about pitch accent, I asked a Japanese coworker what they called pitch accent in Japanese. They told me "intonation". I know that is wrong, but so many Japanese people call it that now.
well according to the definition of "intonation" they are not that far off: "the rise and fall of the voice in speaking."
As an English speaker, I find pitch accent a little difficult. Since English is a stress-timed language, it's hard for me to not put stress on one mora only. It's hard to go from stress-timed to mora timed with a pitch accent.
English is also pretty linear.
"Let's be normal"
So even Misa is calling me out now
Extraordinarily helpful!! I am so grateful for the way you teach!! I have been studying Japanese for a couple of years, and already created a similar color-coding for myself, but had never gotten this pitch-accent explained before!!! thank you!!
I'm glad that talking about and teaching pitch accent has become more common nowadays. Thank you for taking the time to go over stuff like this for Japanese learners. For the learners out there, it may seem intimidating at first, but you'll get used to hearing the pitch accents in words soon after being exposed to the idea. Then, overtime you'll become better and better at recognizing and imitating them in daily speech. I think it's important that everyone is exposed to pitch accent, especially in the beginning, Then, they'll get practice recognizing it from the beginning instead of having to spend a lot of time correcting a bad accent because they didn't know it even existed. To those just finding out about pitch accent late in their studies, don't worry. It's still correctable if you want to, but it may take a bit more time to fix any bad pronunciation habits that have developed.
みさ先生、ありがとうございます！ This will definitely help me with my Japanese orals! I'm still a baby in my language journey but you've helped me a lot so far!
I actually found this really helpful because I was not taught about the importance of pitch. It made sense now that some Japanese words are spelled the same but the pitch is what made the distinction between the two. ありがとうございます！
Wow, this must be the most useful video on pitch accent I've seen for the last two years I've been trying to understand the topic!
Thank you very much!
Thank you for this, I know you said it's more important for advanced learners since it might give people the wrong impression, but I think it's essential to learn early on for learners at least the existence of pitch accent, because we really can't hear the difference unless we know to try listening for it, and thus we won't understand the difference between certain words without at least knowing the basics. I think for people who aren't concerned about having a foreign accent in Japanese it's not necessary to learn every words pitch accent, but to be aware will help you to listen and comprehend at least standard Japanese, and for people who do want to have a decent accent someday as their goal probably would appreciate learning about the existence of pitch accent sooner than many Japanese courses teach, because they'll learn words wrong and then have to go back and reform bad habits in their Japanese, which can be frustrating, especially when you're essentially having to do that anyway coming from English or other non-pitch accent/non tone languages to Japanese, because people from those languages aren't conscious of how they pronounce pitches unless they are a musician or know about pitch accent. Also thanks for teaching us how to pronounce famous memes, this is a very useful and fun video! *One note on the word 二本, it's cylindrical not sylindrical. English spelling is confusing and breaks rules all the time because we have loan words from so many languages with different pronunciation systems and we tend to imitate the spelling rules it's from sometimes.... ^.^' I think for most part Japanese is much more consistent with it's spelling rules than English even though the grammar is more complex. Thanks again for the video Misa-sensei!
I think it is not supposed to be cylindrical either. The word she says in the video is ‘slender’ meaning thin. And the word she is explaining in Japanese (I think) is hon / bon / pon, which is a counter for thin or slender things. So ‘ni hon’ 二本 (にほん) can mean two slender things, like two fingers.
I agree as well about learning early, I'm just starting out and trying to pick up on pitch accents since they are difficult to hear. I feel like learning later causes you to form bad habits you have to unlearn
I think it’s good to at least be aware, but stressing about it could stop you from starting haha. Just so you can pay attention and keep it in mind when you mimic words :-)
This video is so helpful!!! I wasn't able to understand what pitch was but your explanation and tips really helped me and I was able to finally repeat some words more correctly. I'm used to stress based languages so it never occured to me that you can use pitch... And that "pitch" is basically making your voice a little higher or lower (I know it must be obvious but I really didn't think of it like that I just felt like pitch is something super complicated and mysterious because I couldn't really register what the pitch really changes in a word I was looking for a wrong thing and got confused lol)
This is so useful, even for beginners like myself who didn't even know there was pitch in the Japanese language. Thank you so much, Misa San. Now i can be aware of pitch, even while i'm learning the basis, and my ear is going to look for those pitch changes that otherwise would have come unnoticed.
