@snailboat I'm planning on going through some books on phonology to attempt to improve my accent (although I doubt it'll help). I found Introductory Phonology, The Sounds of Japanese, and The Phonology of Japanese from taylor's post, but only the last seems to really be relevant wrt prosody. Do you have any favorites/suggestions?
3 hours later…
Anonymous
5:16 AM
I have The Sounds of Japanese and The Phonology of Japanese but not the third
Anonymous
I think The Sounds of Japanese is a better book overall
Anonymous
I'm not sure any book will teach you prosody very well
Anonymous
I think that intonation is very under-analyzed in general and in Japanese in particular
Anonymous
People have written things here and there, but not a lot
Anonymous
Intonation is non-phonemic pitch, while pitch accent is phonemic pitch
Anonymous
5:17 AM
Vance has a pretty big section on pitch accent too, by the way
Anonymous
It's pages 142-205
Anonymous
Labrune's book is really interesting, though. I like how she tries to bridge the gap between the Japanese school of phonology and the Western generative phonologists
Anonymous
I'm not necessarily convinced that all of her analyses are the best ones, though
Anonymous
I definitely think both books are worth reading, but if I had to pick one I'd go with Vance 2008 :-)
Anonymous
(And it seems like you've already got Labrune 2012!)
Anonymous
5:28 AM
I'm not sure I can really help much. I think people have to pick up the melodies of each language by ear . . .
Thanks! I actually don't have Labrune 2012, I was just browsing through it on Amazon. It's amazing how much of a given book is available on there...
I think I'll check both of them out. As you suggest it's probably not going to do much at all compared to training by ear, but who knows, maybe it well!
I know that I at least can learn the pronunciation of words faster thanks to understanding pitch accents.
Occasaionaly I ask a question which I think is about one thing and it turns out to be about something totally different.
For example I just asked "Use of ただ after a plain/continuative form verb" and it turned out to be about use of ただ before counters.
I think the question title should reflect ...
Occasaionaly I ask a question which I think is about one thing and it turns out to be about something totally different.
For example I just asked "Use of ただ after a plain/continuative form verb" and it turned out to be about use of ただ before counters.
I think the question title should reflect ...
