• It has two tones high and low.
• The pitch change doesn’t occur within a syllable but at the change of syllables.
• When the first syllable is high the second is low, when the first is low the second is high.
• Within a word (phrase?) once the pitch lowers it won’t rise again.
• Particles become part of a word when considering pitch accent

So with two syllables the possible accents are FF (flat), LH, HL.
Flat is usually marked as being low tone but I think this can change when a high tone precedes it; you just continue in that tone, you don’t necessarily drop the tone.
With four syllables the permutations are FFFF, LHLL, LHHL, LHHH, HLLL.

This is fine until you start putting words together.
A preceding phrase’s pitch can affect a following phrase. So a high tone may be sustained in rapid gapless speech until the next drop in tone, or a rise in tone may be ignored if the preceding phrase ends in a low tone. ²
illustrated in these two phrases

oHAYOU goZAIMAsu — two words
oHAYOU GOZAIMAsu — one phrase

aRIgatou goZAIMAsu — two words
aRIgatou gozaimasu — one phrase

but even then this isn’t a hard and fast rule, consider this example.³

haNA is the accent for both nose and flower
but
haNA ga akai — the flower is red
haNA GA AKAI — his nose is red

In fact the rules (if there are any) start to get complicated when you go away from single words and start using sentences. Then there are regional changes, even within the standard accent ⁴, and words whose pitch accent is variable. Kindachi goes so far as to say ” …it would seem that there are no fixed accent patterns at all. ”

Usually pitch accent is presented as the method to distinguish synonyms. Unfortunately given the small amount of variation in pitch and the large number of synonyms this isn’t as useful as you might think.
kougyou 工業 industry and kougyou 鉱業 mining for instance. or
nou for 能 talent　脳 brain　農 farming
Fortunately context will give meaning in 99.9% of cases.

Another problem is where to find out the tones of a given word. As far as I’m aware only specialist dictionaries such as NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典in Japanese give them. Proper standard Japanese is very important in broadcasting, although like the BBC who once only used received pronunciation maybe regional variations might become more acceptable in Japan. For L2 learners the only markers I’ve seen are difficult to read. I’ve seen accent marked by using capitals, or putting an accent over the last high tone, when using romaji. In kana I’ve seen lines under and over kana, or by using superscript for high tones. I’ve even seen musical notation used to denote tones. But overall it’s very hard to read passages marked up in these ways.
The most comprehensive textbook I’ve seen for pitch accent is Gene Nishi’s Japanese Step by Step. Which could work as basic dictionary of sorts.

There is stress in terms of emotion or emphasis, but it’s important not to use English stress patterns, or to use English stress (louder and longer) in place of pitch stress ( a pitch change, a diatonic step). Although anyone who has heard a Japanese woman say sugoi has heard how elongation emphasis occurs (on the syllable before i as it happens)

I think therefore that the important thing is to know of pitch accent’s existence. Rather than mark up books in very cumbersome ways it is best to learn proper pronunciation by mimicry. Learn by shadowing or by having a native correct you. I think a uniformly flat accent is the most acceptable foreign accent. The most important things are to avoid stress accents in an English fashion and to pronounce Japanese loan words in Japanese rather than English. Bear in mind what English sounds like when the stress accent is placed in the wrong place. One of my Japanese teachers finds the way Japanese place-names are mangled into American English on the Tokyo underground English announcements very distracting for instance.

afterthoughts and updates
#1 I think it is the advent of cheap CDs that stopped textbook makers attempting to markup accents. What could be better than a recording of the Japanese words and passages?

#2 Thinking back to Doug’s piece, children as part of their language acquisition skills are very good at discerning differences and mimicking them. As you get older you lose this ability, so it’s no surprise that Doug’s daughter has no problem and the relatively ancient L2 learners do.

#3 To complicate matters I’ve noticed that verbs can change their pitch accent depending on their declension. For instance 見る　miru but mimasu

#4 Thanks to arunlikhati for the link to the paper on marking accents.

