Bought two good reference books

[untmdsprt]

I've found two good books when I was out yesterday in Hachioji.

[url=http://www.amazon.co.jp/NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典-NHK放送文化研究所/dp/4140111127]NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典[/url] An accent book based on the Tokyo dialect

[url=http://www.amazon.co.jp/活用自在-反対語対照語辞典-反対語対照語辞典編纂委員会/dp/4760116532/ref=pd_ts_b_11?ie=UTF8&s=books]活用自在 反対語対照語辞典[/url] an antonym book

Both books require you to be able to read hiragana and katakana as they are aimed toward a native speaker.

My teacher suggested I use the accent book because he knows that I'm a serious student, and would like to get rid of my American accent when speaking Japanese. My bf also is encouraging me to speak Japanese properly.

I'd say both books could be used by any level Japanese learner. Both use the Japanese style of alphabetization. The antonym book though is read from right to left, up/down. The NHK is read normally like an English book.

Hopefully these will help others.

[Javizy]

What does the accent book cover? goo's online dictionary tells you which accent pattern a word has (0, 1, 2 or 3), but obviously the difficulty is in actually learning to replicate it. Especially since part of what makes a pattern is how it affects the moras after the word. I've been starting to realise lately how important pitch accent is. It's really shocking how some people write it off.

[untmdsprt]

It uses a bar like ¬ over the character or a long bar over several ones. The instructions are a bit over my level so I'd have to get my bf to read and explain it, but it looks like no bar is low, ¬ high to low, and bar across several means to keep it high until it tells you to go down again.

I'll give you the はし example using romaji to make it clear.

箸 - HAshi (¬ is over HA)
橋 - haSHI (¬ is over SHI)

Do you have a link to the goo site?

[Javizy]

When I said 0, 1, 2 or 3 that is literally all it has, but it's a useful dictionary anyway http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ I use the definitions for my flashcards, although there are an annoying amount of example sentences using classical Japanese.

As for accent, since the patterns affect the following moras, simply marking the word isn't enough. 橋 and 端(はし) have the same accent, but 端が stays high, whereas 橋が comes back down on the が. You'll find some useful information if you look around this site http://sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/sp/lesson/j ... centl.html

I'm still trying to train myself to recognise which sounds are low/high, and reproduce them myself. It's fairly easy to repeat them, but if you asked me the next day to say LH, HLL or whatever, I'd struggle. It's very subtle, and the volume of your voice shouldn't change, so I think it's going to take a lot of practice...

[donguri2062]

pitch accent:
There's a free pdf version of Genki books with pitch accent. (I tried to post a pic to show how it looks, but it turns out it is not allowed.)


A dictionary with audio:
NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典

[Jessi]

Javizy-san,

I totally agree with you about pitch accent! It's something I knew existed but only started to really pay attention to last year (especially since I had to say Japanese words in isolation in the podcasts, and my pitch accent would be totally off! ). I noticed that the goo online dictionary used numbers for pitch accent, but some of them confuse me. I get 1 and 2, but sometimes the way they use 0 and 3 confuse me. Do you understand how all of the numbers work?

One resource I really recommend using for pitch accent is Jim Breen's dictionary, now that nearly all of the words have audio thanks to JPOD101
http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C

[Javizy]

As for accent, since the patterns affect the following moras, simply marking the word isn't enough. 橋 and 端(はし) have the same accent, but 端が stays high, whereas 橋が comes back down on the が. You'll find some useful information if you look around this site http://sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/sp/lesson/j ... centl.html

I'm actually not sure if 端 comes up on the し or the が. It's on the bottom of the link, so you can judge for yourself. The way it has pattern 0 written as L...H, I'd imagine it was LLH.

As you can see I'm not very good with pitch, and just to complicate things, if you look up こんばんは, you get a 5... Coincidently, I just made friends with a Japanese teacher on the train, so I'll have to start asking a few questions

I don't plan on learning words like LLH HLH or whatever, I just want to be able to recognise and reproduce these patterns, so that they stick better when shadowing. It's funny how so many people put this off for so long.