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Hi all,
The first foreign language I learned was Spanish, and the rules for which syllable in a word is accented are incredibly simple and there are NO exceptions. I could explain it to you in under five minutes. Probably under two minutes. It’s wonderful.
Japanese is clearly not so simple. Various pages on the internet say that Japanese doesn’t even have stressed syllables, although when I hear words spoken it always sounds to me like one syllable has more stress than the others. I see the hiragana, I know what all the individual sounds are, but that doesn’t entirely define how the word itself is pronounced. So, after that maybe-unnecessarily-long introduction, my question is whether anyone can recommend some online resource (or will it be addressed later in TextFugu? I’m just starting Chapter 2) or just provide some guidelines on how to pronounce Japanese words, i.e., which syllable gets stressed. Or, if I’m wrong to be thinking about it in terms of stressed syllables, how do I tackle pronunciation?
many thanks,
samIt’s not stresses so much as different pitches. High and low rather than stressed and unstressed.
When I studied Japanese at university, the existence of the pitch accent was introduced in the first couple of weeks, but then never once mentioned again, which leads me to suspect it’s not particularly important. Supporting evidence is the fact that the pitch accent is different depending on where in Japan you are. One specific example is that in Tokyo, はし when pronounced as HAshi means “chopsticks”, but as haSHI means “bridge” – however, in Osaka, it’s precisely the other way around.
Wikipedia’s article is fairly good, if a shade technical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
Thanks Joel!
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