#pitch accent

[onigiriforears]

Pitch, Please Pt. 1 [new series alert]

This was launched on the Seitokai IG (seitokaisnihongo). Keep reading this post to get information that is written on the graphics (and the IG caption).

This is a new series that I've been working on for a bit! It'll be discussing pitch accent, dialects, listening comprehension, and anything else that may fall within that category.

If there's a particular dialect that you'd like for us to cover in this series, feel free to stick it in the reblogs, my inbox, my asks, on the Seitokai instagram, or the Seitokai discord server!

Without further ado, here is what the posts say above!

Pitch, Please! Let's talk about pitch accent.

What is it?

Pitch accent, known as 高低アクセント(kōtei akusento) in Japanese, refers to when a language uses pitch to distinguish between homonyms rather than stress/volume. For example: あめ, meaning rain (high pitch to low) vs あめ, meaning candy (low pitch to high pitch).

Pitch accent can vary by region and dialect. The previous example was based on standard/Tokyo dialect. However, the pitch accent is swapped with the Kansai dialect. あめ, meaning rain goes from low pitch to high and あめ, meaning candy goes from high pitch to low.

There are four (4) pitch accent patterns: 平板 (へいばん), 頭高 (あたまだか), 中高 (なかだか), and 尾高 (おだか). These will be discussed in further detail in a later post within this series.

How to work on it?

Listen to native speakers (podcasts, news channels, videos, etc.)

Converse with native speakers (if possible)

Mimic the correct pronunciation

Be willing to ask for help and accept correction

Resources

Online Japanese Accent Dictionary & Prosody Tutor Suzuki-kun

NHK Japanese Language Pronunciation and Accent Dictionary

Renshuu.org, Kanshudo.com, Forvo.com

Dogen's Japanese Phonetics Video Series

MIA add-on for Anki

MacOS dictionary

HelloTalk

If you're looking for fellow learners, there are over 500 of us in the Seitokai discord server (shameless plug) and we'd love to have you!

[darkroomnerd]

Kanji and pitch accent will be the death of me.

[ogiuemaniax]

The Advent of Pitch Accent: Pronouncing FuwaMoco’s Names Correctly

The new Hololive English generation, HoloAdvent, has made their debut after more than two years of waiting. Among the five Virtual Youtubers are actually a pair of twins—the Abyssgard sisters Fuwawa and Mococo, collectively known as FuwaMoco. And while there is a lot to potentially talk about (including the fact that Fuwawa is a Genshiken fan!!!), I want to focus on one thing: The pronunciation…

[japanese-cryptic-beauty]

Post 2: Correcting Post 1

Or: The journey of Japanese is a journey of folly.

So, I wrote that Japanese has pitch but it's usually not important for meaning, you just sound unnatural.

... Which is something you could say ... Kinda ... sorta ...

Only the Universe has been bombarding me with the importance and prevalence of pitch ever since. So I want to qualify the statement, at least.

Check out this interesting post I found here. Now, if I read this slightly cryptic answer right (it talks about "word-accent" which I assume can mean both "pitch" - Japanese, Chinese - and "stress" - English), pitch is significant to distinguish words with same sounds (homonyms) as follows: Chinese - 71%, Japanese - 13%, English - 0.47%.

Unsurprisingly, in a language (Chinese) using (in its standard pronunciation/main dialect) 5 pitches to differentiate words, pitches are "damn important" (71%). But 13% is actually also quite significant. Your mileage may differ.

Personal bias in skimming information

Now, for me, myself, this is not so surprising. I may have come across the information that pitch exists in Japanese probably twice but my brain may have chosen to willfully ignoring it.

(Textbooks may mention it but then omit it to not overload beginners, I guess.)

Thing is, I have a horrible history with learning how to stress words in other languages. These little accent-y things and squiggles on top of words? They're my nemesis. So I guess I wanted there to be no equivalent of that in Japanese.

I had three years of Ancient Greek in school, an investment of my time that taught me a valuable lesson: Don't learn Ancient Greek. I'm kidding - or am I? - the valuable lesson was to do my choices in a less knee-jerk way. In hindsight, nothing of value would have come of learning Ancient Greek even if I did well. Your opinion may differ. Fine. I really think it's a colossal waste of time unless you make a job choice requiring it. The best it could have done for me was get better at the learning itself or the learning of languages in general. But it failed in the most important thing that language does: connecting people. If it fails at that, it barely has any right to remotely exist as a subject. Nobody likes you Ancient Greek, go away.

Besides the letters, Greek gave me major problems with the stress accents. Put it on a syllable and I would never manage to pronounce the word. I always put the stress wrong. My brain hasn't unlocked how that works. I notice the same in Spanish. I may emulate a speaker (not that I speak Spanish, but when I repeat after someone), but even then I might not even hear the difference.

I know I've aggravated my Swedish teacher for not hearing the difference between his "ooh" and "uh" sounds he was making for the letter "u." (Ironically a song based entirely on the sound "U" is now playing on shuffle.) Hopefully continued exposure and awareness of the problem might help...

