There are number of reasons why people don’t understand your Japanese in conversation.

One of the common reasons is an inaccurate intonation in your speech.

This post is aiming to support your Japanese learning by:

• understanding differences of intonation and accent
• understanding rules and patterns of Japanese intonation
• knowing how to practice and improve your speaking

Hope this post can help you to stop repeating what you say to make native Japanese undersatnd you :)

What are Accent and Intonation?

Accent is for word, and intonation is for sentence. For Japanese language, their differences can be described as below.

• Accent is a way to pronounce a word to distinguish which word you say (pitch).
• Intonation is a way to emphasise context or emotion in your speech (tone).

In Japanese, accent of word do not change but intonation can change according to a speaker’s intension.

Word accents do not change even if you use it in different sentences. For example, the accent of “ともだち” are exactly the same in the sentences below.

See the other post in this blog for the patterns of accents in Japanese for your understanding and practice.

Understand and Practice Japanese Accent to Speak Like A Native

In contrast, intonation can be used to emphasise different part of speech.

Sentence 1 emphasises “たくさん” (many) but Sentence 2 emphasises “ともだち”. Intonation can control what a speaker wants to tell the most in this case.

It is noted that “accent” is also used to describe how a language is spoken in certain region or country. In Japanese, the people in Kansai (i.e. Osaka), Tohoku (i.e. Aomori, etc) use famous and relatively strong accents. This can be covered in dialects.

How to Make Japanese Intonation

In Japanese, intonation is given by a tone which can be a combination of the following attributes.

• slightly higher pitch
• slightly larger sound
• slightly slower pace

I added “slightly” here because they are often less intense than English intonation.

Effects of Intonation in Japanese Language

There are XX reasons to add intonation for better communication, that is, people understand you without repeating your speech.

• 1.Focus
• 2.Emotion
• 3.Question

I will go through each of these with some examples.

1.Focus

You add intonation to a phrase that matters the most.

Example 1 is highly contextual that you would say “I do something today but I do different tomorrow” without actually verbalising.

It is also noted that the particle after the key word is pronounced with the strongest intonation (i.e. “わ” of “きょうは” and the second “と” of “ともだちと”).

It is basically same as English but pitch is very important in Japanese intonation.m

2.Emotion

You add intonation to a phrase to express your emotion. Let’s see an example below for a comparison.

These examples actually express different meanings and emotions for the exactly same wordings with different intonations.

This would be easier to mimic what natives do. You can watch youtube or Netflix to view Japanese contents and see how people use intonations to express their emotions :)

By the way, it may feel funny or embarrassing to mimic Japanese (it was when I mimiced English way lol) but remember Japanese finds it so funny or weird if you make expessions in English way…

3.Question

You add your intonation towards the end to ask a question.

You don’t have to put the most strength in the last part of the speech as long as it goes up little.

You probably shouldn’t stress the last part the most because it may sound bit awkward. However, it would help in some cases that it is unclear whether you are asking question or just taking what someone says.

The first one is just saying “I see.” but the second one is asking “Is it?” or “Really?”. In such cases, saying the last part with the highest pitch helps to clarify that it is a question.

Practice Intonation and Sentence Pronunciation

Speaking with good intonation requires knowing which part needs to be emphasised in a sentence.

To help this, you can practice your pronunciation in the following steps:

• Find an example sentence to read
• Breakdown a sentence into phrases
• Figure out accents of words and intonation (where to emphasize)
• Practice pronouncing each phrase separately
• Practice a sentence as a whole

Some tips of doing this method are:

• You don’t have to understand the meaning of a sentence (improving pronunciation is the objective)
• Check accents by looking up words on dictionary (do not assume accent)
• You may practice with different intonations by changing focus points
• Singing Japanese songs helps with training your phonetics

If you haven’t learnt Hiragana & phonetics and word & accent yet, I urge you to learn those first then come back to practice sentence and intonation. It is because you need to be able to pronounce Japanese letters with correct phonetics in order to pronounce words and sentences.

See the post below for a general guide of learning Japanese pronunciation for more details :)

Japanese Pronunciation Learning Guide by a Native Speaker

Summary

In this post, I explained the difference of accent and intonation.

• Accent is to distinguish words by pitch
• Intonation is to emphasise part of a sentence by tone

To summarise, intonation is experessed by a combination of the following 3 attributes added to the part you want to emphasise.

• highest pitch
• highest strength
• Slowest pace

By adding intonation, you can emphasise part of your sentence for 3 different purposes.

• Focus
• Emotion
• Question

See how your intonation is compared to native Japanese, and try to get some feedback to improve your intonation.

It is sometimes that your problem is accent and not intonation, so make sure that you understand what needs to be fixed to improve your overall Japanese communication skill :)