so what you're telling me is me being a silly simp for a japanese character in a video game and repeating what they say might actually be helping my japanese pronunciation more than i thought it was
@@ChronicalV We actually learn language like this as adults too. If you actually study effective language acquisition methods, listening comes first (usually recommended 100 hours to begin... there's an excuse for anime watching), repetition/repeating after someone comes second, and then learning reading and writing. I wish I'd known that while I was studying languages, and not when I started teaching them.
@@katiewong1547 i know what immersion is, i just mentioned it. when i finally dived into japanese it was the way i went. pretty sure reading is more effective at early stages than listening tho (once youve learnt to read that is)
Thank you to, Mariano, the Patron who paid for us to be able to freely have this lesson. You won the internet cookie, and I hope you get that thing you've been wanting. :3
I'll be rewatching this video many times so I made these timestamps for myself. 0:00 Intro 2:34 Start, rule no. 1 3:05 rule no. 1 Examples 3:49 rule no. 1 4:00 rule no. 2 4:46 Examples (with particle "ga") 5:33 rule no. 2 5:48 Pitch accent patterns 6:11 頭高 explanation 6:27 頭高 examples 7:33 America is as 頭高 7:49 Dogen says 頭高 is the easiest for Native English speakers 8:27 中高 Explanation 8:45 中高 Examples 9:55 America is as 中高 Version 1 10:15 America is as 中高 Version 2 10:30 (Almost?) all 中高 words only have one correct pattern 11:22 中高 usually easy for EN natives 11:52 尾高 explanation 12:10 尾高 examples 13:13 America is as 尾高 13:28 尾高 is the hardest for native EN speakers 14:08 平板 explanation 15:01 平板 examples 16:02 America is as 平板 16:52 more important Information (idk what to call this lol) 17:15 Phonetic awareness 17:40 recap of the 4 patterns 18:33 Outro of past dogen 18:39 Present Dogen is back again
THANK YOU TO THE PATRON WHO DONATED TO THIS OCCURENCE! And thank you Dogen for the incredible content you put out for us to consume!!! (much love from a Texan native trying to learn in an environment without native Japanese speakers, having a native speaker for a lot of the examples helps and gives an inherent clarification)
As a first break-down in reverse-engineering Japanese Prosody, I'd call these patterns, in increasing order of "strength," if it be "strength" to keep the pitch up. WEAKEST: EARLY collapse; MID-word collapse PARTICLE collapse (I.e., not collapsing until the final particle) and NO COLLAPSE, NOT EVEN AT PARTICLE. STRONGEST The downstep seems to be what the Japanese ear is really listening for, and, thanks to the second rule, one may indeed say "THE downstep."
I couldn't work out for ages what it said on his top, because I was stuck on seeing the first character as と! I expressed my confusion in a RU-vid comment, and luckily some kind soul set me straight on the matter. :)
@@psxndc I wouldn't say the drawstrings are forming dakuten. With the combination of the font, angle, and the drawstrings blocking the letters, it made the katakana on his sweatshirt look like it was hiragana, that's all it is. The sweatshirt actually says ヒラガナ but because of the factors I mentioned previously, it looks like it says とうが (I'm not seeing a ら or a し, and I'm not sure where he's getting a whole extra letter from either, but I definitely agree that the top 3 letters look like it says とうが).
@@dogemasta4907 Thanks. Can you explain why his name is "Dogen," but the first letter is To? I've been so confused by this but have been too embarrassed to ask.
I started about 15 years ago but I'm only at about the 1 year or so of "school" learning with lots of little add-ons a bits and pieces from friends or travel or miscellaneous books. Now I know why I didn't go harder on in depth learning yet!!! I want this to ground further attempts and build better habits -- I did a brief edX course on 発音last year which also opened my eyes to all of this pitch accent stuff. Thank you!
Is there also male audio is in the Patreon series? Would be nice for another reference point and a variation in pitch range for shadowing and mimicking. Most of my Chinese teachers were female, in Uni and it took a very long time to find my natural range and a good native speaker to model after.
This might just be me being a musician, but I noticed something weird noticed about the 平板 pattern (and all the other ones as well, for that matter...) There are clearly more than two distinct pitches used. In the examples even in the 平板 pattern the pitch noticeably dropped off at the end. Is that just what it actually sounds like? It would make sense to me, since the human voice is usually a bit all over the place anyways...