There's some good news, though

While my chosen learning method of WaniKani doesn't display stress, it features two speakers, Kyoko and Kenichi that say the readings. I wondered on occasion if they were real, but they do use pitch when pronouncing words. (And they might slightly vary between each other.)

So there's a neat little feature:

You pick your speaker and chose to let pronunciation play out every time the reading is featured - in case of reviews after you transcribed it yourself first.

I have to admit I was in the habit of not playing it when I could do multi-kanji word readings well, but this exposes me to pitch and pronunciation peculiarities I might otherwise ignore.

More exposure!

[EDIT:] Probably more good news, depending where you come from

So, in researching this I came across this article. It provides two pieces of context that I want to quote .

A reply to a letter to the editor of a manga magazine printed in Romaji (without accent marked) quoted in point 5: "When two or three words sound exactly alike except for pitch accent, context is going to resolve the ambiguity virtually 100 percent of the time. In practical terms, accent is probably the least important aspect of Japanese pronunciation no matter what your level of language skill."

In other words, even bad pitch accent will be understood almost always. This is where I first will employ the most horrible, stereotypical example that's ALWAYS trotted out to justify anything: the chopsticks/bridge example.

Chopsticks and bridge both transcribe to "hashi" (and to the same Hiragana). They only vary in rising and falling pitch. Now you could argue that makes pitch important. But as the above quote states - context usually resolves that quite reliably.

I mean, having browsed reddit and Quora for a while, you will inevitably see this being trotted out, and people ask the rhetorical question: Don't you think it's important to know if the bridge is burning or a set of chopsticks?

Rhetorical questions are, of course, only questions in the most technical sense. They're usually just people being smug or actually making biased or even bad faith arguments.

As mentioned above, people are not dumb. Japanese is already incredibly context-sensitive. You constantly have to keep track of things said before - because omission is common. You can leave out the subject because you mentioned it before as "the topic." Good luck with translating that, AI...

You usually can infer what is being said. But propagators of the burning chopstick dilemma are trying hard to make you think their way. Or are they even trying? It's so tired an example. If there were lots of these, surely people would quote them, too? Who cares what's going on with the damn bridge, anyway?!?

Okay, moving on.

I found this from point 6 a very useful and probably true assessment: "People without hearing impairments can mimic the melody of language, but they can hardly interpret visual accent markers into the oral/aural domain without special training because visual and auditory stimuli are processed very differently in the human brain. In all likelihood, the author of the above-mentioned letter simply feels more comfortable visually with accent markers. But using such markers to speak Japanese creates pronunciations that are worse than a crude synthesizer."

Well, I was notoriously bad at it in one language already. I guess I will hold my horses on trying to make that my method. Thankfully, audio material is available in enormous quantities, so we can learn from the melody of native speakers. And that is good news.

[kaityslangblr]

Japanese Homophones & Pitch Accent┃Same Sound Different Meanings? 同音異義語

[reportwire]

Review: Japanese Phonetics by Dōgen

Review: Japanese Phonetics by Dōgen

For Japanese learners, one of the biggest stumbling blocks can be pronunciation, pitch-accent, and overall phonetics. For one, English and Japanese operate on entirely different phonetic schemes, as English is considered a “stress-accent” language, compared with Japanese, which is a “pitch-accent” language (more on this later!). Phonetics beyond basic pronunciation is rarely taught in-depth in a…

[cemeterything]

she doesn't have a single speaking line in the podcast but i know exactly what agnes montague sounds like in my head

[corvid-language-library]

Japanese vocab: some words I messed up/forgot this week:

Colour indicates pitch accent (pink = high then falling, orange = remains high, purple = flat)

All sample sentences are from Renshuu app.

景色（けしき）- scenery, scene, landscape [noun] その国は山の景色が美しいので有名です。The country is renowned for its beautiful mountain scenery.

贈り物（おくりもの）- gift, present [noun] エミは素敵な贈り物に驚きました。Emi was surprised at the nice gift.

郊外（こうがい）- suburb, commuter belt [noun] 郊外から通う学生はバスで通学している。Students that commute from the suburbs come to school by bus.

最も（もっとも）- most, extremely [adv] 日曜日は私が最も暇な日だ。Sunday is the day I'm most free.

とうとう - finally, at last, in the end, ultimately [adv] とうとう私の姉は婚約した。Finally, my sister got engaged

適当（てきとう）- suitable, proper, appropriate [な-adj] 適当な時に彼にそれを言いましょう。I will tell him at the proper time.

無くなる（なくなる）- to be lost, to be used up [v1, intr] 彼女は元気が無くなった。She's not as energetic as she once was.

鳴る（なる）- to sound [v1, intr] 突然ベルが鳴った。Suddenly, the bell rang.

構う（かまう）- to mind, to care about [v1, /intr] ここに座っても構いませんか？Do you mind if I sit here?

しばらく - for a moment, for a minute しばらく考えさせてください。Let me think for a moment.

講義（こうぎ）- lecture [noun/v3] 講義の間、彼女はとても退屈だった。She was very bored during the lecture.

招待する（しょうたいする）- to invite [v3] 彼をパーティーに招待してもいい？Can we invite him to the party?

