Let's start with the most useful rule: any word that is not a particle has a fixed pitch accent. It will be the same whenever you encounter it. If you learn the pitch accent of a word, that's all you need to accent it correctly. However, you may not always know the pitch of a word; next we'll cover some rules that will help you guess correctly most of the time.

Two more things are important to remember when you are trying to determine pitch accent. The first is that the accent of a word may change if the word is incorporated into a larger word - we'll cover this in Some unexpected twists below. Additionally, when you put words together into sentences, you need to know how to address the pitch of particles, and how to handle the overall pitch of the sentence. We'll cover this in Pitch accents in sentences below.

Most of the time, if you get the pitch accent of a word wrong, your Japanese will sound a little odd, but it will be perfectly understandable. However, in certain situations, it could lead to an unfortunate miscommunication. Some Japanese words which use the same sounds (known as 'homonyms') are distinguished based on pitch accent - so if you use the incorrect accent, you are actually using the incorrect word!

Below are a few of the most common and important examples. In Further study and credits, you can find a more comprehensive collection of all examples found in the 10,000 most useful words in Japanese.

So now we are well equipped to pronounce individual words correctly - but what happens when we put words together in sentences? How do things change? What does the overall pitch pattern of a sentence look like? We can determine sentence-level pitch by thinking of it as a combination of three rules.

You will often encounter the term 'prosody' in connection with pitch accents. Prosody refers to the elements of real speech that convey meaning over and above the words themselves. A great example of prosody would be the use of rising pitch to indicate a question for a sentence which would otherwise be a statement. Looking at the sentence written down, you may have no idea it is a question, but if you heard it spoken aloud, the prosody would make it obvious. In Japanese, prosody is usually used to refer to the changes in pitch at the sentence level that we describe in this section.

Japanese pitch accents are relatively straightforward, but as we have seen, they are not completely regular, and until repeated exposure trains your ear naturally, trying to remember the rules that govern accents can seem overwhelming. Try not to be discouraged - correct accents can make you sound much more natural, but they are generally not vital for communication.

As we have seen, most words in Japanese are 平板, and this is especially true for verbs. The 平板 pattern does not exist in English, so the most common mistake beginners make is imposing an English accent pattern on Japanese 平板 words. In American English words are most commonly accented on their second syllable, which corresponds most closely to a 中高 2 pattern, where the downstep occurs after the second mora of a word. (Consider the word America: Americans pronounce the ME with a slightly higher pitch and a slightly longer duration: a-ME-ri-ca.) While this pattern does exist in Japanese, it is not the most common pattern, so you will often sound unnatural if you use it constantly.

One thing to be aware of is that numbers and counters are quite irregular. For example:

This guide describes the pitch accents of words in

ひょうじゅんご

標準語

, 'Standard Japanese', which is the form of Japanese taught in schools and used by NHK announcers. As a result, NHK guides are the canonical sources of information on this style of language! In the real world, accents vary widely around Japan, and even in Tokyo not all of these rules are followed (despite the fact that 標準語 is often referred to as 'Tokyo dialect'). In some cases, differences of opinion occur even in 標準語, and where that happens, we display each of the possible options, with the most common first:

The pitch accent of compound words is usually the combination of the pitch accents of the individual words. However, it is not uncommon for words to change their pattern when they are absorbed into larger words. For example:

Most Japanese dictionaries use the same notation for defining pitch: a number indicates the mora after which a downstep occurs, or 0 if there is no downstep. In other words, all 平板 words are represented by a 0, 頭高 by a 1, and 尾高 by a number equal to the number of moras in the word. 中高 would be any number greater than 1 and less than the number of moras in the word.

In order to use this notation, just count the number of moras in the word - remembering that small kana symbols except っ are included with the previous character (so きよ is two moras, but きょ is only one). When the pitch of a compound word is based on the pitch of the words it comes from, the pitch of each word is shown joined by '-'.

Kanshudo includes the standard dictionary notation. In addition, we also provide a simple binary pitch diagram - the word written in furigana, with lines below the characters to indicate low pitch, and above to indicate high pitch. The end of the line indicates the pitch of the word that comes next - so for a 平板 word, the line ends at the top right of the last character (high); for all other categories, it ends at the bottom right (low). Here are a few examples:

In Kanshudo, (when available) the pitch diagram appears directly below the word itself when you see the word in the standard form we use in search results. You can click the pitch accent diagram to bring up more information. For example:

Congratulations - if you have read this far, you have already taken the most important step in mastering pitch accents by familiarizing yourself with the categories and the basic conventions.

The next step is to train your ear to recognize these categories when you hear them. If you do that, your brain will start to classify words into the correct categories automatically as you hear words in context. You will find that this 'automatic learning' will greatly reduce the amount of rote learning you need to do.

However, some rote memorization will be necessary, in particular for the easily confused words we list above. Study those carefully and test yourself on them.

Finally, it is important to confirm that you can reproduce the correct accent even when you know it, and there is no better technique for that than mimicking correct pronunciation. If possible, have a native speaker listen and confirm your accent is correct, but if not, just record yourself and then listen to yourself alongside the original to identify where you need to improve.

All our audio samples were created for us by

みやもと

宮本

じゅんこ

淳子

. Junko is currently an associate professor in the Japanese language and literature department at

とこは

常葉

だいがく

大学

in Shizuoka, and before that, she was a professional radio announcer for several years, so as well as crystal clear pronunciation, she brings a deep understanding of the official pitch accents in use in Japanese media.

The best resource in English we have found for studying pitch accents and Japanese pronunciation in depth is the comprehensive lecture series by Dōgen, which you can find on Patreon here. Dōgen is an American with near native-level Japanese (and a cool anonym!) who has studied phonetics extensively at university in Japan, and combines that knowledge with a clear and easy-to-understand presentational style. We highly recommend his lessons.

For a definitive written guide, you can't do better than one or both of these books:

• The NHK accent dictionary 「NHK日本語発音アクセント新辞典」, which you can find on Amazon here
• The Shin Meikai accent dictionary 「新明解日本語アクセント辞典 第２版」, which you can find on Amazon here

A great tool for understanding the accent patterns in conjugated Japanese words and full sentences is OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) from the University of Tokyo. They have a cool 'waveform generator' for visualizing pitch change in sentences and inflected words that you can find here. The interface is in Japanese, but all you need to do is paste your text into the large text area and then press the button labeled

じっこう

実行

.

Amongst the most useful 10,000 words in Japanese, there are actually nearly 600 homonyms with different pitch accents (for a total of nearly 1600 words). When you are ready to take a deep dive, visit the full collection and perfect your pronunciation!

On Kanshudo, about 150,000 of the definitions in the word dictionary include pitch accent information. Additionally, we are working on some games and other tools to help you memorize pitch accents as you study on Kanshudo.