Learning Japanese

[quote]
First, you will NOT pick them up just by listening, unless you have some previous understanding of how the pitch system works and you actually listen for pitch. I’ve yet to hear a non-native use correct pitch without having specifically worked on it[/quote]

So, Uh, how do we arrange this ??? I’m happy to be your first.

Yeah, I think that’s unavoidable at this point as my Japanese pronunciation is just a extrapolation from English and Chinese. I still need to set the “cognitive categories” for Japanese phonology and that takes time, concentration, consistency and feedback. (Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile: )I also misread the pitch mark key :blush: thinking the 3rd syllable is high.

Nice. I’ll pay attention to this when I start getting into verbs. I’m still learning phrases right now.

The relationship between Standard Chinese (SC) and some of the SE Mandarin dialects are like this, too; for example, in a dialect spoken around Chóngqìng, SC 4th tones are 3rd tones, so 大 is pronounced something like dǎ and 打 is dà. This isn’t the case for all the non-standard Mandarin dialects; there are some whose tone systems are pretty different from SC. Hángzhōu dialect, for example, has seven tones. If you have some background in dialectology here’s their organization by qièyùn tone category: upper (陰) a lower(陽) register píng; upper register shǎng; upper and lower register qù; upper and lower register rù. Lower register shǎng merged with lower qù. The splits are conditioned by initial types.

Anyways, like I said, I’m going to pay attention to pitch in my audio material and try to model it. I’ll aslo continue to use dictionaries to make sure I’m hearing things correctly. But I’m not going spend lots of time specifically drilling pitch at this point (like I did for Chinese).

:bow:

Thanks everyone for the advice :notworthy:

Here’s how I’m setting up my review sheets. The bold syllables are high.

んせい ------------------- 先生 ------------ teacher
わたなべ-------------------- 渡辺 -------------Watanabe
おはようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal)
おはよう----------------------------------------- good morning (informal)
る ------------------------- 夜 ---------------- morning
れいし ----------- 失禮しました ---- excuse me
こんばん -------------------------------------- good night

I’m listening for pitch distinctions in the audio and getting the marks from a dictionary. I then memorize the pronunciation and practice.

The harder aspects of pronunciation are syllables with /u/ [ü͍] and the ら-series, which are illustrated in this beast – “よろしく”. Words seem to be getting harder, too, with items like おひさしぶりです and しばらくですね. I’m finding Japanese to be fun language to study despite these (expected) difficulties :slight_smile:

(There was an earthquake while I wrote this :astonished: )

All very interesting. Anyway, here here is something from a guy who published a kanji dictionary some years back:
hadamitzky.de/english/lp_pitch_accent.htm

And something else from the distant past (meaning, it may have been written before we were born):
chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/ … fWrong.htm

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

おはようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal)

shouldn’t this be

はようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal)

Or is that a hougen thing?

Archy, it seems like you have a much stronger understanding of pitch and phonology in Chinese and Japanese than many native speakers O.O;; so if that’s your thing, you should definitely concentrate on it.

The ‘u’ sound… I don’t think it exists in English. It’s like the ‘oo’ in ‘loo’ or ‘too’ but less rounded, more simple.

Since you can use IPA, know how to use dictionaries, and have already learned at least one foreign language (especially one whose intonation is fundamentally different from English) i’d think you should be sensitive to (and ready for) many things the average foreigner coming to Japan is not. You’ll be doing fine, i’m sure. Have fun, and good luck! :slight_smile:

Not stressing syllables is a challenge for me. I was (incorrectly) stressing れ in しつれいしました and ら in しばらくですね. With lots of listening I’m improving with these words, though.

The same kind of statement could be said for pitch in Chinese. There are lots of situations where tones are elided, such as in contracted words, and change depending on context. Tonal variation within SC isn’t negligible. In northern China, for example, third tone characters rise when they aren’t followed by another syllable. But, nobody really says not to learn the tones… Anyways, the above statement seems lazy to me. The writer could have at least left a source.

Pitch in Japanese is obviously not as important as it is in Chinese. And someone like me, who knows nothing, isn’t in a good place to make a decision on how to “practice to learn correct pronunciation from the beginning”. It’s too bad the author didn’t write out his opinion on this in more detail (Everyone knows interaction and audio is important.) and that teachers and textbooks don’t approach it either. All I can really do is listen and pay attention to details. With more experience things will become clearer.

I enjoyed this.