倒れる（たおれる）- to fall (over, down) [v2, intr] その男は倒れた木に座っていた。The man was sitting on a fallen tree.

[oifaaa]

To be fair, we can't hear an accent when you type.

Are you saying that when you see me typing your not imagining it in an Irish accent???? Disappointed ngl

[abijahfowler]

heiji: hello

abijah: * fiddle-de-dee ahh japanese *

heiji: what the fuck did you just say to me

[ch3shire-rabbit]

The top one is a request from insta that was cute enough for me to digitalize, on the bottom it’s just. Juan n José

—————

Do NOT repost, edit, trace, or use my art in any way. Thanks.

[heathenpoetry]

please specify in tags whether or not anyone in your family does this, if you do mimicry and/or impersonation, when/why/what kinds of voices and noises you do. and anything else you want to include

[starry-bi-sky]

Miscellaneous things from my “Danny Fenton is Thomas Wayne” au (a better au name to follow)

When Bruce was younger/learning to talk, he couldn’t pronounce his name correctly. When Danny was teaching him his name, he’d say “Booce” so Danny started call him “Boo” as a nickname. Danny still calls him “Boo” as his main nickname as Bruce gets older.

When Bruce was a little older, Danny would take him out to the balcony or sneak him up to the rooftop so that they could look at the stars together. Danny told Bruce that if he ever felt alone and Danny wasn’t there to be with him, just look at the stars, Danny will always be with him.

Danny likes making things. He’s a tech whizz like Tucker and the two of them love to create ideas together and try and make them. After he gets adopted, Danny has a lot more access to making gadgets and gizmos. He doesn’t really sell them unless he thinks they’ll help the world be better, or because its harmless.

When Danny was adopted, he didn’t tell his friends until the Waynes asked what he wanted to do to ‘debut’ himself. (They figured that the world and press would find out about him eventually, might as well make an impression) And Danny thought, regrettably, that some sort of party would be best for him to make connections. So the Waynes taught Danny etiquette and other stuff that would help him, and then sent the invitations out.

He asked them to invite the Mansons, so they did. Then texted Sam about it and asked her to attend, and possibly bring Tucker if she could. Safe to say the day of the party, when Danny got introduced, he could feel Sam glaring holes into his head. It was totally worth it. (Bruce was being taken care of back home, which Danny fretted about the entire time. He kept having to convince himself not to leave early.) He was sorely tempted to invite Vlad to see his face.

Speaking of Vlad, he has no idea that Danny changed his name. He didn’t think Danny would do that, he just thought he ran away or left town. And its not like any of his friends would tell Vlad. He doesn’t know that Danny’s changed his name until the headlines about the new Wayne Heir come out.

After Danny was adopted, he started self-teaching himself business and other stuff that would help him learn how to run Wayne Industries. He did it in secret so that he could surprise his new parents.

Also about Martha — I’m not making Sam the Martha Wayne equivalent. Amethyst Ocean really isn’t my thing, so Martha Wayne is either going to be a separate character that Danny genuinely falls in love with. OR Danny’s just gonna remain a single dad.

Danny has somewhat retired ‘Phantom’ / his ghost form. Or at least he doesn’t transform into a ghost quite as often. Mainly because there’s no reason to, and also because Gotham doesn’t have nearly enough ambient ectoplasm to sustain Danny like in Amity. The only times he transforms is to have late night flights.

Sam and Tucker don’t call Danny by ‘Danny’, they call him Thomas or Tom. Tucker sometimes jokingly calls him Tommy.

More miscellaneous stuff to come lmfao

Taglist(?)

@blankliferain idk if this is what you meant by tag you but you didn’t specify if you wanted to be tagged for a fic or a post so I figured it wouldn’t hurt

@storm-and-fire same as above it might not be a fic but its a more info on the au?

[corrodedcoughin]

Wayne is out of town on a trip for a few days so eddie is left home alone. Naturally he invites Steve to sleepover and as they are about to go to bed for the evening eddie tells Steve to wait.

He watches his boyfriend flip the light off and stand on the table, reaching up to unscrew the lightbulb and run to the bedroom while screaming

‘HOT BULB STEVE. LADY WITH A BABY. LEMME THROUGH AAHHHH’

It’s not use though, Eddie drops it two feet from the bedroom door and turns to Steve

‘Well my darling, you always wanted to experience life before light bulbs, right?’

‘No Eddie. No I don’t think I’ve ever said that.’

Turns out all the bulbs blew and Eddie couldn’t be bothered to buy more so he’s just be swapping the one bulb around gif a couple of days. Eddie actually doesn’t know how he hasn’t dropped it before now but doesn’t tell Steve that. He commits to the ‘Victorian era aesthetic’ and even puts on an awful cockney accent when he pulls Steve to bed

‘Awright treacle? Fancy a cuddle do ya?’

It’s awful and Steve does not laugh (he does)

[tuituipupu]

it’s 2am + i was thinking hm yes how is käärijä gonna tease & banter with international crowds … and then i thought about him taking the piss out of the british accent and i was like… yep i’m ready to be bullied 🤩

[voiceemporium]

Jonah Simms in Superstore played by Ben Feldman