Japanese Pitch Accents + Sentence Breakdown for Beginners

3 years ago
345

For beginners of Japanese - Let's break down a Japanese sentence (two actually) together.

I intended this to just be a sentence breakdown, but since this was my first attempt and I planned to go through the pronunciation, I gave a short introduction to pitch accents in Japanese too.

Note: pitch accents vary greatly by region and dialect. For example, in Fukui prefecture, most words are treated as heiban (mostly flat). The two ame's I mentioned, 雨 and 飴, for example, would be pronounced the same. The pitch accents presented here are the standard Tokyo dialect. If you learn that, you will be understood most anywhere.

If you want to skip to the sentence breakdown, jump to timestamp: 03:07

00:00 Introduction
00:29 About Japanese Pitch Accents
03:07 Sentence Breakdown

A few tools mentioned in the video:
- Chrome extension Yomichan (also works with Brave browser!) : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yomichan/ogmnaimimemjmbakcfefmnahgdfhfami
- Their website: https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/
- NHK Accent dictionary: https://www.nhk-book.co.jp/detail/000000113452016.html
- Or on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dictionary-Japan-language-pronunciation-accent/dp/4140113456/ (expensive if you aren't in Japan!)
- You can also buy the NHK dictionary in electronic form in the app store. The app that I have is called "Dictionaries" and then you have to buy the dictionary as an in-app purchase
- For an excellent and in-depth crash course on pitch accents: https://www.patreon.com/dogen

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