Very useful lesson. I've been waiting for such an explanation for a long time. And with Japanese grammar names makes it priceless. Thanks very much
Oh my god flexing the abs is such an amazing tip, thank you so much! This makes it so much easier pronouncing the high pitch mora. Amazing video as always!
Hope to see more of your very instructional videos Misa! Thank you!!
INTERESTING! also: what a good teacher, and great presentation. Awesome speaker
Your ab technique is super helpful for me as a beginner. It made it so much easier. Thank you for your videos!
As soon as I heard "Un", I knew where it was going 🤣
We all did.
It's the first pitch-accent related example you learn, for good reason I guess.
Timestamp please? I wanna be a part of this joke lol
Edit: ok I think I got it 😂😂
I learnt unko from Mr Yabatan 😂😂
awesome video! and your elegant onscreen graphics make it so much better!
btw, i love your galarian ponyta!
I like how she writes them in hiragana for beginner/ intermediate learners
This was a great surprise. I would have never thought about looking up accent rules. it’ll be so much easier trying to remember how words are pronounced now, trying to hear the pitch changes
There are rules that define the pitch accent for certain kinds of words, but a way of memorising the pitch accent for specific words consists in associating a different colour to each pattern. For example, in my case the heiban pattern is associated with the blue colour, so in this case, for the word for nose ("hana"), I imagine a smurf's blue nose. In the case of the odaka pattern, I use the green colour, so in the case of "hana" when it means flower, I imagine a flower in the middle of a pasture of green grass.
Wow that is fascinating, I will try that!
It's worth mentioning the Migaku Japanese (Previously MIA Japanese) Anki Add-on does this as a feature, it also has graphics somewhat similar to what みさ先生 has on screen in this video which I find extremely helpful.
@@t0asted611 thats right thats how i came into this
Do you know where we can find those rules?
I find this way of learning pitch strange. Recalling the colour associated with a given word before you can produce it seems like it would make fluid speech impossible.
Misa I've been watching your videos for years since you were a small channel. My Japanese has definitely grown thanks to you,
I'm honestly so happy you decided to cover pitch accent I struggle with it so much and every time I talk about it no one knows what I'm talking about.
I see those D&D books back there. Have you ever thought about doing a Japanese language D&D stream? That's something I'd love to see. It could be a really good resource/listening exercise for learners! Just a thought...
YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!!
I agree!!
Super useful video! This is the most understandable explanation I have seen so far.
Thank you!
This is literally the most important video I have ever seen for Japanese. Despite being beginners, no one wants to sound like a foreigner. This is such a good video, thank you, sensei
This is what i needed for so long...
ありがとうね!みさ先生!😍
"This lesson is not about how to say poop in Japanese"
it is now
😂😂😂😂
4:30
I am far from getting to this point in my own studies yet, but I'm glad I found this video anyway. It answered a question I had when listening and trying to emulate native speakers. The course I'm learning from pointed out that there is no stress accent in Japanese like I have in my native English, but naturally I noticed the pitches and that there are sort of accents to words and I couldn't figure out what that was about. This answered that question for me so perfectly and made it super easy to understand. Thank you so much for making this. 💕
This was really helpful, I was struggling a lot to link the sound of the particles with the words at their sides, but I feel like I get it now. Thanks!
Omg girl you completely saved my life with this video cause it’s been weeks since I started searching info on this and I couldn’t really understand it. Now I do, thank you Misa!! ありがとうございました！💕✨
Really awesomely explained! Pitch accent is so often overlooked!
I'm glad I was blessed as a Brazilian. In my language, we tend to put the strongest syllable as the last one in words we don't know. So, for me, in the Japanese language there is the word with the "Brazilian accent" and the word with the "Japanese accent". "chopstick", for me, has a Japanese accent and "bridge" has a Portuguese accent.
also, this entire pitch thing is very similar to stress in portuguese, like Rain and Candy are just Áme and Amê. The only thing you need to do is to consider the high pitch as the stressed syllabes and add a higher pitched voice to them.
Todo lugar que eu vou, tem um brasileiro nos comentários, estamos em todo lugar °^°) omg
Great video! Pitch accent is actually one of those things that are easier to learn when exagerated to the extreme, then toned down. Because a lot of people have problems discering more subtle pitch changes. Amime often has extremely exaggerated pitch accents (and accents more generally), so it is useful listening practice. I find it easier to mimick those extremes than, say, a "normal" Japanese speaker. The same is true for news anchors, radio hosts, commercial voice-overs, story narrators, etc. They're easy to immitate. My wife (who is Japanese) hates it when I immitate those voices 😅 But her parents find it hilarious.
