About This Deck

This deck will teach you the pitch accent of the most common words in each of the four main pitch accent patterns.

By listening out for the pitch of these words while immersing, your ability to perceive pitch accent in native Japanese speech will develop rapidly.

Features

• Native audio
• Pitch graphs that visually demonstrate the word's pitch
• Pitch accent color-coding for enhanced recall (heiban, atamadaka, nakadaka, odaka)

Word Selection

The words in this deck were not chosen solely based on frequency. Many other factors were taken into account in order to select a set of words optimal for training pitch accent perception:

• All words in the deck are the same length: three mora long. This allows your ears to hone in on the difference between each pitch pattern more easily.
• Words that have multiple different pitch accents have been excluded.
• Words whose pitch changes based on the context have been excluded. This includes verbs, as the pitch of verbs change depending on the conjugation.
• Note: although the pitch of i-adjectives also changes depending on the conjugation, i-adjectives have not been excluded from the deck. The reason for this is that, unlike verbs, i-adjectives are most commonly used in the unconjugated dictionary form. That said, keep in mind that the pitch accent of i-adjectives will change when conjugating.

How to Use

Learn 10 new cards each day. You will learn heiban words on the first day, atamadaka words on the second day, nakadaka words on the third day, and odaka words on the fourth day. Learning the words for each pattern on a different day will prevent you from confusing which pattern a word is. For this reason, it's crucial to not learn more than 10 new cards per day.

When reviewing, for each card, recall which of the four pitch accent patterns the word is. If you easily recalled correctly, mark the card "good". If you hesitated or recalled the pitch incorrectly, mark the card "again". Do not use the "hard" or "easy" buttons.

It's important to note that most odaka words are pronounced as heiban when directly followed by the particle "の". For example, although the word こころ is normally pronounced as odaka, in the phrase "こころのなか", こころ is pronounced as heiban. For odaka words that become heiban when followed by "の", this is noted on the card for that word.

Once you learn the words in the deck, start listening out for them whenever you're listening to Japanese. When you notice one of the words in your immersion, try to see if you can hear the relevant pitch melody. If you're not able to hear it, rewind a few seconds and try listening again. By following these instructions, you will become able to clearly hear pitch accent within a few weeks.