Episode 18: The importance of heiban verbs/pitch accent for heiban verbs
Added 2017-05-10 16:33:35 +0000 UTCBibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page
Good morning, everyone.
In this episode I address the importance of heiban verbs. This is a big one!
The verb only video I mention in this lesson can be found here: https://youtu.be/Q5aejRrsohs
A few important notes regarding this video:
1. Though I haven't found any explicit information on this in the pitch-accent resources I use, in more colloquial speech many standard Japanese speakers will say the ない form of 平板 verbs with a downstep on the な, as in toMENAi.
2. It is also acceptable to say the ながら form of 平板 verbs with the downstep on the な, as in toMENAgara.
3. Some of you may notice that my Japanese 'R' sounds are a bit off in parts of this video (as well as other lessons)—this is one of the issues I have with my own Japanese, which I talk about more in episode 51 and episode 52.
Hope you guys enjoy the lesson! I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. If you have any questions leave a comment below, and thank you all for your continued support!
Best from Beppu,
Dōgen
Comments
Hi, Ryan. This is covered in Episode 43, "The consonant z and j", here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-episode-19377965 Hope this answers your question!
Dogen
2025-06-03 23:50:12 +0000 UTCThank you for the lists and thoughtful presentation. My question is a little off-topic (not about pitch accent), but when listening to the (native) recordings, it seemed to me that the じ in words like 始める、始まる sometimes (often?) sounded like [ʑ] (a fricative, not an affricate like [ɟʑ] ~ [dʑ]). I think I read that that's more common for women, but I'm not sure how widespread or consistent that is. I don't know if this is more common in careful / monitored speech or not, and I imagine it's also more common to pronounce じ as [ʑi] in the middle of words compared to the beginning (where I'd expect more [ɟʑi] ~ [dʑi]), but that's just speculation and I have no idea if that's actually true or not. Anyone happen to know about this or have a link?
Ryan
2025-06-03 04:26:32 +0000 UTCI actually learned 着る from a random scene in Naruto Shippuden when Sasuke said 早く服を着ろ。
Trainfan1055
2024-10-06 14:14:53 +0000 UTCPretty happy I started paying attention to pitch accent early on. A lot of the less common heiban verbs which I learned after I trained hearing pitch sound weird to me when pronounced with incorrect pitch. Here's hoping I can manage to correct the verbs I learned before being able to hear pitch.
Vincent
2023-04-11 11:29:17 +0000 UTCNot a question, but just wanted to say, wow this lesson opened my eyes so much. I've learned Japanese for few years, and have been really starting to try to notice pitch accent for a few months now ... but never have I even considered -ru verbs can be heiban, and their subsequent conjugations too. And you are right, basically no Japanese teachers would ever correct students on things like this, unfortunately (they should though) 目から鱗が落ちました。 Thank you so much Dogen for these great lessons!
Stephen Leung
2022-03-12 13:26:00 +0000 UTC" Note: though I haven't found any explicit information on this in any the pitch-accent resources I use, it seems that in more colloquial speech, the ない form of 平板 verbs can also be nakadaka, as in iKANAi." I haven't seen almost anything on this topic either. I found that little article "Determination of the pitch patterns of negative and affirmative sentences realized as noun-adjective+zyanai" where in the end he seems to mention an effect of accented NAI after verbs. Though my japanese level is too low to be sure.
Strange Guy
2020-09-04 21:06:42 +0000 UTCIndeed, and I talk about this in lesson 21! Cheers.
Dogen
2020-08-22 04:06:39 +0000 UTCOne thing I noticed while swimming through the sea of japanese verbs: I can learn twice as much by the price of one. Basically, verbs with the same kanji and the same stem (or stem-like-thing) have the same accent. Good example is transitive/intransitive pairs, like aku-akeru, ageru-agaru, noboru-nobose-noboseru etc. Though there are some exceptions, like kudaru-kudasu (heiban) vs kudasaru (nakadaka). 'Same stem' rule is important since 入 kanji has iru-ireru pair (heiban) as well as 'hairu' (atamadaka). Another stuff is those verbs with basically the same meaning though using different kanji (like 取る、採る、把る、捕る、撮る、摂る which are actually the same verb with small semantic nuances). Yay!
Strange Guy
2020-08-21 19:31:06 +0000 UTCHi Clare! This is actually a great question that I need to do a bit more research on. I do know that 行かない often becomes iKANAi in more colloquial speech, I believe even when it is sentence final, and thus iKANAidesu does sound more or less OK to me. I believe that 行かないで is always 平板. Apologies for not being able to answer this in more detail—currently doing more research on this and a few other topics.
