Pitch Accent

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Pitch Accent

In this lesson you will learn about Japanese pitch accent. This is a pretty advanced topic, and it varies largely by dialect.

It is often said that Japanese is just spoken out with flat sounds, without tonal changes or pitch. This is actually pretty close to the truth, as you will make your way with flat sounds in most cases. However, there are some cases when words with the same spelling are indicating different words, just by changing the pitch accent.

This lesson shows a few examples of how common words are pronounced in Tokyo dialect. Just beware that the pitch does vary a lot around the country. As wrong pitch is a sure sign of a gaijin, beginners are strongly recommended to keep the general pitch as flat as possible.

Listen

Listen to and compare the sounds in the following table of examples, going from left to right, one row at a time. The part of the word with accent is underlined in the romaji spelling.

雨	あめ
ame	ame
Rain	Candy


一杯	いっぱい
ippai	ippai
one (cup or glass)	Full


箸	橋
hashi	hashi
Chop sticks	Bridge


今	居間
ima	ima
Now	Living room


牡蠣	柿
kaki	kaki
Oyster	Persimmon


鮭	酒
sake	sake
Salmon	Sake, Japanese rice wine


二本	日本
nihon	nihon
Two (sticks of)	Japan


成る	鳴る
naru	naru
To become	To sound, to ring

Wikipedia on Pitch Accent - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

Comments (10)

8-) this will be easy compared to spelling test except for the fact i cheated on them so i got easy As lol

:P This is going to be pretty hard to remember..

Ohh, difficult to remember.

if i follow this in other parts of japan and not tokyo will i still be understood? isit strictly only a tokyo dialect? thanks. :)

Very interesting! :)

@Nott: Yes, it's only where there are multiple words with the same basic pronunciation that it could be a problem understanding. Bit it would in most cases be obvious which of the words you mean - from the context.

Even if I screw these up, would I still be pretty understandable?

reading this one is easy for me :) I had fun

arigato :)

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