#5 there are recordings of pitch accents in otherwise identical words here. Are your ears tuned enough to tell the difference in a single word out of context? (possibly offline due to earthquake in Northern Japan Sunday March 13 2011)

#6 There is a CD ROM companion to the NHK dictionary that looks quite interesting. You compare recordings of your voice to a standard recording to see where you’re going wrong.

#7 From a high school Japanese teacher Katie Suttles on Edufire a link to a teaching supplement for the Genki textbooks. You can see just how cumbersome marking Japanese text for tones is. Without audio I doubt it would be any use at all.

#8 I finally got a chance to ask a Japanese teacher (and teacher-trainer) about what the thinking is in teaching pitch accent.
The “official” line is to introduce new words with correct pronunciation and hand gestures and mark the pitch accent in handouts.
However it is found that in the classroom when accent signs are used in handouts students’ accents sound slightly strange as they are more cautious when pronouncing, loosing fluency.

In adult education where you probably only have 2 hours contact per week, communication and fostering fluency take precedence over the fine tuning of accents. Don’t sweat the small stuff. I think it would also be very demoralising to have a teacher try to fine tune your pitch when you might not be able to hear the difference; it’s hard enough to remember the words and get them out grammatically at a reasonable speed.

The advice for self-instruction is to understand about pitch but to learn accent by emulation of model Japanese sentences. ie shadowing.

Indeed I was thinking to myself how do you know you’ve got the correct accent even if you have annotations in front of you. You need a feedback loop of some sort to fine tune what you are producing. You can’t really hear yourself talk, so you either have to record yourself and compare your accent (WordChamp has an interesting on-line application that allows you to do this and overlay your recording and waveform with a native speaker’s) or have a native speaker who will listen to you and try to correct you.

#9 (Oct ’09) Through a post on JapanesePod101 I found that goo’s online dictionaries have accent information in their entries.

——
1. Haruhiko Kindachi, The Japanese Language translated by Umeyo Hirano (Tuttle 1978) pp117 to 123
2. Gene Nishi, Japanese Step by Step (McGraw Hill 2001) p20
3. Clarke and Hamamura, Colloquail Japanese (Routledge 1981) p9
4. Yoko Hasegawa, Against Marking Accent Locations in Japanese Textbooks (University of California) section 5

Related posts:

1. The Japanese Language
2. Basic Japanese Through Comics (parts 1 and 2)
3. iSpeak Japanese

にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese is an interactive site based around school activities made by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

It is almost completely in Japanese. There are some English explanations of what to do, but otherwise it’s an immersive program. You click on pictures and you get a dialogue or a description written in kana and spoken to you in Japanese at the same time.

Both polite Japanese, the masu desu form, and casual plain Japanese is provided. The children mainly speaking plain form and adults polite form.

It sems to be mainly a teachers resource but I’m sure most students would be able to navigate it by themselves and learn new things. You might need to know your kana, but even then you could read along with the audio to improve your kana and there are learning kana screens as well.

sections include
15. じかんわり（jikanwari – timetable) for telling the time and dates
4. からだのなまえ（parts of the body)
3. トイレ (toilet)
10. きゅうしょく (school lunch)
11. そうじ (cleaning)

There’s a lot of vocabulary here presented in an interesting manner, it’s worth a look. I’ve learnt some new words already.

It needs shockwave and java I think. On my setup some of the voicerecording modules don’t seem to load, but you might have more luck. Also some directories seem to be missing. It also uses frames as well as shockwave which makes it hard to bookmark sections unfortunately. The last update was Heisei13 which I think is 2002 so it’s a bit dormant perhaps.

Related posts:

1. 漢字学習ステップ８級 • Kanji Study Step Level 8
2. Self Study Kana Workbook
3. JLPT 3 Kanji and Vocabulary Tests

Anki
暗記 [あんき] (n,vs) memorisation, learning by heart.

This is a flashcard program that was written by someone specifically to help him learn Japanese. It’s free, and runs on Windows Linux and Mac. Apparently there’s also a version for mobile phones but I can’t find or comment on how that works.

As sample card decks there is vocabulary for various JLPT stages and Heisig kanji learning system. I think the help files could be better and his terminology clearer but it’s fairly simple to make your own decks and add to decks. Pictures and sound can be added.

