What is Pitch Accent in Japanese and is it Important?
Depending on the people you follow to learn Japanese, you may or may not have come across the idea of pitch accent. Also depending on who or who you don’t follow, you may have heard conflicting opinions regarding its importance. I’ll explain what it is and what are the advantages of learning it.
What is pitch accent?
Basically, every word in Japanese is said with a certain intonation. For example, in 機能 (きのう), the first syllable is loud and then the pitch drops off. Whereas in 昨日 (きのう), it starts low pitch, goes high on the second syllable and then drops back down.
There are basically 4 such patterns in pitch. I’d explain the types myself but these two videos below do a much better job. Many examples use homophones to show how the difference in pitch has practical implications. The 2 videos together are about 30 minutes long.
Learn Japanese Pitch Accent Part1
Learn Japanese Pitch Accent Part2
Next to note is that there are some rules regarding pitch accent that govern how pitch pattern changes when verbs and adjectives are conjugated, when nouns are combined or used with certain particles, etc.
What’s the main reason to learn pitch accent?
Learning the proper pitch accent of words is essential if you want to speak Japanese with a perfect accent and sound like a native. Though you may not be able to hear the difference in pitch initially, Japanese people certainly can. Being an accent, it does differ from area to area but you’re probably learning standard Japanese anyway and regardless of differences between dialects, you need to be consistent within a dialect.
However, it’s useless for the purpose of normal communication. You could speak Japanese with a cringy American accent and Japanese people still wouldn’t have any trouble understanding you. Unlike Americans and Parisians, Japanese people generally won’t make fun of you for your pronunciation and will be impressed by the mere fact that you’re attempting to learn their language.
Japanese isn’t a tonal language. Though differences in pitch exist between homophones, context is enough to decipher what’s spoken.
When it comes to speaking skills, pitch accent is undoubtedly nothing more than its name suggests: an accent that’s only needed to sound native. It’s completely unnecessary if your goal is just to talk and express yourself in Japanese.
Can learning about pitch accent improve listening skills?
Assuming that most people have no interest in sounding perfectly like a native, does pitch accent have any other utility?
The important takeaway is that pitch accent is the reason why some words and sentences sound different than you’d expect them to. It explains why the ‘u’ in ‘desu’ is nearly inaudible. You may have noticed many such discrepancies without having explicitly known about pitch accent. It’s worthwhile to take note of these differences when you practice listening to Japanese because it’ll form a clearer image of how a word should sound. Knowing the basics of pitch accent gives you a framework to understand and internalize these differences over time.
Of course, with enough listening practice, you’re sure to notice and remember disparities in pronunciation naturally, but knowing about the variations in pitch makes you more aware of these and less likely to dismiss it offhand (oh, a syllable just sounded inaudible this time). In other words, knowing the different pitch pattern types makes you realize that there’s an underlying system to the variations in pitch and that it’s not just a random way Japanese people happen to speak.
As for homophones, I don’t think it’s important to be able to tell them apart by their pitch pattern because you can distinguish a word from its context anyway.
Just learning the theory behind pitch accent won’t help in becoming able to hear differences in pitch patterns that you can’t distinguish already. You’ll need specific training and repeated practice to be able to do that.
In conclusion, knowing about pitch accent gives you the tools to understand why some words sound different than expected. It gives you a mental model to absorb phonetic discrepancies. It helps you to realize how Japanese isn’t flat and why some syllables get ‘eaten’. Nonetheless, just learning about pitch accent won’t improve your ability to notice it where you hadn’t before.
Is pitch accent in Japanese overhyped?
Here’s the thing, variations in pitch aren’t something unique to Japanese. Our very own English words have patterns in pitch (and also stress), changing which would sound strange. According to Wikipedia, Turkish, Persian, Swedish, and Norweigian are also classified as pitch-accent languages.
Yet, it’s only among Japanese learners where an obsession with pitch accent can be found. Without a doubt, this is just a result of Japanese’s greater popularity. While the resources for learning pitch accent in Japanese are admittedly few, they’re non-existent in these other languages (maybe they shouldn’t be?). No one’s expecting beginners in other languages to learn the phonetics of accent. As Japanese learners, we should be grateful for the availability of phonetics resources that help us to get more out of listening practice sessions, but calling such study as essential or necessary is far-fetched.
