This one thing might be killing your progress

Hey KoreKara Squad, 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how new Japanese learners could potentially stumble upon hundreds of hours of content attempting to teach them how to “actually” learn Japanese. It’s great that there is a growing number of people interested in language learning and Japanese in particular, but the amount of content could lead many astray or be too overwhelming.

One topic new learners might get unnecessarily bogged down by is pitch accent, and I wanted to share some of my ideas on this.

💡 Tip of the week

If you’re not familiar with pitch accent, let me give you a quick rundown. Pitch accent is a phonetic feature of Japanese that describes the accent, or high and/or low pitch assigned to certain words. This accent serves to distinguish one word from another when they would otherwise be identical.

One of the key ways you can distinguish a foreigner from a Japanese person is whether or not they speak with correct pitch accent.

But because of this fact, I often see many beginner learners hyper fixate on learning the rules of pitch accent and trying to perfect their accent.

The problem with this is that you’re trying to perfect your accent before you’re actually fluent, which will slow your progress down.

The most compelling reason to avoid fixating on pitch accent from the start is also that it doesn't necessarily hinder comprehension. This is totally different to Mandarin Chinese, where different tones make speech incomprehensible.

Communication won’t break down with incorrect pitch accent.

Rather than burdening yourself with the intricacies of pitch patterns, your time would be better spent early on picking up some of the most common words and basic sentence structures. (Things that actually get you to fluency)

Exposure to comprehensible compelling input will take you much farther than explicitly studying pitch accent patterns.

Once you’re actually fluent, it becomes a lot easier to pick up pitch accent, since you have a developed ear and you’re actually fluent in the language. 

Once I actually became fluent, Japanese people would often be eager to correct my pitch accent. (It’s something they do even amongst natives) The best speakers I interviewed were also able to start speaking with basically perfect pitch accent without ever learning the “rules” behind how it works.

But this isn’t to say that there is no place for explicit pitch accent study, I just don’t think it is necessary for beginners. For 99% of learners, just being aware of pitch accent (and maybe passively adding it to your Anki cards) will be enough for you to acquire it over the long run.

If you want to explore this topic in much greater detail check out:

1. Dogen’s channel. He’s basically the go-to guy when it comes to all things pitch accent.

2. Pitch Accent Trainer: This was shared by Ian from the KoreKara Club. Great way to practice if you actually perceive pitch accent.

📺 Immersion of the week 

So I found this interesting podcast the other day hosted by a half-Japanese guy who interviews hip-hop and music artists in Japan. It’s called the Goldnrush Podcast and it makes for an interesting insight into that side of Japanese culture + hours of natural conversation. Not only do you get the immersion time of listening to the conversations but then you get to listen to new artists and music. Enjoy.

I also recently made a new video for the channel that covers how I would start over again from scratch with Japanese. So, if you want a brief overview of all of my thoughts and feelings about learning Japanese, check it out here. It may not be Japanese content but a little shameless self-promotion couldn’t hurt 😉

✍️ Kanji of the week

Since we’re talking all about pitch accent this weekend I figure the Japanese term for it would be fitting. 高 means tall or high and 低 means lower or short. 高低 alone means rise and fall. Pitch accent is the up and down or the rise and fall of Japanese.

🗣️ KoreKara Club Update

We just had our first club meeting at the KoreKara Club! We talked about importance of output, The KoreKara Method for learning Japanese, stories in Japan, and our goals for the next year.

Going to be doing these every month, hope to hang out with more of you guys in there 🙂 

Until next week, またね!

Eric