There is also a dictionary lookup of online dictionaries but the ALC site doesn’t seem to work for me. It might not like my browser. (The error is in Japanese and I can’t really be bothered to figure it out past だめ or 禁止 or whatever it’s saying. )

The main benefit of the program is “spaced repetition”. This is where cards are shown to you at the ideal time for you you to memorise them. There’s no point in reviewing a well known word so the program tries to show you it just before you forget it. — There’s better explanations on Anki’s site.
Its hard to evaluate the method by which the program does this but I’m willing to trust it.

I use iFlash on the mac at the moment and really like it. It also has spaced repetition based on a score. Anki might be a replacement as iFlash has become a little dormant. (however he’s promising an iPhone version when development opens up on that platform which’d be enough for me to get an iPod touch perhaps.)
But at the moment I think I prefer iFlash’s list view; which alllows me an easy overview and multiple card sides; which allows me to store notes and examples easily. However this might be possible in Anki as well.

Finally Anki has pretty good statistics features to chart your progress which would be a good incentive to learning I think.

Check it out!

Related posts:

1. iFlash
2. WordChamp – Internet Flashcards
3. Flashcards Deluxe 2.7

Maria Fernandez-Toro & Francis R Jones (CiLT)

This is an interesting textbook offering advice on how to study a language on your own. It’s not specifically about Learning Japanese, but gives methods for studying any language.

It has 2 main sections.

Section 1 looks at style of learning, your aptitude for self instruction, your experience in solo learning, and motivation. There are short questionnaires to help you diagnose problems you might have in some areas.

Section 2 gives 82 learning techniques divided amongst the four key skills; reading, writing, listening, and speaking; and the two building blocks; grammar and vocabulary.

It can help you find new inspiration if your study habits have become a bit stale. Especially useful for people going back to study after a long time or those studying on their own.

The only place I’ve seen that you can buy this book is direct from CILT’s suppliers.

Related posts:

1. The Japanese Language
2. Japanese for Busy People II – The Workbook
3. Unicom Preparatory Course For JLPT3

At the simplest level you can store lists of words in the notes feature of an iPod. Write them in a text file in UTF encoding and the iPod can display the Japanese. However the typeface is very small compared to roman type and can be hard to read.

To be a little more sophisticated you can seperate word and definition by a screens worth of blank lines. This way you can test yourself and not see word and definition at the same time. On the 5G (video) iPod there are 11 lines per screen in notes. The screen is 26 kanji characters wide. Roman text isn’t monospaced so will vary depending on the letters used. Text does wrap however. File size is limited to 4k per note.

iFlash can generate ipod note based versions of it’s flashcard decks using blank lines to avoid showing the definition and word at the same time. However at the moment they haven’t changed for the larger 5G iPods and seems to be optimised for screens with a 7 line height.

–update 07Sep09–
iFlash now has a version for the iPod Touch. In fact the Touch with it’s wealth of applications and screen real estate renders most of this post obselete. A lot can happen in 2 years technology-wise.

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Photos

A slightly more readable way of producing cards on the iPod is to make them as jpegs. The advantage is readability. The disadvantage is size and each card has only one side. You can put Japanese on one jpeg and english on another but if you use shuffle you will lose the link bewtween them; you can only study them in the order they are imported. My only solution for this is to make your cards using two sides to the screen and physically block one side. Not ideal at all.

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Audio Flashcards

Of course the real beauty of an iPod is it can play audio and is much better at doing this than displaying text or photos. There is a wealth of Japanese launguage material out there and best for me is japanese iPod 101. I edit single words to a single track and save them to playlists. The text used in the menu systems and Now Playing screen is larger and clearer than notes. However in menus it doesn’t wrap. In the Now Playing screen it will scroll if it is wider than the screen. I have tried keeping Japanese to one channel and English to the other so that by removing an earphone I can test myself however whatever way the compression works I get a faint recording of one channel in the silent passage of the other channel. The other alternative is to leave a silent space before the definition. This means that if you want to test yourself in both directions you will have to make the file twice. Once English first; once Japanese first.

