Accent reduction

In the course I'm taking, we get one elective.  I chose pronunciation and intonation, since I can study reading easily at home, but don't have access to native speakers who will repeat things when I ask.  I usually don't have trouble having my words misunderstood, but I want to reduce my accent as much as possible.  In Japanese, that means both getting the sounds right and mastering pitch accent.

Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Vietnamese, but it does have what is called pitch accent.  It's like a two tone system, but a word's pitch pattern can sometimes change depending on the words around it.

It wasn't taught at all in the college Japanese course I took, but it matters.  Words that have the same sounds but different meanings can have different pitch patterns to distinguish them.  An example would be two words that are pronounced 'hashi'.  One means 'bridge' and the other, 'chopsticks.'  One starts out high, and goes low and the other does the opposite.  Please check out the videos listed below for examples that explain this way better than I can in writing.

I'm reminded of several Indian instructors I had in college.  Their vocabulary and grammar were very good, or even excellent, but they stressed the wrong syllable on words often enough that it was hard to understand them at first.  Eventually I caught on to their accent, and could understand what they were trying to say.  For example, one professor would stress the first syllable of 'develop', and at first I thought that 'devil up' was some sort of Indian English slang that meant about the same thing as 'develop'.

I'm also learning more about Japanese phonetics.  English consonants like  T or K will give good approximations, but the Japanese pronunciation is softer, with less air produced.  The T is more like it is in Spanish.

Our teacher has really good English pronunciation, so she can do a good, but slightly over the top, impression of an English speaker speaking Japanese.

This kind of accent reduction is exactly what I'd hoped to get from this class.

For anyone who wants to learn more about this, here are some introductory videos:

Japanese intonation: word-level
Japanese Phonetics (Patreon Series): Episode 1