How To Learn Japanese Pitch Accent The Simple Way

how to learn pitch accent without being overwhelmed so Japanese words have their own pitch patterns if I say sensha it means a tank as in a military vehicle but if I say sensha it means Car Wash as in washing your car so what's the difference is the pitch pattern sensha tank has a high low pitch pattern um but sensha Car Wash has a low high pitch pattern so pitch patterns change meanings but many people feel reluctant to learn pitch patterns because they think it's too difficult but in my opinion many people make peach accent more difficult than it should be and here's why one obvious reason is natural conversations are too fast for beginners if I say tank slowly it's probably not that hard to follow the movement of the pitch pattern but if I say sensha is probably much harder because it's fast and that's expected if you're a beginner when I started learning English conversations between native speakers were just too fast to follow but as I learned more English it became easier so that's expected but I don't think that's the biggest reason why people find Pitch accent more difficult than it should be it's because you haven't learned Japanese with me because if you do I will teach you the kind of Japanese the real life Japanese people today actually speak because textbooks and apps give you very unnatural and sometimes incorrect examples so click the link in the description and subscribe to my email group but seriously I think the biggest reason is people approach pitch patterns from a very analytical perspective they think learning pitch accent is equal to learning how to consciously analyze pitch patterns it can help but analyzing is not the goal it's just one of the tools to learn pitch accent if this tool works for you that's great but if it doesn't you can try something else repeat this word after me while you're paying attention to the pitch pattern to go I hope you could repeat after me now tell me which is higher the first syllable or the second syllable even if you could perfectly replicate the pitch pattern many of you might have trouble analyzing oh Which is higher the first syllable or the second syllable consciously analyzing is much more difficult than simply repeating the melody the pitch pattern and it's going to get more complicated because in standard Japanese we have four different patterns high low low low high low low high high and another low high high that makes the following particle low but let's talk about three to keep it simple so an example of high low low is potstar hi Lolo an example of low high low is amazing an example of Law High high is important die easy low high high now let me give you a very simple word to see if you can trace the pitch pattern repeat after me very easy right okay let me try another word sleepy I'm gonna say it slowly so repeat after me while tracing the pitch pattern Nemo I hope you could do it now which of the three patterns is this is it high low low or low high low or low high high people typically find it hard to consciously identify the pitch pattern even if they can actually repeat the phrase or word and it can get more complicated when it comes to a longer word or a sentence how about this arigato gozaimasu and what's the pitch pattern most of you guys find it hard to tell which syllable is higher than which syllables and this is difficult for native speakers too I hire native Japanese speakers to add Japanese subtitles to my videos and I also ask them to visualize pitch patterns and they always always make mistakes sometimes it takes several revisions to get it right even if I tell them this is hi this is low this is high when they try to visualize they manage to get it wrong and they speak standard Japanese with the perfect pitch accent so consciously analyzing pitch pattern is very very hard and those pitch patterns are simplified for example if I say sugoi the word sugoi has a low high low pitch pattern but in reality with sugoi the first syllable is actually lower than the third syllable and with gold the pitch Rises but it doesn't matter semantically so we just say low high low for convenience so if you think learning pitch accent is the same as learning how to analyze pitch patterns it makes sense that you find it overwhelming because it's very difficult but that's not the only way of learning pitch accent here's another way which is a more intuitive approach and I guarantee you you can already understand pitch patterns intuitively for example in English you have this expression uh-huh as in yes if you ask me have you watched the dangers in my heart I could just say uh-huh to say yes but instead of saying what if I said haha doesn't it sound weird have you watched the dangers in my heart does it sound weird the only difference between Aha and aha is the pitch pattern it's exactly the same as sensha cabosh they have the exact same pitch pattern low and high and sencha tank uh-huh so if you think saying aha instead of aha sounds weird it means you already understand different pitch patterns here's another expression as in oh oh I forgot to pay the electric bill what if I said instead of uh-uh doesn't it sound weird oh I forgot to pay my electric bill doesn't doesn't sound weird so you already understand pitch patterns it feels more difficult because it's another language it's also kind of like music if I sing [Applause] [Laughter] you understand what song this is right but if I ask you to transcribe this and write music unless you studied music you can't do it is the same so pitch accent is like that you can perfectly learn how to sing the melody the pitch patterns without analyzing it all the time now I'm not saying analyzing is completely useless if it works for you you don't have to stop doing that learning the basic patterns and practicing them is a good idea but if you have trouble analyzing pitch patterns don't think you can't learn pitch accent you definitely can it's like grammatical theories learning the basics can help but if you try to analyze everything it gets impractical but once you get the hang of it you can learn it by tracing the melody and Anime are actually very useful to learn pitch patterns because they tend to speak clearly and slowly I'm gonna show you how first find the sentence that you like foreign and if it's too fast you can slow it down and you should also record yourself and compare it to the original one foreign do you want to try another one [Music] yeah your first sentence is too long you can just break it down into smaller parts no problem and I find it pretty fun it's pretty fun to speak Japanese like anime characters even if I typically say don't speak like anime characters and you might think this is too simple but if you keep doing this it will make a huge difference because you will get better and better at detecting pitch patterns and eventually you will be able to do it even if it's fast so try it and see how far you can go now some people say oh but there's many different dialects that have different pitch patterns but what they don't know is that even if you live in a different region in Japan and speak a different dialect most of the time if you grew up in Japan you will also speak standard Japanese with the standard pitch accent Japanese has different levels of respectfulness and when we speak Kegel or honoritic language which we use when we talk to strangers for example we actually use standard Japanese with the standard pitch accent for the most part so regardless of where they live in Japan they can speak standard Japanese with the standard pitch accent even though they might not be a hundred percent perfect they're basically like bilinguals of their dialect and standard Japanese and that's also what we learned in school and if you turn on TV or Netflix shows most of the time people speak standard Japanese or at least Tokyo Japanese so if you speak standard Japanese everybody in Japan can understand you but if you speak a very strong dialect that's not always the case and even with dialects a lot of them are actually variations of Tokyo dialect which standard Japanese is based on look at this map any shade of blue is a variation of Tokyo accent so it makes no sense to say that the standard pitch accent isn't useful because of regional dialects another thing that people often say is that it's okay not to learn pitch accent as long as you can communicate and that's a valid point I have had trouble understanding non-native speakers because of their pitch accent but in real life you can always ask questions like oh you know what did you mean by that sorry can you say it again or maybe can you say it in English so it's not going to be a huge problem when it comes to communication It ultimately comes down to your preference how do you want to sound do you want smooth communication do you want to sound like a native speaker or maybe you'll find if Japanese people can understand more or less I guess it's kind of like clothes because some people are okay as long as they're not naked some people want to dress better or some people want to communicate through their fashion personally I like natural real life Japanese so that's why I specialize in teaching you the kind of Japanese the real life Japanese people today actually speak because textbooks and apps just sound too weird to me so can the link and subscribe to my email group Japanese with Utah

Channel: That Japanese Man Yuta

Views: 67,819

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Id: jp22QXysMHg

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023