Happy Chinese New Year! :discodance:

[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]おはようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal)

shouldn’t this be

はようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal) [/quote]

It does sound like that. The dictionary has this: おはようございます[―はやう―] 8. :ponder:

Actually i know someone who says ディーナツ for ドーナツ. So why not, デイナツ spelled “dey” instead of “day” :laughing:

You’re right about “not a verb” - in some quarters people will toss you a 連体詞… :whistle:
ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%80%A3% … 3%E8%A9%9E

Have fun (with Japanese and otherwise)…

:rainbow:

中国語にあるから連体詞じゃなーい :ponder: なんだろうね。

しかし連体詞なんて面白いね ずっと気にしてなかったけどあのページを見ると「あ こうゆうものあったね!」と思う

yuliさん、ドイツのJens Rickmeyerの「日本語形態統語論」知ってますか?
日本の文法に興味が強ければ、それ絶対読めばいいと思っています。まとめると、日本の学校文法は全く間違いという内容です。

Yeah, i don’t think that the prosody of Japanese was/is his speciality (anyway, that reference was only meant as a kind of summary of what we’ve been talking about, the commonly taken approach). Anyway, since it’s clear now that you can make good use of pitch accent information (most other beginners would at least be confused if not deterred by it), you may perhaps be interested in books like this one:
amazon.com/Japanese-Spoken-L … 0300038348
(Her books have pitch markings in the text, unlike other textbooks)

Thanks & same to you!

[quote=“Hellstorm”]yuliさん、ドイツのJens Rickmeyerの日本語形態統語論知ってますか?
日本の文法に興味が強ければ、それ絶対読めばいいと思っています。まとめると、日本の学校文法は全く間違いという内容です。[/quote]
いや、知らないです。「日本の学校文法は全く間違う」?信じられますよ。 :laughing: その本を明日調べます(今すぐお風呂など :wink: )。

[quote=“archylgp”][quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]おはようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal)

shouldn’t this be

はようございす----------------------------- good morning (formal) [/quote]

It does sound like that. The dictionary has this: おはようございます[―はやう―] 8. :ponder:[/quote]

It’s おはようございます.

I found a book for learning more about pitch accents. It’s called 1日10分發音練習 (sanmin.com.tw/page-product.a … QDb1272VqL). The book has pretty good pitch accent markings for elementary words and phrases.

In addition to pitch marks, which are based on spectogram readings, there’s some writing on general pitch patterns and an audio CD. Variable pronunciations for a lexeme are also included, but there’s no writing indicating when one is preferred over another.

This is actually what I’m aiming to do with 2 other languages.

I’ve got my native language (Indonesian) and native-level language (English down), so just Mandarin and Japanese left. I get exchange students from the US not realizing I am not a typical American Asian (well my face looks Asian) because my English sounds like them apparently. I love actually having that ability. So for some unknown reason I unconsciously have this goal to master 4 languages.

So far, both are doing crap. Japanese is better than Mandarin although I’m living in Taiwan now and the gap between them is just like a year of study, but my Japanese still nowhere near the level that I can already use monolingual dictionaries without worry.

The only thing I’m worrying about learning both right now is that I have a lot of problem in motivating myself to learn Mandarin. I’ve been too used to the Japanese immersion environment I had for a bit, so I don’t really want to make the transition to a Mandarin one since I’m already fairly comfortable (and surprisingly liking Japanese as a language!). I’ve been here for 4 months, but I can tell my Japanese is improving along with my Mandarin, but at this pace I’m not sure if I can ever master Mandarin.

I don’t know if anyone else ever had this problem, but yeah… I’m probably off-topic anyways. ごめん。何かいい考えがあったら感謝します。

Did anyone read the New York Times article “Japan Curbs Hiring Foreigners Even as Labor Shortage Looms”?

It is the rare individual who can begin learning a foreign language as an adult, and ever sound native. I tutored English for three years at a community college, and had lots of ESL students. I have yet to meet anyone who only began studying English as an adult who sounded remotely like a native speaker. Lots of really dedicated folks very fluent in English, of course, but with easily discernible foreign accents. I’m not doubting that some of you here are language savants and can/have achieved that goal, but that is not realistic for us mere mortals.

I agree with Gao – no one’s saying it’s impossible, but it is indeed extremely rare to reach near-native level past adulthood. Honestly, I taught both English and French, and I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone like that either.

I personally did reach near-native level in English, but I started learning English before adulthood. I didn’t live in an English-speaking area until adulthood, but I must have been 14-15 when I decided to study really seriously.

Fast forward to now – I’m 36. I started Japanese 2 1/2 years ago. I do hope to reach near-native level one day, but I can’t be sure that it’s feasible. However, I would qualify myself as very gifted for languages (studied a dozen, was always way ahead of others in class, won a few prizes and language competitions), and I have a degree in Linguistics, so I understand phonology pretty well.

I participated in a speech contest last year and it was recorded. My Japanese language partner listened to it and said that, at times, some short phrases did indeed sound native. Unfortunately, I must confess that my level is not sufficient to maintain that for a long time, and mistakes are likely so common that I cannot possibly hope to sound native until I’ve become much better. It’s obviously not an instant process, and pronunciation improves as your knowledge of the language does. Still, I’d say that a strong focus on pronunciation is important right from the start, or you’ll be spending lots of time trying to undo bad habits. In the case of Japanese, pitch is definitely one such element that shouldn’t be ignored.

Agreed. I spent at least 100 hours the first month I started learning Mandarin learning how to pronounce Mandarin phonemes and tones. I was constantly listening to the tapes and reviewing my pronunciation with the professor and teaching assistant.