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Getting rid of my accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4698 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 73 of 84 13 January 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The fact that no one goes into detail about how to learn Japanese intonation is very frustrating to me. I really do want to learn it and I'm willing to spend years working to perfect it, but I basically have to figure it all out on my own. Well, that's not entirely true, but that's how it feels sometimes. Even if I were surrounded by natives 24/7, I still wouldn't necessarily know what frequencies to use at what times. It's obviously not enough to just be surrounded by the target language. You seem to think it's pointless to try hard to learn it while not being in the country, but it must be possible to achieve. I'm counting on it being possible. I believe the reason most people fail to do it is most people don't try hard enough. There are patterns and rules regarding the frequencies individuals use in specific situations. If I can just figure them all out and get better at mimicry...
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| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6106 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 74 of 84 14 January 2013 at 5:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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I chatted online with some Chinese guys who told me their textbooks all have tone information in them. They were shocked that English language learning material mentions all of this very minimally. Still, I have met quite a few Chinese with thick accents in Japanese. I don't think this is so easy for them either.
For me, I'm not at that level, I have other bigger problems to fix. Though maybe learning more about tones might help with other listening comprehension issues. Hmm. You have read the wikipedia article on this, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5362 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 75 of 84 14 January 2013 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've heard the same thing from some Korean students.
I think Hiiro Yui is talking specifically about intonation, not pitch accent. I don't know, I don't see the big deal with intonation -- it's usually the most obvious thing in languages and although it can be full of fine distinctions, generally, it's also very repetitive and it applies equally to whatever language is below it. Pitch, however, is random and intricate. Edited by Arekkusu on 14 January 2013 at 9:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4315 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 76 of 84 14 January 2013 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know the feeling. Boy, do I ever. Now, my native language's phonology is very similar to the Japanese language's (or extremely adaptable to the learning of it, depends from where you look at it), so I had an advantage from the moment I realized that. With that in mind, I'm not quite sure this will help much, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I started working on my intonation by shadowing Japanese variety shows (most of them downloaded or streamed from the web). A large number of them are taped in Tokyo so they can counted on to be (mostly) in hyoujungo, although as a note, you have to be mindful that a lot of the hosts come from Kansai so they ocasionally let some "fashionable" kansai-ben slip. (* Not to imply that to shadow kansai-ben is bad, but even if the word is the same, the accentuation is different to hyoujungo.) If downloaded, you can replay and shadow them as many times as needed. I also suggest looking at the lips of the speaker (if they're on screen) and make an effort to replicate that. Edited by Lakeseayesno on 15 January 2013 at 7:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4319 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 77 of 84 15 January 2013 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I have seen English textbooks with sentence intonation/pitch for Japanese, but they were older ones (from at least thirty years ago). So you might be able to find some of those. They marked it with rising and falling lines among other things. As for learning pitch/intonation, with Swedish (where it can be important for meaning too) I did not have any problem picking it up since I have literally ONLY listened to native speakers, and mostly listened to people with the same or similar dialects, and I listen to the spoken language more than read the written. My brain quickly began picking out "patterns" for it and I remembered intonation/stress/pitch as just plain part of the word or sentence, instead of as a separate thing. (I will never say "can I shower now?" wrong, ever, because I memorized it as a set phrase with pronunciation intact, for example. I didn't memorize the written form first and put my poor pronunciation onto it, and memorize that.) I think it's something quite difficult to get across in text, and of course it will be more difficult to unlearn your current mistakes... I think it ends up being just the same as with other parts of the language, you just somehow memorize "this kind of sentence has this tone of voice and this word has this pitch/stress, and when they are together it sounds like this". Only by listening to lots of native speakers all the time will you get it, I think it is more of a listening-and-remembering skill than an actual speaking skill. I immediately noticed you have (pardon me, I don't know what else to call it or even where you are from) "African-American vowel pronunciation". I was actually very surprised no one else mentioned it, since it was something that immediately struck me when I was listening. I don't think that has to do with pitch or tone of voice or anything at all, just plain pronunciation. However, I am not good at Japanese myself, so if a Japanese person wants to contest this, by all means do so. I noticed it happen a whole lot in o (ex. mo) a (wa), and e (de). The others seemed fine to me (ignoring some actual words that sounded odd, such as not speeding up/"pausing" in the right place). I think you did better when the sounds were within words. I think speaking without pausing would really improve your speaking in a lot of different ways, so I would recommend thinking over your sentence more fully before saying it (and when alone, think about sentences you may frequently have to say, remembering how natives said them - I personally don't bother actually practising aloud, I just think about a sentence I remember really clearly and repeat it in my head with their voice). I also might understand what you mean by "sounding Japanese" and "physical capabilities". Even if you have absolutely perfect pronunciation, the "voice" of a Japanese person probably "sounds" different due to your overall pitch (not sure if this is the right word) and where the voice comes from in your mouth. In Swedish, people's voices are much deeper than in American English and sounds like something different, hard to describe but kind of like they always have a cold, in a way - this is something I as an American don't know how to do yet (because I haven't bothered trying), so even if I had perfect Swedish I would automatically sound American just from that. However there must be descriptions for it, if not for language learners than for singers. Similarly it is very noticeable when Swedes speak English that their voices come from there. It IS a cultural thing and not a physical thing, it CAN be learned. So if that is what you are talking about, it certainly is fixable and might actually be easy. And, err, if anyone has tips on how to change where you speak from by all means tell me, I should at least attempt to improve my Swedish pronunciation. Edited by kaptengröt on 15 January 2013 at 6:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6106 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 78 of 84 15 January 2013 at 7:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hmm, so what's the different between pitch and intonation? Intonation has to do with pitch, doesn't it? I think I'm missing something here. Intonation is like rising the pitch with a question at the end?
Yeah I don't know. I listened to the mp3. I suck at this language, but to my ears the vowels sound about right. To me, it seems the pauses are odd, like there are hesitations in the midst of verbs. I'm not sure if this is real or not, maybe someone else can verify, but to my ears it seems that Japanese people run through the verb endings and conjugations like a machine gun, very quickly, and the time they speak more deliberately, not pausing but I can sort of feel their brain working between syllables, is when speaking Chinese kanji compounds. Edited by cathrynm on 15 January 2013 at 7:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6890 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 79 of 84 15 January 2013 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Think of the "overall pitch" that kaptengröt talks about as another word for "register" (as in soprano, alto etc.).
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5362 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 80 of 84 15 January 2013 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Pitch is word or phrase specific. Just like FOrum is always stressed the same way in English. Intonation is like a blanket that applies over a unit of meaning and that would remain the same even if you changed some words for other phonologically similar words. This includes raising in the case of questions. All languages have intonation, but not all languages have a way to encode their nouns with stress, pitch or tone.
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