YES, I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS. 教えてくれてありがとうございます! 😭💖💖
"Once you go down you stay down" ... I felt that
Honestly I wished I was taught that since my very first vocabulary lessons. I made the effort to systematically learn the kanji with each word I learnt, I wished I was taught about this and I could've learn what pitch accent was associated with it. Thank you Misa, as always, for your great lessons!!
In my experience with talking to Japanese people about pitch accent, they tend to call it "intonation" or just express that the "foreignness" of your words are due to the "wrong intonation."
I've read that Japanese people aren't taught much about pitch accent, and this is why, but I don't know definitively. It does make sense though, because stress is extremely important in English, but we don't "learn" stress, we just do it, and learn vocabulary and grammar and such. The stress comes naturally, and it's very obvious when it's wrong.
{Sorry for rambling as I suddenly decide to remember and sort ideas out as I type which makes it even longer}
Idk if it's because I've been on TH-cam too long and ppl around me tend to have *very* varied speaking levels etc. , but I find it somewhat difficult to use the right accent/stress/pitch/intonation in English (I seem to be fine w/ other languages strangely)
An example would be like Ts - I'm always like "must pronounce the Ts", but then I might be like "I sound weird", doesn't pronounce the T, "okay, why is this also strange"
(Idk, sth like 'better'? Like it can be pronounced as 'bet-tah', 'be-tuh', 'be'er' ... , right?
Or like 'this' - 'thuh-i-suh', 'dis'???)
I also think I have a slightly deeper English voice (or it could just be from me unconsciously trying to use a deeper voice because I don't have a deep voice) because I tend to sound rushed and/or somewhat monotone - but then again, that could just be from me being tired all the time, but I kinda get the impression that in my non-nervous voice (my voice goes higher/faster when nervous, but apparently other ppl don't notice so maybe it's just my imagination), I sound like I'm very not bothered to do anything or just really sad (I feel like I get asked whether I'm fine or not a lot.....I know I kind of rub my eyes a lot, but when I have watery eyes, ppl *don't* ask so it's kinda strange but I also think my voice is in a 'kinda-nervous-state' so maybe I sound more emotional???)....
[Context - if it makes a difference :
HK Chinese in UK so I've always been surrounded by English/Mandarin/Cantonese to some capacity + kinda learned French/Spanish ('cuz mandatory lessons @ school - would've been great if our year group could've chosen the language to learn in high school because I changed schools and it became difficult to differentiate them....but y'know, it's not like everyone was annoyed the year below us {and the occasional new students} got to choose when all of us who chose languages {I forgot if it's a mandatory humanities subject along w/ History/Geography/sthelse?} were stuck w/ French for the next few yrs.......rly wanted to learn Spanish at that point in time...) + Japanese/Korean from anime/songs/shows]
@@606aichan7O7 English is difficult because there’s a lot of different accents, and you can mess around with what vowel sounds you use a LOT. Even within one dialect.
えー！I've been learning pitch accent and thinking it would be nice if Misa sensei covered the topic... then you did! さすがみさ先生！本当にありがとうございます！
Thank you, Misa-sensei, for another great lesson. I was looking for a pitch accent introduction for a while but most of the resources I found are either super convoluted or "you just need to memorize every single word and you're good" type. Plus - poop jokes are always welcome!
The accent is similar to spanish, we use á in the line in top of a letter to pronounce the accent. If I were to write the two あめ in a spanish way it would be like this:
áme & amé
Gracias por haberlo explicado como tal porque ahora me farula la cosa
Yes. Spanish gives the stressed syllable the high pitch. A - mé goes low->high. A - me goes high->low. :)
@Yossi Hofi i can’t think of any examples right now, but pitch/emphasis can be really important in spanish
@Yossi Hofi You are indeed right my dude, I live in Mexico and we are always taught to use “acentos” to differentiate the words, though in common practice some people use pitch to mark the accent. Going from “Mi papá es el papa y come papa” (my father is the pope and eats potato) to my father is the father and eats father. Though papa and papa are written the same, pitch is implicitly used to differentiate them.