Disadvantages of learning about pitch accent and memorizing pitch patterns
My primary criticism is that learning pitch accent isn’t worth the effort compared to the benefits. While you can be done with the basics within an hour, learning and getting used to all the rules for how pitch accent changes depending on circumstance, and memorizing the patterns for individual words will take a lot of effort.
In my opinion, this effort is better expended in improving facets of Japenese that expand your ability to communicate such as learning vocabulary or practicing grammatical constructs.
Also, it’s most efficient to learn about pitch accent as soon as possible so that you can practice it while listening to Japanese even as a beginner. However, many beginners will be daunted by the volume of rules and choose to skip this aspect of Japanese learning that’s so obscure.
How I learned about pitch accent
I watched the following videos to learn the basic pitch accent types and some rudimentary rules that govern changes in pitch accent.
Learn Japanese Pitch Accent Part1
Learn Japanese Pitch Accent Part2
Video explaining the pitch accent type of verbs and i-adjectives
It’s easy to recommend watching these videos because they’re only about 45 minutes in total and the information isn’t very hard to remember. I didn’t bother to go beyond this and learn the various rules regarding how pitch accent changes because it seemed like the effort required to internalize all of them wasn’t worth it, especially since I’d also have to train myself to tell pitches apart first.
For learning the rules that cause changes in pitch accent, Dogen’s phonetics course seems to be the only comprehensive resource in English. Though it’s said to be good, I haven’t used it myself because I figured that it would be more in-depth than I was interested in. From what I can tell, it would probably take a few weeks to absorb all the rules.
To be frank, I couldn’t decide whether Dogen’s course was on Patreon was worth buying because his free video lessons didn’t have much useful information and there were no details about how long his course on phonetics is or what topics are included. I can’t try something if I don’t know what I’m trying or why I should try it.
This page has some rules regarding pitch accent and I got so bored that I didn’t read the whole thing.
How I “study” pitch accent of words
I don’t really make an active effort to learn the pitch accent patterns of individual words. I never bother looking it up. Instead, my only contact with pitch accent patterns is when I revise sentences in Anki.
Originally, I installed MIA add-on for Anki only for its automatic furigana generation function. However, I enabled coloring words by pitch accent because it wasn’t any extra effort.
There’s no doubt that I’ll probably come to remember the pitch accents of some words simply by associating their respective pitch pattern’s color with them. At the same time, I’m investigating whether hearing words and sentences with their pitch information will enable me to develop greater sensitivity in being able to hear differences in pitch.
I make no extra explicit effort towards remembering the pitch pattern of words because I believe that that effort is better spent in learning more vocabulary and exposing yourself to more Japanese input.
An annoying thing about studying pitch accent is that many dictionaries, especially English-Japanese ones have no information about it. Having to separately also look up the pitch accent of a word after looking up its meaning seems like an annoying chore that I’d prefer avoiding unless absolutely necessary. It’s bad enough to have to learn the readings of new words, let alone the pitch accent as well.
If you’re serious about learning pitch accent, not only will you need to learn all the various rules for it, but also memorize the individual pitch accent pattern types of all the vocabulary you’re learning. You can use the aforementioned extension to review pitch accent information while revising words and sentences in Anki.
This site can be used to look up the pitch accent of words. For sentences, it’s said to become more inaccurate the longer and more complicated the sentence gets.
Conclusion
It’s easy to recommend learning the basics of pitch accent because it doesn’t take very long. Knowing the basics has the potential to open you up to noticing and remembering some pitch accent information without even trying. You’ll also become aware of how Japanese isn’t ‘flat’ and why there are discrepancies in how you expect something to sound and how it actually does.
Nonetheless, anything beyond that is a bit of a far stretch to label as essential. As mentioned earlier, taking up the effort to learn all the rules regarding pitch accent and remembering the pitch accent patterns of words is only worthwhile if you share the goal of having a literally pitch-perfect Japanese accent.
