Improving your accent Part 1

みなさん、

こんばんは。

Earlier on, i was looking through one of the Japanese learner’s blog that i have been following.

http://creativityjapanese.wordpress.com

and realize that quite a lot of Japanese learners have this problem of pronouncing the words correctly.

As such, i hope that this post can help you to improve your accent.

In different parts of Japan, Japanese people speak different accents. In Japan, the one is mainly used is the Tokyo accent or what we call 標準語(Hyou jyun go)There are generally 4 types of styles of the 標準語.

A mora in short, is 1 hiragana character.

There are 4 rules that you need to know

1) If the 1st mora is low, the second mora will definitely be high

2) If the 1st mora is high, the second mora will definitely be low.

3) Once low, never high (e.g you will not have てんき (High-Low-High) till the next character

4) High-Low and Low-High will have different meanings (e.g はし (chopsticks/High-Low) and はし　（bridge/Low-High－Low)

This was one of my questions that came out during the teaching course.

Watch the following 3 videos.

More links on Accent

http://accent.u-biq.org/english.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

http://imtranslator.net/translate-and-speak/

http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/