Dogen
2020-08-14 00:16:28 +0000 UTCHi Dogen! I hope I'm posting on the right video where you'll get to see this question. Is the 平板 pronunciation for the ない form only applicable when the ない is sentence-final? I was playing around with Suzuki-kun and tried out the "colloquial-formal" 行かないです and the negative command 行かないでください. Both of those came out nakadaka iKANAide even though the sentence-final 行かない came out heiban. Any thoughts on this? (Apologies if you've covered this in a different video; I looked through the table of contents and didn't see anything that looked relevant to this question.)
Clare Kappenman
2020-08-12 12:58:10 +0000 UTCHi Matthew! I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but I do often of trouble with the Japanese R sounds, and say them in a sort of retroflex manner. Incidentally, I break down the Japanese R sounds, and my troubles with them in lessons 51 and 52, which can be found below. https://www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-episode-22175672 https://www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-episode-22484478 Cheers!
Dogen
2020-07-21 12:01:04 +0000 UTCam I hearing some sort of rhoticity (or maybe some type of pharyngeal closure/tightness) in the "ru" of your words like taberu and shimeru? Any chance for a brief allophonic breakdown or something of the like on this (or perhaps direction towards a further video covering this)? Anything's appreciated really : ]
Matthew Barzal
2020-07-20 22:10:38 +0000 UTCHi Julian, I always use 始める as a 平板 verb in isolation, and 初めて as 中高, but when I combine the verb 始める with another verb such as 食べる as in 食べ始める then I will make the entire compound 中高, as compound verbs tend to be 中高, and more and more compound verbs are becoming 中高, as I talk about in one of the later lessons on verbs. Cheers!
Dogen
2020-07-01 05:04:17 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, just wanted to get your thoughts on the verb はじめる, as I feel like I hear several different pitch accents used by native speakers depending on the context. It's listed in the dictionary as a 平板 verb, with the adverb はじめて listed as 中高 (although I came across a native recording that used 平板 for the latter, as if it were the て-form of はじめる) My main questions are, is there any speaker variation that takes place with any forms of this word, and what would the pitch accent be for the [verb]+はじめる structure? (e.g. 食べ始めた) Many thanks!
Julian Bentham
2020-06-30 15:13:40 +0000 UTCVery glad to hear that Markas!
Dogen
2020-06-17 05:05:56 +0000 UTCIm Glad i found you on YouTube, im making much progress thanks to your videos! This video taught me A L O T.
Markas
2020-06-16 12:28:08 +0000 UTCHaha my pleasure Alex! Very glad to hear that you're learning so much! This was hard for me as well at first. Cheers!
Dogen
2019-12-17 06:26:46 +0000 UTCHi Dogen! This was a very uncomfortable (but necessary) lesson for me. You scored direct hits against me with roughly 90% of those verbs, which I was ignorantly distorting. Thank you for being a friend who will gently, yet thoroughly and indisputably, corrects another friend's huge, glaring mistake.
Alex
2019-12-16 20:27:01 +0000 UTCHi Daniella! That's really great to hear—I'm sure Japanese will start to sound completely different than before, which in turn will mean your accent will improve dramatically! Thank you very much for your support and keep up the studies! You'll make a lot of progress in the next few months with study habits like that!
Dogen
2019-12-14 04:20:06 +0000 UTCI'm so happy I started with your phonetics lessons! While I did study Japanese at university for a year (had a native Japanese teacher) who talked about the importance of pitch accents I never really stuck with it. Which was odd since we do have a few pitch accents in my language as well and it really sounds weird when foreigners use the wrong pitch accents for certain words. So now when I started learning again 5 years later I thought about it again and checked you out, oh am I glad I did! It feels like I'm learning Japanese for real this time, every time I get a new vocab word in wanikani or from flashcards I always have OJAD up while listening to the pitch accent and trying to repeat it as closely as possible. I've started to look into more stories with audio as well as I now can see the importance with actually listening and mimicking speech than just thinking it out loud in my head. Thank you so much, Dogen! You're a great teacher ^^
Daniella
2019-12-13 22:28:02 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, (This question is not about phonetics tho) When you address the potential conjugation you tend to use the "simplified" version for godan verbs (食べれる instead of 食べられる). I've learnt both forms back in 2015 but preferentially the longer form. Are this shorter forms more used in common speech? or is a shift ongoing (maybe to distinguish it from the passive form)? Thank you!
Jokin Pedreño Alcolea
2019-05-02 09:08:30 +0000 UTCHi Walt, もらう is often written only in hiragana, so I opted to display it this way. Cheers!
