Japanese Pronunciation: Pitch Accent Basics

Most Japanese course books and teachers don't teach Japanese pitch accent properly. Because of that, the vast majority of foreign learners speak in Japanese with — well — a "foreigner accent". Improper stress doesn't only sound weird, it often makes it hard for native speakers to understand what you are saying. If you understand the way Japanese accent works, you will be able to pronounce a word naturally, without the hesitation.

If you don't know what mora is, check the video on Japanese Rhythm:

Dictionary with the stress marked (convenient but has occasional mistakes):

Another website (Looks ugly, but seems accurate. Also has a conjugation table for every verb, with stresses!):

[Rubycon]

An example I saw from another video that was really helpful was comparing the pitch changes to the vocalizations English speakers use for "yes" and "no". "Uh huh" is low->high and "uh uh" is high->low.

[lawnmower]

Japanese pitch accent is a funny thing to me because I didn't consciously recognize it, nor was I ever told about it, during my entire Japanese language bachelor's courses. Looking back, when I studied abroad and such, I was always told I had the best pronunciation, and I think it's because I was imitating the pitch to some degree without realizing what I was doing. Back then I probably would have said getting the phenomes correct was the ticket, but I know now that pacing and pitch does way more to create an impression of good pronunciation.

[bazzlerogers]

You are the best language teacher I have ever seen. I've studied Italian for years and I haven't seen anyone explain the concepts as concisely and as well as you do with Japanese. Please keep making videos! I want to learn more from you!

[darknesswithin]

As a vocalist myself, it's good to see Kaname using his vocals for explaining the nuances.

[rodionradchenko]

For some of us Europeans the concept of pitch is very hard to grasp unless you took music lessons of some sort.
In most of the indo-European languages we use upwards-downwards tone across multiple words in a sentece to charge it up with a certain emotion (or ask a question).
All that without even realising what's going on with the tone.

[lookingrespectfully]

あなたの説明は素晴らしかったです！It was very easy to grasp as a beginner in studying japanese pitch-accent, どうもありがとう！Time to watch the rest of your videos!

[hakonsoreide]

Great video.

I notice you call the pitch accented morae "stressed", but the term can be confusing to speakers of many languages, especially the Germanic ones like English, where a stressed syllable by definition is louder, stronger, higher pitched, but crucially it is also significantly _longer_ than an unstressed syllable. In addition, the natural rhythm of the languages is one where the time from one stressed syllable to the next gravitates to being of equal length, regardless of whether there is two, one, or no unstressed syllables between the stressed ones.

If you tell an English speaker the stress of for instance あなた is on な, they are very likely to then pronounce it あなあた for a while because that is how it has to be pronounced based on their understanding of what word stress means.

It is actually a little difficult for a native English speaker (or a Norwegian like myself) to properly pronounce a long unstressed vowel next to a stressed short vowel, like the name of Czech composer Janáček, for instance, which is correctly pronounced with a short "a" on a stressed vowel followed by a long "a" on an unstressed one. It just doesn't feel natural.

Or "Tolkien", whose name is also supposed to have the stress on the first short syllable, but is often pronounced with the stress moved to the longer second one because it just feels more natural to an English speaker. This also has the effect that many who put the stress in the right place mistakenly pronounce his name as three syllables so that the second and third syllables can be short.

[Skalias]

I've always had correct pitch accent but I've never thought about it till this video. I think it must be from starting to learn Japanese from an early age (Learning Japanese was mandatory in my country until grade 9 at least when I was in school) and being a massive weaboo my entire life so I've been listening to spoken Japanese for a long time.
(Unfortunately when I was a kid I didn't know the value of getting a free foreign language education so I never properly applied myself in the classes and now I'm paying for it both figuratively and literally lmao)

[arcticafox]

Extremely high quality Japanese learning content AND A CORGI! Subscribed!

[ariasparrowmusic]

Where has this been all my life! Looking forward to the next pitch accent video. So helpful <3

[kroantai]

Thank you very much for the explanation, I'm looking forward to further explanation of this topic. ❤

[gabulartiga]

OMG!!! this video is great!!! as a spanish native speaker this was really hard for me to understand, I just learned it by practice and habit when I lived in Japan. It was specially hard for me to understand when japanese people tried to explain it to me because there is "accents" in spanish that is kind of a similar concept but different at the same time so I couldn't understand the actual difference till today!!! Thank you so much!

[diamondkung]

Thank​ you​ very​ much​ for​ making this​ video, very​ help​full.
I​ am​ glad​ I​ found​ your​ channel.​You​ teach​ Japanese​ in​ the​ way​ that​ I​ cannot​ find from​ any​ book.
どもありがとうございます。

[toniheikkila]

This is hard for me as a Finn. In Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable of every word.

[felipechaves]

With the anata examples it was clearer, but raising and falling pitch sounds a bit ambiguous imo. But basically you mean that it is low pitched until you reach the high pitch mora, and then low pitched until the end.

Usually I see people explaining this mora by mora あなた = LHL (low high low pattern), but the raising falling explanation feels a bit more visual.

[yesyouam]

Your videos are amazing. I decided to learn hiragana and katakana a couple years ago and this is really helping me put that to use! Thank you!

[jerrytom]

I like your video very much, I look forward to see the video talking about how the stress accent shifts😊

[gnostie]

This is very interesting! Was the next video shown already? I mean the one where it's explained how accent shifts within a sentence.

[zzayy]

These titles are so incredibly clever. I click on them every time thinking you’re going to speak the words in the title in the video and always get mislead but end up watching anyway.

[KotrokoranaMavokely]

In my view and lingstudies Japanese pitch accent is down up down phonetics that priorizes first the down tones in the beginning and in the end in the middle high tone. It's a down tonal asian idiom very musical too in a down up down acoustic.