Dogen
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Japanese Phonetics Episode 32—Live, now with native recordings!
🕑 Added 2017-12-02 16:36:40 +0000 UTCSunday, January 23, 2022 update: A previous version of this video contained a mistake in the pitch-accent graphic for 先生は女だ at 12:35, but this has been fixed, along with a few other minor cosmetic changes.
One additional note on pitch-accent graphics: In this series, particles and conjugations of the verb です are typically indicated with an open circle instead of a solid dot, but in this lesson, ‘でした’ in the verb ‘食べませんでした’ is marked with solid dots in order to maintain consistency with other lessons on verbs.
Bibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page
Good evening Patrons! The thirty-second episode of Japanese Phonetics is now live and updated with high-quality native recordings! In this episode we test our knowledge of beginner through intermediate pitch-accent. Answer sheets may be found linked at the bottom of this post. Please note that the content of these two files is the same—I decided to use two file types for convenience/accessibility.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free leave a comment below. Thank you very much for the continued support, and good luck with your Japanese studies. Hope everyone is excited for the upcoming pronunciation sub-series!
Best from Beppu,
Dōgen
Comments
KanjiMan333
Hello Dogen, for question 18 I understand that the downstep occurs on the か but the か for それはおかし sounds like it's pronounced with a slightly higher pitch than the お that precedes it. Am I wrong and they're actually the same pitch?
ShineKia
Dogen-sensei, is 入れながら pronounced with iRENAgara acceptable?
Dogen
Hi Markas—I think you may be going through the series a bit too fast; this is very hard to tell unless you're already at an extremely high level (even I have to often look up the pitch of certain words when reading my scripts). Don't worry too much about nailing each and every word at this point, concentrate more on slowly but surely learning the important rules while doing dozens and dozens of hours of native speech input—I believe that this is the best course to take. Cheers!
Markas
Finally moving on to Pronunciation! But actually i still feel like during the times when i read a passage etc, i sometimes worry or think if the connecting words are Heiban and that if i should say it in a flat manner, because i don't know all of the word's pitch accent when reading a passage for the first time, whats your solution Dogen?
Dogen
Hi Mik K. As mentioned at the end of this video, we'll be exploring this topic in the future, in the 'advanced pitch-accent' sub-series. の is peculiar in that it often changes the pitch-accent of words which come before it to 平板, as is the case with 日本. Apologies for not being able to address this in more detail at this point—I'm still working out the exceptions to this particular phenomenon. Thank you for the support, and let me know if you have any additional questions!
Mik K
Hi, but why does の change the pitch accent of にほん? Is this explained in one of your previous videos?
Neeson Champion
Hey! Just saw this now. Yeah I do plan on it, I'll get onto it next week after new years has settled down.
Erik Alexander Olson
Hey, to Neeson Champion, are you still around? Are you planning on updating the Anki deck to up to this lesson? Thought I would just post this here since it's the last in the pitch accent series until the advanced lessons later on.
Dogen
Hi Matthew, I was sure I responded to this comment, but it seems as though my response is no longer up, so please allow me to reply again. I expect it to take approximately 10 episodes to get through the essentials (devoicing rules, vowel formation, the 'R' sound, etc.), and an additional 5-10 to cover the more advanced concepts, which I'm currently organizing. Please let me know if you have any question or concerns with regards to this timeline!
Matthew Mitchell
How long do you expect the pronunciation series will take to finish?
