Pronunciation Advice

[Jembru]

Hi to all you wonderful Japanese learners out there. There is a problem with my Japanese that I'm struggling to iron out, and I wondered if anyone else has had this problem, and maybe has tips on how to fix it? 

My pronunciation is still quite off (and my intonation sounds like the anime parody of a typical English speaker speaking Japanese.. despite using the shadowing method as part of my regular routine, but that's something I can probably only iron out with continued practice). I've been aware of this for a while, but as it wasn't too big a deal, I never bothered to fix it. During a conversation it rarely causes serious issues, because the context helps the listener to follow my meaning. However, I was reminded of how bad it was yesterday.

JP and I went to a video game exhibition with some Japanese friends. It was in a science museum so besides the game workshop, there were a lot of permanent hands-on games for the kids. One of these was a wall with magnets on, each displaying a single English word, for kids to make sentences with. One of our friends started asking me the meaning of words he didn't know. While I was secretly pleased with myself for being able to translate most* of the words he asked about (transparent, squirm, and later cog <-- that last one 歯車, no word of a lie, I had only learnt the previous day while practicing the writing of 歯!!), two of my answers took a few attempts for me to say before he understood what I meant.

These were '出血' (bleed) and 永遠 (eternity). He told me that I'd said 出血 like しゅけつ, but I don't know why 永遠 caused trouble. I've listened to how it should sound on denshi jisho and I think I maybe put a pitch accent on the えい, like in 映画.  

I'd have thought shadowing would be a good way to correct this kind of thing, but I've been shadowing for over a year now. Although admittedly, I stop using the audio after a while, and just recreate the dialoge using the English as a prompt, so this could be the problem? I also wonder if the things I'm using to shadow (my shadowing book, News In Slow Japanese, but the fast version, and the audio blogs on LingQ), are a bit too fast for me to pick up on the smaller details? Or is it that words slightly change their intonation in the context of a sentence, due to the tone of the speaker and which word is being emphasized?  
Is there anything else I could do to fix this problem?  

*There was one word that I couldn't say in Japanese, and even after I was defined it with some examples, and my friend knew what it meant, he couldn't offer a Japanese translation. It was the verb 'haunt'.  Any ideas? I can say 'haunted mansion 'お化け屋敷' and a children's horror novel I have is about a haunted villa, 'ゆうれい別荘', in my kanji book, Marukochan even forms paranormal investigation group 'お化け探検隊' with her friends to uncover the cause of strange goings on in an old rundown out-house.. and the actual verb for 'to haunt' doesn't come up anywhere!! Jisho has a few entries but none that seem specifically related to the action of a ghost haunting a place.  

[Bokusenou]

I used to have issues with this until I got the NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 (NHK Japanese Pronunciation Accented Dictionary). It's for broadcast announcers and such, who need to use the standard Japanese pitch accent for things, instead of kansai dialect, etc. I have the EPWING file version, but I also got the Android app, since the sounds are slightly clearer.

Screenshot of entry for 出血
The sound file makes it clearer (much easier to understand than jisho.org's IMO),
but the text is showing that the "shu" part is almost whispered, and then the rest of the word is said more clearly at an unchanging tone.
For the words where the tone goes up or down you see the tail end of the line point up or down, like with 水族館:

There's also more than one official way to pronounce that word, so it mentions each of them, by, I think, most common to least.

I'd love to hear how others approach learning pronunciation!

EDIT: For haunted, I think 幽霊が出る works for a house, while my dictionary gives 幽霊に付かれた肖像画 for "haunted portrait", so that might work for things other than a house. Anyone know any more about this?

[Jembru]

That looks like a really useful tool! The first proper book I studied from was all romaji, but it wrote the words with marks to show the pitch, and put a cross through silent vowels. It was really handy, but I've never seen any other learning resource that does this.

Before I part with my money, does the app let you record yourself and compare your accuracy?

[Bokusenou]

Unfortunately not. It's still the most comprehensive pronunciation tool I know of, but it wasn't made for learners, so it's pretty bare-bones. It has the dictionary, and an introduction which includes an explanation on how the accent lines work, but just looking at the lines themselves is fairly self-explanatory.

[Jembru]

So, I eventually got it all set up and it seems pretty good so far! I'm trying to say new words myself first, then using the markers, I amend my pronunciation if I think I need to, then finally play the recording to see how close I was. Obviously I can't do this for every word I know, and I might not always remember, so I doubt anything can prevent us as non-natives from sometimes pronouncing words a little off, but it should help me to learn patterns so that it's easier to guess!