Dogen
2018-08-30 00:33:41 +0000 UTCSorry, you didn't include the kanji for もらう. Is it the usual one 貰う or something unusual?
Walt Poor
2018-08-30 00:31:12 +0000 UTCHi Benoît! My pleasure. Yes, you are correct! My う at the end of certain verbs, such as 笑う, 洗う, しまう, etc. is sometimes a bit too back and open. This is an artifact of me trying to deepen my voice to add character to my YouTube persona. A French speaker, Bertrand, actually pointed this out to me not too long after this lesson was released—since then I've tried my best to address this issue, and I think that if you listen to more recent videos you'll see that the phenomenon is much less noticeable, if not absent altogether. I'd like to add that I made my vowel pronunciation videos (lessons 35+) after becoming aware of this phenomenon, and talk about う at length in said lessons. Incidentally, are you French as well?
Dogen
2018-04-05 01:23:33 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, thank you for the lesson. I listened for a while to your recordings and I noticed that the way you pronounce う such as in 笑う is different from what I heard in the recording on my dictionary and different from the way you make the "u" sound in る and く. It often sounds like a お to me. Just wanted to know if you consider it to be a proper う sound. Maybe it's just my hearing that is not yet able to properly distinguish.
武之和 (Benoît, Auroden)
2018-04-04 21:18:25 +0000 UTCHi David, thanks for the question. I do indeed: this is a result of the phonetic shift that is currently going on with heiban verbs in this specific form. More and more people are saying 平板 verbs with the downstep on the な in the ながら form these days—particularly young people. That said, this is not the 'correct' pronunciation, and I believe that it's simply easier to teach the correct heiban pronunciation of these conjugation, as it falls into the easy to remember 'heiban stays heiban' rule, which is why I didn't address it in this lesson. You'll be fine pronouncing the word either way ^^ Hope that this helps!
Dogen
2018-02-19 03:14:21 +0000 UTCHi Dogen, thank you for making these lessons. They're amazing and I can't stop watching them. I did have one question though. Typing 止める、開ける、or any other heiban verb with the ～ながら conjugation (止めながら、開けながら) yielded a Prosidy result that was nakadaka with the downstep on the な. It was just the word, so I don't think the site's messing up. Do you know what's going on?
David Francis
2018-02-18 20:30:37 +0000 UTCHi Jeffery. Words that have multiple kanji have different meanings, but the same pitch accent. I hope this answers your question!
Dogen
2017-10-15 13:36:56 +0000 UTCYou said that the Kanji are there to clarify the meanings, are the vocabulary presented there has the same reading or same meaning or more importantly heiban as well
Jeffrey Tang
2017-10-12 13:47:34 +0000 UTCHi Patrick :) I address this in episode 19, which you can find here: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-episode-11381695">https://www.patreon.com/posts/japanese-episode-11381695</a> thanks for the support!
Dogen
2017-06-17 13:41:47 +0000 UTCHi Dogen. As you explained, the nonpast negative form of heiban verbs is also heiban: 止めない How about the past negative form: 止めなかった ?
Patrick R
2017-06-17 04:56:25 +0000 UTCHi Kevin! The short answer is that it depends on the combination of pitch-accent patterns and sentence length. I'll be addressing this in more detail in the sentence-level pitch-accent video. 勉強する, incidentally, would be 平板 through る, as it's a 平板-平板 combination :)
Dogen
2017-05-19 14:48:13 +0000 UTChi dogen, do any of these verbs change pitch when used with other words? Particularly curious about する when attached to words like 勉強する or like ○○にする
Kevin Le
2017-05-19 01:31:41 +0000 UTCHi Kevin. Most single particles, such as よ、と、が、な、に、は、も、 を will attach high to heiban verbs :) Please note that there are some exceptions to this rule, though not super common.
Dogen
2017-05-12 15:06:37 +0000 UTCHello ^^ I assume that they do, but I've never studied this in detail, unfortunately. One thing I've found is that names of places are often heiban, while names of people are often atamadaka. Will try to do a bit more research on this one!
Dogen
2017-05-12 15:03:29 +0000 UTCThank you so much for the lesson! I have a question: how do particles play into this? Like とめるよ？ Still catching up on other videos, so sorry if this was addressed earlier!
Kevin Griffin
2017-05-11 02:27:36 +0000 UTCHey there Dogen, I have a question. Do proper nouns (Personal names, names of places, etc.) have rules too? And if so, are you planning on making a video on that?
Floppy
2017-05-10 23:12:58 +0000 UTC
