Stress Accent vs Japanese Pitch Accent

#SpeakJapaneseNaturally #pitchaccent

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[YesterdaysMoose]

As someone who struggles with rudimentary Japanese language skills, I think it is very stressful. 😉👍

[richc.]

Thank you Fumi Sensei! 良いお年よ! I'm looking forward to our next lesson in italki 最高の先生です ^_^

[Ryan_gogaku]

Yes. 😀 But English stress isn't only longer, louder, and with greater pitch movement. In fact, the most important cue for stress in English is also the worst thing to do in Japanese: vowel reduction on unstressed syllables. In other words, you only have stress because other vowels are not stressed, and those unstressed vowels become a schwa. "Corona" is /kəˈɹoʊnʌ/, not /k*o*ˈɹoʊnʌ/. That first vowel is just an unstressed filler. So Japanese learners say things like カロナ or クロナ or カローナ, without paying attention to the quality of the first vowel, because it doesn't matter in English. They apply that same pattern to Japanese words, too. こわい and かわいい are confused all the time because people think of that as just /kəwai(:)/, instead of also paying attention to /a/ vs /o/. Basically, thinking of Japanese words in terms of English stress is, like this video says, a big problem.

[hawktrainer]

This is so helpful! Have been trying to understanding the difference for a while. Thank you!

[fernandoitri]

Wow, this information is omitted by all teachers that I know. Congrats to be a perfect sensei!! ❤

[eboni]

See as a singer I always got this conceptually though never to the degree of a native speaker and my teacher said I was a good speaker... Then I forgot after years of not speaking and now coming back to it, this single video unlocked an old very needed skill in my brain!

Thank you ☺️!

[niwa_s]

I reckon the reason people find this confusing is that pitch affects loudness Regardless of whether you're actually physically speaking louder (= measurable increase in volume), which I assume you mean by "stronger", a pitch raise alone already makes that syllable or mora sound louder, and a pitch drop quieter. Similarly, how loud a sound is can affect what pitch we perceive it to be.

It's not an issue of having "untrained ears", either; loudness is highly subjective, with a variety of factors playing into it, and being able to tell them apart is not really something the human ear is designed to do. I'd argue that "developing an ear" for pitch accent is really mainly learning to recognise a more subtle form of accenting. A combination of volume and pitch naturally tends to produce a more "dramatic" change in loudness than pitch alone. Correspondingly, when it comes to production, I think the most useful approach is to "tone it down"; don't concentrate on changing your pitch but on keeping your volume fairly stable.

For English speakers, they also have to be careful not to distort their vowels, but that's not an inherent feature of stress accents. Some languages don't really do it.

[a.m.]

before this video, I couldn't understand the difference but now it's so clear!! Thank you so much!!

[dan]

Some languages have both stress and pitch accent, like the Germanic languages that have pitch accent. Most Norwegian dialects, most Swedish dialects, some Danish dialects, Limburgish and some West Central German dialects have pitch accent.

[中国-tk]

Can you also make a short video how pronounce the casual yes and no in japanese (ええ & ううん) I kinda not quite get how it properly pronounce. ありがサンキュー！

[andresfontanez]

This seems only accurate sometimes because I’ve definitely heard Japanese men in movies stress a part of a word when yelling at someone 🤔 I’ve also heard parts elongated by…comedians scolding another making/making a sarcastic comment I think? I wish i could give video clip examples. Anyway, I’m sure you are mostly correct. Even in English the rules break sometimes which makes both languages difficult to teach 😅

[rasseranch]

So for all the people who are arguing/wondering about stress accent, you should look on Wikipedia.
There are so many types of stress.
Usually stress is used to mean loudness and pitch.

It doesn't mean longer, that's different kind of stress (stress-timed vs mora-timed etc.)

Fascinating.

[joannagarcia]

I would love more examples of words with stress vs pitch. I am struggling so much to figure out how and where to change pitch vs my instinct to stress a sound

[rachelmartin]

This is still stumping me....after over 30 years trying to figure it out! But if you stick with it, you'll start adjusting without realizing.

[morfy]

Most important question, does sound about right if you treat it like stress accent? How off does it sound?

[juancarlosvegaoliver]

What is the difference between higher and stronger? I can't tell it. Can a sound be high but not strong? or strong but not high?
And the pitch sounds to me like accent😥

[andresleon]

I thought japanese pitch accent was hard, until i jumped on to Korean, at least japanese Pitch accent has resources, but no one talks about pitch accent in Korean 😢

[Yuns-vzoz]

I keep getting these confused :(, hopefully pitch accent will click one day.

[bangtanie]

Does changing pitch ever change the meaning of the word or is it just used to make speech sound more natural in japanese?

[itspikachutime]

At this point I think pitch accent isn’t real and everyone with any high knowledge of Japanese just collectively decides to play a prank on newbies by talking about pitch accent because 90% of these sound the saaaame! :(