Pitch in Japanese language

[kschroe19627647]

I did some rehearsel together with a native speaker recently, and found out that it's very difficult to get the right pitch when pronounciating Japanese. Is there a way to train this ability? Are there some basic rules for me as a newbeginner?

[neige_schnee]

Hello kschroe19627647 san,
You got really important point!
It has some rules and some dictionaries and textbooks index pages have indications of pitch so you can refer to them.
If the accent is on the first syllable (sound), then the first syllable is high-pitched and the others are low: High Low, H*L-L, H*L-L-L, H*L-L-L-L.
For example あさ.　
If the accent is on a syllable (sound) other than the first, then the first syllable (sound) is low, the following syllables (sounds) up to and including the accented one are high, and the rest are low: L-H, L-H*L, L-H-H*L, L-H-H-H*L.
For example ありがとう
If the word is heiban (doesn't have an accent), the first ssyllable is low and the others are high: L-H, L-H-H, L-H-H-H, L-H-H-H-H.
For example おはよう
Yuki 由紀
Team JapanesePod101.com

[kschroe19627647]

Thank You for Your reply. It's fine that there are some rules...

I even found an in-dept explanation of the "pitch"-issue on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

It contains some audio-examples as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese_pitch_accent_demonstration.ogg

[wildjasmin296741]

Thanks kschroe19627647 for raising this question.

Does anyone know if there is an online dictionary with such word pitch notations? I have been using http://www.forvo.com/ to listen to the native pronunciation in order to learn the pitches, however, forvo does not cover many words.

Thanks,

Jasmine

[community.japanese]

kschroe19627647-san, Jasmin-san,
This page is all in Japanese, but it shows the accent bar:
http://accent.u-biq.org/a.html

Hope this helps!

Natsuko (奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com