I’m a Japanese native speaker and can guarantee you that all the audio in this video sound correct, so yes, I think there’s a drop in pitch at the end of 平板 (realized after I found your comment). I think that’s why Dogen mentioned the binary pitch pattern used in this video... in reality pitches must be more than just “high” and “ low”.
I think this might be similar to how pitch accent behaves in a sentence www.kanshudo.com/howto/pitch (see 6. #2) "After a downstep, the next rise in pitch is not as high as the downstep" When using the OJAD tool from Tokyo University and looking at the sound graph (or just listen to Japanese naturally), you might notice that consecutive high pitch become lower and lower.
It sounds similar (but I don't have perfect pitch or even great pitch) to going up a whole step, and then coming down a half step. Or managing to hold a note until the last syllable, when you go a little flat.
Im glad other notice this too. I cant help thinking that some syllablse like い and あ naturally have different pitch and making them hit the same pitch is quite hard to do. Idk... I mean when produced by vocal cords at least... Perhaps its different with a synthasized voice.
It's actually easier to feel it than to hear it. Lower pitches will resonate (vibrate) more than higher ones. If you feel a vibration in your mouth a lot on the low parts and just a little on the high ones, you're on the right track.
that's my secret captain. i just say Hai to everything. but in all seriousness where i work is 95% English. so friends coworkers (even the Japanese) speak English when we hang out. so i never really needed it until people started moving to different places, then i got really depressed because i was lonely so i lost all motivation for anything, from going to the gym to learning Japanese and how i wasted many years of not studying . up until now im starting to feel better so im just now im starting all over again
im pretty sure all of these exist in english actually. it just depends on inflection and you dont have to say the word like that everytime you say the word yk? either that or im just really conditioned to japanese at this point
how do i study this? should i just keep listening and trying to hear it until i start picking up on it or learn words with their pitch accent? im still kinda confused loll
I won’t pay attention to pitch for now because learning the language in itself is “hard” enough, but I’ll definitely remember those 4 pitch names (頭高と中高と尾高と平板) because I think I’ll need that in few years, when having a good pitch-accent will almost be a requirement. I have a question though : is it really useful to actively learn pitch-accent? Won’t it just come up naturally as we listen to Japanese content and talk to Japanese people? I say that because I’m not a native english-speaker and I never learnt english pitch, I just learnt it naturally, by listening to people talking in English and now, I talk with the good pitch-accent for most of the words I know. And I did that without even realizing there is a specific pitch for each word, until recently (maybe I’m dumb, I don’t know XD).
Yes. He said the reason. If you want to have to unlearn bad pitch, go ahead. Also, learning pitch accent is not any harder than learning the language normally. You should be using Migaku Japanese with your flashcards and referencing them with qolibri. Both of those have pitch accent.
@@baronvonbeandip it depends on what you consider “learning the language normally” is. I currently mostly learn about vocabulary and conjugation while testing myself by reading and listening to some Japanese but I don't actively try to pronounce words and have a good pronunciation (I know how to pronounce each character, I just don't apply any pitch on it). That's why I don't learn bad pitch : it's just non-pitch. I'm in a language where there's no pitch at all so not having any pitch on a word is normal for me, so there's nothing to “unlearn” here. Anyway, thanks for the app, I'll check that
For words that fall under odaka or heiban, are they still said that way when not followed by a particle, or does it change? I realize there's not much need for it since there'd probably be a particle of some sort at the end even if it was a one-word reply, but I'd still like to know. A lot of your pitch accent lessons have pointed out things I picked up on just from listening to native speakers for so long, while also pointing out which I got wrong from trying to intuit it myself. I want to know if I'm wrong about this assumption that it changes, too.
With a little app I downloaded a while ago, I started trying to learn just the reading and writing part of Japanese and have pretty much neglected speaking. The funny thing is that I didn't notice how the kanji is said when learning them, only what they mean, so even though I knew what a sentence said, I couldn't vocalize it. It's such a weird situation.
Nice knowing that you probably knew all of this since long before, then watched this on Patreon two times from what you've said and still came here just to compliment Dōgen.
You watch this stuff!? And as I write this comment, I see "Grading Metatron's Amazing Japanese by Dogen on the recommendation panel on the right...... What next? Shadiversity and Skallagrim featuring in Dogen as well?
Thank you! A subtle point if you listen carefully; longer strings mora in the "same pitch" (high or low) actually tend to lower in pitch ever so slightly. You can hear it very clearly in あいさつが (the が is almost a minor third lower than the い), in おにぎりが、and 日本語が。 I wonder if there's any rule regarding this? Or if it's best to just mimic as close as possible through listening...
