pitch – Self Taught Japanese

Japanese intonation changes in two-word compounds

Japanese pitch accent (something I’ve written about before) is tricky because each word has a different combination of up and down pitches, and sometimes the accent of one word can affect a word immediately after it. To make things even more complicated, different regional dialects of Japanese have very different patterns of accents – for example… Read More »

Japanese Pitch Accent: It’s more important that you realize [beginner/intermediate]

There are many learning resources for Japanese that glaze over the language’s pitch accent, which differs greatly from English where emphasis (not using pitch) on a single syllable is used instead. For example, one of the first textbooks I studied from mentioned that the accent differs from region to region (this is true), so there… Read More »