That's how I explained Japanese to my Hispanic friends (I speak both j and Spanish. I wish English had accent marks sometimes lol)
Using Spanish syllablary made it a lot easier to explain!
My first ever lesson about pitch, I think it was time I learned it and this was really comprehensive! Thankyou
So happy you made a lesson on pitch accent!
I think this is one of the hardest things in Japanese...
if you haven't worked with a language that emphasizes tones before, yes. however, i feel like most ppl are just too lazy to practice. language learning is all about discipline and there's really no shortcuts.
it doesn't have to be about discipline, the most efficient way is to just talk to native speakers in their language about stuff you like and naturally absorb their way of speaking, it's already a natural impulse the human brain does and your memory is based on emotional attachment, so the stronger emotional connection to the memory, the easier it will be to remember that and to have that affecting you and your behaviour. Being a discipline paranoid studying in books logistically and praticing alone without talking to anyone with no emotional investment is just stupid. Even if you don't have anyone to talk to in the language, emotional investment is just overwhelmingly superior to discipline, that's how humans evolved to work since the development of the neural system.
Native speakers don't know any formal rule if it's not taugh them, they just use all the rules without noticing because they absorbed these speaking manners from society around them. You don't learn how to read to then be instructed in every logical rule to then learn how to speak your language.
i am so thankful for your in depth videos! seriously a great tool as i continue my study of japanese. thank you for this content!
It seems like the concept of "tilde" (not this: ~, this: áéíóú) in Spanish:
For rain, you say: ame
For candy, you say: amé
Same also for Filipino/Tagalog however, it is mostly written when either the literary variant is being used or in language classes.
In Spanish it's actually stress accent not pitch accent. And it's not a tilde it's just an acento.
@@SimonR4y Tilde is the actual character (´), "acento" is the stress accent, whether it has "tilde" or not. But I agree there's not pitch accent in Spanish.
@@selkenshin oh you're right I was misinformed about the tilde.
Thank you so much for what you do. I'll be moving to Japan in a few months, and I can honestly say it never would have happened if I hadn't stumbled across your videos a few years ago. Really, thank you.
This video was incredibly informative! Thank you for all your hard work in editing and explaining this one! I was familiar with pitch accent vaguely but this video taught me so much, especially the abs trick. I felt like I had a workout! Thank you and I'm really looking forward to the next video :)
Thank you so much, Misa-sensei! I was waiting for this lesson all my life. This concept became a lot clearer to me when I watched your lesson.
My native language is Spanish, so is easy for me to understand, we have that change of pitch in the words using this symbol " ´ " in the syllables, for example, rain would be " ame ", and candy would be " amé ". I Love your channel, this is very useful content!! I'll be a japanese speaker in my third trip to Japan!
it's not the same thing. in spanish, the "accents" (these symbols ´ ` ~) are actually called diacritics. They make the syllable longer and louder, but not necessarily higher pitched. you could still change the pitches depending on the sentence. I'll give you an example: if you ask if they (a group) are young, you would say: son jóvenes ?? and the pitch for the word "jóvenes" is actually low high high, and not high low low. So even though the ´ is on the first syllable it's pronounced low pitched.
when they say "Japanese pitch accent" the word "accent" has nothing to do with what is called in Spanish "acento"
@@TheTTax I know is not the same, but, I mean that we are used to the change of pitch and tones of the words using these symbols that doesn't exist in english, that's why you don't know if is (read in spanish)"tomeiro" or "tomato". In spanish is written explicitly how the words should be pronounce.
@@benjigoenitz the accents only say the length and stress of the word, it doesn't say what pitch! And in any give sentence, you could pronounce all the pitches all different and no one would notice anything different. Accents in Spanish are irrelevant to pitch
@@TheTTax estoy de acuerdo :)
the fact that you use colors to match the words between english and japanese to guide the tranlation alone made me subscribe
A series on pitch accent would be awesome! And thank you for a great video as always!!
Thank you so much, this is exactly what I needed, please make more video about the words that have different meanings based on their pitch accent!
This kicked my Japanese confidence squaw in the nads
just for her to come in the end and so "oh, no, nobody actually uses this stuff, only in Tōkyō and standard formal japanese, japanese ppl don't actually know or use this"
Don't worry so much, you'll get it with practice and by hearing Japanese enough.
It's really shakey to guess what the correct accent is, but once you hear a word used enough, it'll sound weird when someone uses the wrong pitch.