Thanks for the recommendation Rin, and for your help in making sense of the confusing process of setting it up! ^^

[chocopie]

久しぶり！I have an accent dictionary on my phone called アクセント辞書. I think it costs me 50p a month? I might go all out and buy the NHK one one day. At the moment I don't use it that often but I like knowing that it's there just is case.

With practising pronunciation, my general approach is be attentive while listening/watching and if I hear a word that is not pronounced the way I pronounce it, pause, relisten and then replay the sound in my head a few times before saying it myself out loud. I don't worry about thinking which part is specifically high or low pitch, just copy the speaker's cadence.

[Jembru]

Good to see you Chocopie! I'm finding the free version of the nhk one pretty useful actually. So you could maybe try that first? I can't compare the sound quality having not heard the paid version, but because of the accent markers on the words, it's fit for purpose.

I've discovered that there is quite some variation between the pronunciation offered on jisho.org, and that of the nhk directory. The most recent word I compared between the two was 血液 <I'm leaving nothing to chance with blood-related words, if anyone wants to see what I mean. This has made me slightly less concerned about sounding a bit off
.

I've started doing exactly that Chocpie! Ever since the 出血 incident, I've started noticing how things are pronounced much more than I was before. I recently rewatched a teen drama that I first watched a year ago, and noticed that 仲間 wasn't pronounced as I thought. That is, with a pitch accent over the か (although I just checked out of curiosity, and the voice on jisho.org sounds vaguely like that.. nhk doesn't though). I knew this word when I first saw the drama, yet never noticed how they were pronouncing it!

[chocopie]

Is the free version of NHK available on android? All I can find is the full-price app.

I just listened to the jisho.org 血液 recording and... it's kind of weird but maybe she has quite a song-song voice? On forvo, the female recording has two versions of 血液 but neither are as extreme as the jisho.org recording!

I've started doing exactly that Chocpie! Ever since the 出血 incident, I've started noticing how things are pronounced much more than I was before. I recently rewatched a teen drama that I first watched a year ago, and noticed that 仲間 wasn't pronounced as I thought. That is, with a pitch accent over the か (although I just checked out of curiosity, and the voice on jisho.org sounds vaguely like that.. nhk doesn't though). I knew this word when I first saw the drama, yet never noticed how they were pronouncing it!

Hooray! It's cool once you realise you really can hear (and remember!) the pitch accent on words. Out of interest, what is the NHK accent for 仲間？My accent dictionary has the same as this and I think the jisho.org recording is the same.

[Jembru]

I'll have to let Bokusenou talk you through how I got the nhk thingy. She had to talk me through it in baby language. Lol I know I installed a dictionary reader from the app store, and then she directed me to a site I could download the zip files from... then I cried in the corner for a few hours because I couldn't unzip them... then once unzipped, my reader wouldn't let me switch between dictionaries (I have a kokugo dictionary too), because of the way I'd saved the files. Eventually got it all working though.

仲間.. I wish I could show you. It's written the same as in your link, so agrees with that, but sounds flatter than the jisho version. As bokusenou has said though, the sound quality isn't great on the free version, so I'm putting it down to that.

[Bokusenou]

Technically it's not free, I got the NHK pronunciation dictionary EPWING file off the EPWING CD I snagged off eBay. EPWING is an abandoned file format though (it was succeeded by ONESWING a while ago), so I don't think the makers really care what you do with them nowadays, and you can find a ton online.

[Jembru]

Ooh, so that's why the sound quality isn't so good? Because it's a copy? Hmm.. maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it then... oopse.

[Bokusenou]

Nov 15, 2015 21:47:59 GMT Jembru said:

Ooh, so that's why the sound quality isn't so good? Because it's a copy? Hmm.. maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it then... oopse.

The sound quality is probably because I had to compress it to take less space. The uncompressed file was more than 1GB,and I was trying to save space on my phone at the time. I can probably find the CD (think I still have it somewhere) and get you the uncompressed version, but it might take longer to upload.

[Jembru]

Oh no... there's no need to do that Rin. Honestly, the indicators over the words are more than enough of a guide for me, the audio is just a handy bonus!

JP has been told his accent sounds surprisingly authentic, and he's also good at doing impressions and regional British accents. I'm terrible at faking accents though, so I think I'll never get rid of the 'foreignness' in my Japanese. I'm cool with that though. I'm better at looking at what I can do these days, instead of always focusing on my weaknesses!