I've been studying Japanese for about five years, but this is quite a useful video to improve or raise one's own awareness of how words should be pronounced. Thanks to both Dogen for the amazing video and to the person who paid for us to be able to watch it!! I really apreciate it!!
8:56 Dogen, i think you made a mistake. this word means "jelly-filled donuts". i learned it from Pokemon. thank you very much, Mariano, for making this lesson public for us!
I don't know a lot about pitch accent in Japanese, but it always surprised me, as a native-English speaker who has lived for years in Japan, how so many foreigners just don't get some very basic things about pronunciation. It's good to watch a video like this. I'm glad others are interested in pronunciation.
When speaking Japanese, does anyone have this same issue: One day you are almost fluent, you find all the words and manage to string them together into grammatical sentences at a fairly rapid pace and it feels like you finally are "getting there". And then the next time all you manage to do is stringing words together separated with "は" and hope they can guess what you actually are trying to say. I don't understand this volatility and it is making me a bit depressed :(
I feel you! I have good Japanese moments and bad Japanese moments. It is not necessarily a bad thing though. Usually struggling and making mistakes in language learning means your brain is processing something right now. Or maybe the brain is just tired…who knows…
It's totally natural, when it comes to learning anything there are highs and lows, it's just very noticeable with language learning. The way I think of it your brain wants to discard any unimportant information, you just have to remind it that it /is/ important and then it'll actually commit it to memory properly. The 'bad days' and volatility are just part of the process.
literally within seconds of this lesson, my mind was blown. i could mostly hear it in individual words, but had no real clue as to how or why... literally, seconds in. thanks to you and your patron!!
From the view of Japanese native speaker, you guys don’t have to care about this at all, but just go out there, get somebody to talk to, and just go for it.
I'm currently not learning Japanese yet as I plan to only seriously start studying it after getting to a higher level in Korean and Spanish. I will still rewatch this video a couple of times until I get a feeling for the pitch patterns. I hope that this will help me recognize pitch more when I start studying it. :)
"It helps even more if you watch it before developing bad habits" * Grumbles in uni class that never mentioned pitch accent, and only mentioned general intonation over an entire sentence* Suddenly, the thing said to me by an old Japanese man who visited our class for a few weeks makes sense (after being the person to begin/end class for the day: "Your pronunciation is getting better!"). Had no clue I was doing anything differently - must have just been picking up on our teacher's pronunciation. UGH. AGHHH!!!
This lesson really opened my eyes to pitch tone. I was aware of it to some degree, but it makes a lot more sense now. Thank you for making this video and that you to the Patreon member who paid for it.
It's amazing how much the difference in your voicing style for English vs Japanese influences how I perceive your personality. English Dogen is a lot more chipper and nerdy, but Japanese Dogen sounds like a world-weary wiseman or at very least a lot more serious and grounded. Maybe it's just my imagination or maybe it's from not being able to tell what's sups supposed to be seriousposed to be physical humour versus what's just you, but it seems like your body language changes up a bit when switching language. Of course it's hard to tell when you mostly watch the skits. To elaborate further on the personality thing, if I were listening to Japanese Dogen, I would assume a man in his 30s who had a long day at work and has a bit of a wry attitude. But with English Dogen you still sound like a teacher's assistant.
About the "high low high" not existing, when I listen to Japanese people being interviewed, or someone responding to a question *in* Japanese, I often hear something like 「↑です ↓け ↑ ど↓」 What would this be considered?
Pedagogy: Plz always have a MARKERS for bad examples, like sad trombone (sound) after a bad example, and RED CIRCLE WITH SLASH for the visual of the bad pitch-pattern.
You know this is the beauty of the Japanese language. Unlike in Chinese, Japanese words have flexible pronunciation and still you can be understood. The tricky part in Japanese is the small っ and the long vowels.
How pervasive is Tokyo-style accent? What fraction of the National population live Type-I accent regions, and speak with approximately the media standard accent in daily business and colloquial speech? Comparing accent maps to population tables, it seems to be at least 75%. Why is that not stated in any articles that not just some, but the overwhelming majority of Japanese , speak in the standard accent?
Aint ever seen a language with more swag in its phonetics. Thank you for sharing this gold with us so freely. It is dearly treasured by us grammar nerds.