For example, try saying some english words with the wrong pitch accent like "wa➚TER" instead of "WA➘ter", "ap➚PLE" instead of "AP➘ple", or "ci➚TY" instead of "CI➘ty" (Most 2-syllable english words have high-low pitch accent.) Or hopefully if you've seen Dragonball Z in english, the main character's name is pronounced "GO➘ku", and if you grew up hearing that, it sounds weird when Japanese people pronounce his name with correct pitch accent "Go➚KUU". Or Vice-versa.
English is more of a stress accent language, so words like "Uni-VER-sity" would sound off if someone stresses the wrong syllables like "UNI-versity" or "univer-SITY".
Another way of looking at it is how valley girls sound weird for raising the pitch accent of every last word in every sentence, making everything they say sound like a question. "Oh my gosh? Today was really hot?? I got all sweaty??? I can't wait to drink water???"
You didn't have to learn any of this in english, you just got it from experience. It's similar with Japanese. It may take some practice to be able to hear the different pitches, but once you learn the rules and become really familar with words, you won't have to think about it.
It also really helps if you can refer to a specific character saying a quote in a unique way, kind of like how people remember movie quotes like "GET TO THE CHOPPA!" I have some Japanese quotes in my head like from K-On!, Yui says "a➚RE? MI➘ma➚CHIGAE➘ta!" And I can recreate the exact way she said the phrase in my head. I don't even think about this quote necessarily, I've just mapped the pronunciation of those words to my memory of her saying them, and it sticks. I wouldn't say it with a random pitch accent because I have her example in the back of my mind.
With light study and lots of immersion, you'll learn pitch accent, too. 頑張って！
@@EXTREMEKIWI115 damn that's so accurate
@@adrithmanvik1853 Thanku.
One thing I'd like to add is looking up the pitches helps a ton. Since most people don't have the skill to hear pitches, they can confuse them easily.
Looking them up in a pitch-accent dictionary clears this problem up and makes pitch easier to remember. So far, I've been making Anki cards to test for pitch and meaning separately, but both decks have the same information.
Peoples' intuition to use their native pitch accent is really strong. Japanese pitch cannot be guessed, it must be studied through immersion, and looking up the pitches removes a lot of guessing.
Learning this just shows me how much more complex Japanese is as a language than most, it's actually incredible, but I am beginning to understand it at least a little bit.
I think at least for my learning style it is easier for me to get the bigger picture thinking first and then get into the details, though. Learning all of these ups and downs is confusing but as soon as you pointed out in the bigger context of the sentence that the low-to-high/low-to-high/low-to-high thing was happening and that is the audible separation of words it started to click.
Again, this just demonstrates how incredible of a teacher you are, Misa. These kinds of concepts are difficult to learn, even more difficult to master, and then it's probably even more difficult to break it back down and explain it to someone who doesn't even know that it existed in the first place lol.
You're so awesome!
I wish I could remember the website I saw back in the day that had recorded differences in pitch accent between various Japanese dialects. I primarily lived i OIta, Japan and hearing some of the drastic differences between the Oita accent and the Saga and Kumamoto accents was pretty interesting/amusing. For those that don't want to use Google, Saga, Oita, and Kumamoto are different prefectures on the Japanese island of Kyushu.
If you're looking for a good time get a group of Japanese people together from different parts of the country, introduce alcohol, and get them to start sharing their local dialects with one another. Hilarity ensues.
I have been studying Japanese since April on my own and among all the channels on youtube regarding Japanese lessons you're the best japanese teacher I have found, you're content is perfect
This is where I struggle. I have no problem "hearing" the pitch at all. My problem is I am unable to replicate it. My brain and my mouth won't cooperate.
Oh thank you so much Misa! Please make more videos on pitch accents!
thx for teaching us about pitch accent, it always haunt me 😭
This is my favorite channel to learn Japanese, arigato gozaimasu. While learning to write kanji is more difficult so learning to speak it is my first goal. Arigato gozaimasu Misa-sensei.
But if you really think of it, 箸 (はし/Chopsticks) are just a 橋 (はし/Bridge) between your plate and your mouth for the food to cross. So was I speaking wrongly, or was I just speaking in metaphor? :3
- My expert advice on how to never get invited to a dinner party ever again
Thank you so much MisaSensei!! I've wanted to learn this for awhile now!! Also the abb bit really does help me!
We have something similar in English!
