Japanese Phonetics Episode 26—(Now replaced by Lesson 6.3!))
Added 2017-09-02 16:04:02 +0000 UTCNote: On October 29, 2021, I took down this lesson, and replaced it with the newer version of lesson 6.3, which I believe provides a much better framework for sentence-level pitch-accent than this older lesson on 'terracing'. I will not be recreating this lesson, again, as I believe the newer information in lesson 6.3 is much more easy-to-understand and useful.
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Bibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page
Good evening Patrons! The twenty-sixth episode of Japanese Phonetics, now updated with native recordings, is live! In this lesson I introduce the important phenomenon known as 'terracing', and give advice on how to study it.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to leave a comment below. I'll be responding to all comments and messages in the next three days (including those that have yet to be answered). Thank you very much for your continued support, and good luck with your Japanese studies!
Best from Beppu,
Dogen
Comments
It's my pleasure Fernando! This will occur in 尾高 words as well; in the example you give the highest pitch in 男 will be higher than the highest pitch in 日本人, if all other factors are held constant and the speaker talks in a textbook manner. Incidentally, I address many of these other factors, and how to sound natural at the sentence level, more in the next several lessons. Cheers!
Dogen
2020-01-27 04:45:33 +0000 UTCFirst of all, I really want to say thank you for creating such an amazing phonetics course. I really love English phonetics and I'm really enjoying your videos. I have a question in regards with the Terracing concept you introduced in this video. The examples you gave us started with an 頭高 word (僕) and a 中高 word (先生), both having a downstep. So I wanted to know what happens if the first word is a 尾高 word. Is terracing also applied due to the fact that 尾高 words have a downstep too? For example: 男は日本人です。Thanks on beforehand!
Fernando Luis Valdivia Santander
2020-01-27 02:09:55 +0000 UTCOh and speaking of アメリカ人 I was wondering if there's a future lesson protection for countries or nationalities?
Trace O'Rorke
2019-10-20 22:02:00 +0000 UTCTook me 20 some episodes but I finally have a question. So far it seems like anytime we havd a rise and a fall in pitch with a word that's by itself, the drop in pitch has gone to the same level as it was at the start of the word. Such as for 先生. But in this video you said that consecutive pitch drops become lower and lower. So the example phrase you had 先生はアメリカ人です I noticed that be pitch drop immediately brought the end of the word 先生 lower than where it started. Not sure if you explicitly explained that in the video here so I'm curious if this is usually the case with terracing.
Trace O'Rorke
2019-10-20 21:34:08 +0000 UTCHi Aryeh! Yes that is correct, that's because います is connecting to a heiban word while 先生 is connecting to an atamadaka word. And yes to your second question as well. However with regards to the third, yes that's almost correct, but that's only if you're talking about in the middle of a sentence, because of course, pitch can rise immediately at the beginning of a sentence that doesn't have any previous downstep. Hope this helps, and glad you're getting so much out of the content!
Dogen
2019-10-13 05:40:17 +0000 UTCHello Dogen! Huge fan of your Youtube channel and the phonetics series. I have a couple of (related) questions: In the example 僕は先生をしています we see a rise in pitch for the nakadaka word 先生. However, we don't see a rise in pitch for the nakadaka word います. Why the discrepancy? Is it because います is connecting to a heiban word while 先生 is connecting to an atamadaka word? Likewise, in the sentence 僕は先生をしています you have して experiencing a slight rise in pitch. However, in the example from the last video, 私は日本語を勉強しています you show no rise in pitch in して. Again, is this because in the latter example して is following a heiban word, whereas in the former it follows a nakadaka word? If my guess is correct, would it be correct to add on to your general rule that "pitch stays high until a downstep occurs" with "and if pitch raises, there must have been a downstep previously in the phrase?" Thanks so much!
Aryeh
2019-10-12 01:20:51 +0000 UTCAt first it's quite challenging, but you'll get used to it quite quickly, especially for one word answers and short phrases. Cheers!
Dogen
2019-05-12 04:43:49 +0000 UTCGreat video! I do have a question though, when it comes to watching series or movies for phonetic awareness isn't unbelievably hard to pick the difference in pitch in regular speech speed and may mess with the initial knowledge of each word?
Odai
2019-05-12 04:23:10 +0000 UTCHi Walt. I was indeed talking mostly about individual words, but Suzuki-kun certainly does tend to mess up the prosody as well with longer sentences. I try to mimic native speech when it comes to longer phrases!
Dogen
2018-09-25 06:22:38 +0000 UTCそうですか。 I have been struggling with the prosody pattern (without the fancy name) for years. I thought something like this was happening, but could never pin it down, and my perception and frustration applied to both what I was hearing and the pictures of sentences in Suzuki Kun. When Lesson 7 mentioned that Suzuki Kun often gets confused with sentences, I thought that what I was seeing on that site was an example of this confusion. But this lesson tells me that at least some of what Suzuki Kin shows for sentences may be prosody.
Walt Poor
2018-09-23 21:19:40 +0000 UTCAwesome, thanks for the input Matt! It looks like you responded to the post rather than to So Mn, so I'm going to post on their thread again so they know. Cheers!
