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Japanese dictionaries w/ pitch accents? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5566 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 1 of 11 22 September 2009 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm just beginning on my conquest of the Japanese language. I'm aware that Japanese has
a pitch accent, and have been reading up on it, however I find it difficult to locate materials for learners which actually indicate where the accent occurs in different words. Fortunately, I was able to locate one course book which does (Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi), but it has no accompanying audio. Virtually all materials just advise the learner to listen to Japanese and copy the intonation of Japanese speakers, which I understand is probably the best path for many learners. I can see why that might be something particularly difficult for a beginner who is not linguistically inclined. Seldom are language learning materials written for those of us who have degrees in linguistics. But I have a firm grounding in phonetics, a desire to understand how the pitch accent works as opposed to tones or a stress accent, and a desire to make my Japanese pronunciation as good as possible from the beginning. I want something more. I want to be able to determine the correct pitch of a word I have no audio examples of, for instance if I'm practicing my Japanese by reading some written material aloud. And I think it would also be useful to see the correct pitch accent for a word and compare it to what I hear in speech to get a better sense of how the pitch accent works and a better ear for hearing the correct accent of new words. Does anyone know of any good Japanese dictionaries that indicate the pitch accent of each word? Or other useful Japanese learning materials with pitch accents? Edited by Levi on 22 September 2009 at 4:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pfwillard Pro Member United States Joined 5698 days ago 169 posts - 205 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 22 September 2009 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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WWWJDIC has audio clips and dictionary.goo.ne.jp has the accents marked by the number of the accented syllable--0 for flat words.
The Pocket Kodansha has them, but most of the English-Japanese dictionaries I've looked at don't--just open to hashi and see if it distinguishes between bridge and chopsticks. If you really want to speak correctly, get an accent dictionary for broadcasters like NHK's 日本語発音アクセント辞典. About $70! One possibly related item I like is a book/CD called Shadowing: Let's Speak Japanese! It is a listen and repeat kind of program but the speakers really emphasize the pitch of useful phrases. That program also gives a hint of the male/female language differences. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7120 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 3 of 11 24 September 2009 at 3:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I think Kodansha does this. It does in the basic dictionary for sure.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wiseachoo Newbie United States Joined 5543 days ago 13 posts - 13 votes Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 11 25 September 2009 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Levi:
I'm extremely confused by your request. Assuming you are at the level where you can read/pronounce kana, "pronouncing" the japanese language is actually extremely simple, much more so than English where we have different situations in which we pronounce the same letters differently. If I had to take a guess here, you're probably reading heavily "romaji-fied" materials (you should stop this asap if this is the case). Learn kana and never go back, as you're doing yourself harm. pfwillard: Your comment about "hashi" being non-distinguishable in a dictionary. I assume the only point you were trying to make is that lower-quality dictionaries do not include the kanji? As the way of "pronouncing" "hashi" is the exact same when speaking about bridges or chopsticks. Only the context of the spoken situation would lend the user to knowing which meaning was implied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 11 25 September 2009 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm sorry to say you're entirely wrong. If you come across an unfamiliar technical term such as pitch accent, it's probably worth looking up to make sure it's irrelevant rather than assuming the questioner has no idea with a very specific question - and this is doubly true if there are followup posts that treat the question as sensible and also confuse you. Pitch accent is quite important in Japanese - not for comprehension, but for sounding decent. Most learning material doesn't even mention it, incredibly enough, but it exists and matters. It is never marked in normal Japanese writing, regardless of the writing system used. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| wiseachoo Newbie United States Joined 5543 days ago 13 posts - 13 votes Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 11 25 September 2009 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well I stand corrected. I've never considered this aspect of speech "pitch" so much as "tone". This really dives into a grey area of linguistics in general. I studied Spanish in high school and French in college and ran into pitch accents (marks) all the time, however my implications for Japanese were that there really aren't pitch accent (marks) visually speaking.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 11 25 September 2009 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Pitch accents and characters written with diacritics have nothing in common, other than notation - an unfortunate thing which seems to have once again caused confusion. French has diacritics ("accent marks") that show a different sound is being used (... leaving aside the vagaries of French spelling). This is one way writing systems deal with having more vowel sounds than characters for vowels (other ways are to write combinations of vowel sounds one after another, or to write multiple sounds the same way). These marks don't indicate stress or pitch or anything of the sort. Japanese isn't like French; it actually only has 5 vowels, and no need for diacritical characters to show what vowel to use. However, some words are differentiated from each other by what pitch various parts are spoken at, and this is what the diacritics in special material which shows this are for. You may find the wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent interesting. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Endo Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands chokochoko.wordpress Joined 5536 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Cantonese, Dutch*, English, Mandarin Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 11 27 September 2009 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yea I've been looking for a good online dictionary too with accent pitch shown. Even though it's not as dramatic as
Mandarin, nevertheless the classic hashi (chopsticks) vs hashi (bridge) makes it kinda a must to know. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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