For example, the word "contract." The meaning changes depending on which part of the word you emphasize.
If you stress the first part (CONtract), its a noun which means a written or spoken agreement that can be enforced by law (e.g. sign the contract)
If you stress the last part (conTRACT), its a verb which means to decrease in size, number, or range (e.g. muscles contract)
that's stress accent
it's not even remotely close, this pitch accent feels like singing
@@CollMomo1 i know it's pedantic, but it's worth noting that the stressed syllables in English are higher-pitched, so there is at least a slight similarity for shorter words
it is still the exact very same idea, you just have to add a higher pitch to the stressed syllabe and voilà, japanese. You don't have to learn it completely from the scratch like it was something completely and you had never seen anything similar to it.
I have recently contracted covid19 :)
TY SO MUCH FOR ALL THE EFFORT!
I've watched your "Teaching japanese with song" like 10 times! Each! Yep the 1 hour long ones!
I liked the videos about japanese history/culture!
I'm on a 3-4 ish lvl and I'm lacking a ton vocabulary that's why I love those vids the most!!
Thank you so much for you lessons!! It was so interesting and helpful!
Probably the most fascinating thing is that I kinda learned that intuitively just by mimicking natives' pronunciation of the words. Anyways, awesome lesson Misa-sensei!
brilliant explanation - surprising that Japanese tones are so critical but not typically written in most textbooks, dictionaries, etc.
Japanese does not have tones. What it does have is pitch which is NOT crucial. If you don't get "proper" pitch but you do everything else right the worst that will happen is that you will sound a little "Foreign" which you are.
@@Guy-cb1oh thanks guy2015. Heaven forbid we learn to speak well
Misa's videos are so long, yet so easy to watch. Once I watch I stay stuck and can't go back to reality
At 13:30 your “mou” drops though (by a minor third; C to A) even though you said it should rise. Is that a typo?
Sorry you are right! I’ll correct it!
Thanks! And thanks for all your lessons
I'm new to your channel and this was SUPER helpful!!! Your teaching style is great!
I understand this much more than I did from other videosb
I heard that in the Kansai dialect the pitch of the word "hana" is reverse.
For both flower and nose? Which one?
As she mentions at the very end of the video, she is teaching standard Tokyo pitch accent. The accent in the Kansai area is very different. I learned most of my Japanese when in Osaka so listening to pitch accent rules for standard Japanese just confuses me.
Misa you just keep getting better and better over the years
Not sure if Misa will continue her lessons about JPA, so you can look up Dogen.
He has an awesome and detailed explanation of the JPA on his channel, but most of it is for patreons so you will have to search for the videos yourself. They are out there, somewhere.
What Misa-sensei talks about is extremely important. You will be surprised by how much it helps understanding and being understood. After some time you should focus on vocabulary, grammar and kanji, preferably at the same time. By that I mean vocab and kanji and with them goes grammar.
as a beginner and have pitch problems most especially in signing, this video is very enlightening. but i must admit, it is hilarious at the same time. thank you so much for all the effort you put into editing. 🥰
From now on, when people will ask me what exercises I did to get my abs, I'll say Japanese Pitch Accent exercises.
Thank you SOOOOO much for this video! I have been searching for an explanation like this for ages! どうもありがとうございました！
It's stuck in my head. I can hear Dōgen-senpai asking & answering
日本語はフラットですか
ええ、フ↑ラ↓ット です。
Your フ↑ラ↓ confused me so much because I _rode_ it as フ˥ラ˩, like high フ and low ラ, which is the opposite of what you meant.
Omg thank you so much! Please make more of these!🙏
Misa sensei saying "tummy" is the cutest thing I've heard in my life.
Thank you a lot for such a great explanation! Everything is so clear!
"just like my life" nooo think of defeating an enemy.. "and stay down!"
This is super helpful and you are a great teacher, Misa sense!
We Serbs have pitch accent as well, and even more so then in Japanese so for us it´s easy to comprehend all of that. I feel sorry for my american friends that are struggling with this. :D
thank you for the tips Misa sensei. I am stick to your channel now, every day I follow you to talk alone in front of my laptop. it makes me feel like I am attending real class and even better than any teacher I have met to be honest and English is not my mother language.
6:35 "My love, do you ever dream of
Candy coated raindrops?
You're the same, my candy rain"
Thank you so much, Misa! Love your hair and outfit! Very glamorous ✨