Dogen
2017-09-22 13:22:07 +0000 UTCHey, I just subscribed here and love it! I saw this post and wrote this offering. Let me know I feel it's inappropriate :() (C)V(C) nah it's not a weirdo smiley. It's the structure of an English syllable. Must contain a vowel (or a diphthong), that's what the 'V' stands for. On either side of the vowel, there can be a number of consonantal phonemes just before the vowel and just after it as well. The front ones are called the onset phonemes and the final ones are called the coda phonemes. To make a syllable in English you must have at least a vowel. But it can also have up to several consonants either side of the vowel. For example: A Three In Throne An interesting one is 'stretched', it is one syllable. Vowel is 'e'. The onset consonants are 'str' and the coda consonants are 'tcht'. As you know, In Japanese such a sound as stretched would be reproduced as sutorechito with 5 morae. Depends who your source is, but English stretched can be said to have 3 morae str-e-cht, showing that English can have vowelless morae (where Japanese cannot (ん?)) Why I am telling you this?!! Sorry :)) You could get your students to compare how it feels to produce a Japanese syllable with an English one. They will have fun practising puffing out vowelless consonant sounds, t, k, z, m, l, r, v, th etc. ;))) You see, Japanese and English have polar opposite syllable structure. In fact Japanese is one of the languages least able to produce different sounding syllables with only around 100?(check that) possible syllables in its phoneme spectrum. Where as English can make somewhere around 3000 possible syllable sounds. You can have hours of fun with this with Japanese who are beginning English ;)
Matt Anning
2017-09-22 10:45:42 +0000 UTCGreat question Enrico. I plan on covering this in the pronunciation part of the series but you're on the right track—it's impossible to raise or lower the pitch of an unvoiced vowel. I don't cover this in the pitch-accent videos because I like to lay the groundwork for pitch-accent first. The key to 'lowering the pitch' is to simply make sure that the mora before the mora which contains the unvoiced vowel is clear. It's best not to put to much thought into this, however, as there are many instances when speakers actually do voice the vowel in す (particularly women). Again, concentrate more on the second to last mora and things should come out naturally. Will be covering this more in the future ^^
Dogen
2017-09-13 10:50:52 +0000 UTCHey, sorry for the double post! I'm slowly working my way through the first lessons, and I have a question. The pitch pattern for です occasionally calls for a drop after で, something which happens with ます too. The problem I have is that both です and ます are usually pronounced basically without the last vowel, therefore sounding like -des and -mas. This being the case, I can't fathom how I would lower my pitch on a syllable that, by virtue of not having a vowel, is not actually a syllable. I've tried doing it, but the only way I can manage to audibly lower the pitch is by actually pronouncing the vowel, at least a little bit, and it feels a bit weird. I haven't listened carefully (that is, with this problem in mind) to how you pronounce ます, but I have listened carefully to how you pronounce です in the two 平板 examples in lesson 10, and it seems to me that you too indeed pronounce the vowel a little bit, something you don't do in the 起伏式 examples (at least, as far as I can tell, but keep in mind that my ear is not yet quite trained to pick up these things). So, sorry for the long post again... my question is, how should I tackle this? Is it fine to not pronounce the vowel, even if it makes the whole phrase sound like it doesn't drop off in the end? Or should I pronounce the vowel to enunciate clearly so that you can hear it drop off on the last mora? Sorry again to bother you!
Enrico Paolini
2017-09-13 10:39:19 +0000 UTCWow! Thanks for such a heartfelt message Enrico! What you've just described is essentially why I created the series—pitch-accent information, despite being an extremely important part of Japanese, is only available to those who 1: already have a high level of Japanese, and 2: can dedicate a massive amount of time to slowly breaking down information. I was lucky enough to encounter a teacher who taught pitch-accent (partly because I bullied her into it), so I had a decent understanding of the various concepts before starting this series. That said, creating the series has certainly been a learning experience, and I'm very glad to hear that you enjoy it and find it so beneficial! Thank you again for your support, good luck with your Japanese literature studies, and これからもよろしくお願いします！
Dogen
2017-09-11 10:54:16 +0000 UTCHi Dogen! I wanted to thank you for this wonderful series you're creating. I've been studying Japanese for I believe about 8 years now, and am fortunate enough to be able to pursue an academic career in Japanese literature and stay in Japan for a couple of years (well, hopefully more, you never know) as part of it. I've always wanted to sound more natural in my pronunciation, and I've known about pitch accent for several years, I had even managed to find the NHK and Shin Meikai accent dictionaries, but looking at them was quite disheartening for me. I went as far as understanding the basics (i.e. "two tones", "頭高・中高・尾高・平板" etc.), but anything beyond that seemed impossibly complicated and a huge time-sink. What discouraged me so much was that the two dictionaries above had a section on pronunciation rules, but it was just that: a long, dry list of rules and exceptions, presented not in order of importance or frequency, but by part of speech and similar criteria. I couldn't find any textbook that taught pitch accent in a more "textbook fashion", with units, progressions from simple things to complex things, and the like; I even tried asking one of my (native) Japanese teachers at university, and her reaction was basically shaking her head at me with a rather pitiful smile. Well anyway, long story short (conciseness isn't really my strong suit, go figure), your lessons gave me renewed hope (before watching them) and genuine excitement (after watching them) about learning pitch accent, and made me realise it's actually not complicated at all, if tackled properly. I subscribed to your Patreon today and binge-watched all 26 lessons one after the other (mainly to satisfy my curiosity and form an idea on the course), and I absolutely love it. It gives me a basic framework to get started, which I can then supplement by consulting the dictionaries I have (studying modern literature, I paradoxically find myself reading and using uncommon expression quite more than common ones). Now that I verified (by binge-watching =P) that the lessons are top-quality, I plan on going back to watch, study and apply each of them in turn, naturally. I hope that the fact that I've been using Japanese for so long without too much attention for pitch accent (I have been applying some basic rules, like い-adjective pronunciation, but not much else) won't hinder my progress, but the change in outlook that just a first run-through of your lessons provided makes me think for the best. If you read this far, you deserve a medal. Sorry again. The TL;DR is: love your work, both the language lessons and the comedy (and not-comedy) sketches, you seem like a lovely and very competent person, I thank you deeply and am very happy to support you as a patron. Cheers!
Enrico Paolini
2017-09-08 19:32:02 +0000 UTC