To edit I use Final Cut Express because I like the way it works. There are many audio editing programs available and you may find one more suited to how you work. It is a good idea to get original material by a native voice that is as clean and clear a recording as possible. I have heard commercial recordings that sound as if they have been recorded in an echoy bathroom and others that have the hum of a computer hard drive on them. It might be possible to repair them somewhat using a noise gate or other audio filters. You want something that you can listen to repeatedly.

Puting things together.

You can add artwork to audio files that will display full screen if the user clicks the center button twice. This could be useful for adding large kanji. Going further you could make movie files instead of audio files and have several pictures synchronised to the audio. If they are still pictures they should compress quite well.

But best of most worlds is to use notes ability to link to audio…

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Notes 2

iPod notes can link to audio files, like a very limited web browser.

You can either include links in a normal note file but you still have the problem of small type. Or you can make a linx file that makes a custom menu. The links on the menu can link to audio files, folders or other notes. The syntax of how to make these files is explained in this pdf from Apple.

I have used this method to make line by line clickable transcripts of the dialogs on Japanese iPod 101. First I transcribe the dialog in kanji to a text file. Although if you want you could use hiragana or romaji. Lines that are longer than 16 characters should be broken down into multiple lines at a suitable break in the sentence if you can. Otherwise characters after the 14th one will be not appear; the text doesn’t wrap.

Next edit out the dialog from the program. I save this as a single file to the ipod. Then I break it down into individual lines and save these files to the iPod also. These lines can either be one file per sentence in the dialog (my preferred option) or one file per line on the screen. Use a naming convention that you can easily remember like EpisodeNumberLineNumber. It’s worth unchecking remember playhead position so the files always play from the beginning. Also check the option to remove the file from shuffle so you don’t get randomn lines of Japanese when listening to your music on shuffle.

Then I mark this text up so each line links to it’s corresponding audio file. I use the &NowPlaying=false tag so I stay in notes when the audio plays. It’s also a good idea to turn repeat off.

I place a play all link at the bottom linking to the complete episode and a link back to the previous menu. I also put a title in the file. This will appear in the menu bar of the ipod when showing the file and it will be what appears in the menu listing the episodes. You can call your file whatever you want as long as it ends in .linx. I save all these files in a folder called jPod101 in the Notes folder on the iPod.

Now when I go into Notes in the folder jPod101 I have a menu of the titles I’ve given files which lead to the episode transcripts in a large typeface. I can highlight a line then play it by selecting the center button.

example
<title>Episode 93</title>

<a href=”song=93line1&NowPlaying=false”>T: いました</a>

<a href=”song=93line5&NowPlaying=false”>N: 上野公園でこの子の</a>
<a href=”song=93line5&NowPlaying=false”>　お散歩をしてから、</a>
<a href=”song=93line5&NowPlaying=false”>　お昼を食べに行きます。</a>
<a href=”song=ep93&NowPlaying=false”>play all</a>
<a href=”/jPod101″>back</a>

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Related posts:

1. WordChamp – Internet Flashcards
2. Flashcards Deluxe 2.7
3. Skim those pdf notes!

The structure of the course is 14 units. Each unit is made up of three teaching sections of 2 pages with grammer points, dialogs and exercises; a section about Japanese culture; and an episode from a soap opera set in a bar using the topics covered in the unit. Depending on the complexity of the topics covered and the amount of time you have, a unit should take about 1 or 2 weeks to cover.

The emphasis is on things a tourist might need. How to order; how to shop; take a taxi; directions; time; trains; etc. It certainly isn’t business or school orientated. The language is everyday. No watashi wa, ja phrasing rather than dewa, desu ne and desu yo phrasing and so on. (Of course what do I know? I’m just a beginner myself) The discs are well recorded natural sounding dialogs with light humour and a variety of voices. (much better than the Japanese for Busy People tapes that have the man with the most boring voice in the world narrating them). 4 star recommendation, the only drawback is that the text is in romaji which is a bit of a step back once you’ve learnt kana, but on the plus side you can start right away without any previous knowledge.

Related posts:

1. Japanese for Busy People
2. Speak Japanese to me!
3. Japanese for Busy People II – The Workbook