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Japanese pronunciation (pitch)

Schnabelhund   December 21st, 2010 9:28a.m.

Hi,
I'm a native Japanese speaker from Tokyo. I've noticed that there are quite a few words that don't have the right pronunciation samples. For example, the sound sample for 「欠ける」 sounds like 「書ける」; both would be 「かける」 in hiragana, but the pitches are different (pitches described at http://sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/sp/lesson/j/doc/accent.html ).
There could be some improvement. Where do you get your sound samples from?

ジェレミー (Jeremy)   December 21st, 2010 12:18p.m.

to my belief,

On skritter, Two words that have the same phonetic spelling use use the same sound clip.

I even think if someone were to make a fake word entry, (with an existing words pronunciation) that it would borrow *that* sound clip file

lot's of people think theres no voice stress in japanese! good example is the difference between 橋 and 箸

Bohan   December 21st, 2010 3:59p.m.

@Schnabelhund I'm curious, are you using Skritter to improve you Japanese/Kanji ?

Schnabelhund   December 21st, 2010 4:13p.m.

Actually I'm learning Chinese because I'll move to Taiwan in February. I've just been playing around with the Japanese Skritter. I think I'll recap the Japanese Kanji in future, though.

nick   December 22nd, 2010 10:21a.m.

This is true; our pronunciations are all keyed off the hiragana, with no affordance of pitch/stress variation across words with the same reading. When we were recording the sounds, we had to make that tradeoff to reduce the complexity of the system, as we don't have a source for the extra pronunciation info for the hundreds of thousands of words in our database.

This is where the audio comes from:
http://blog.skritter.com/2010/08/japanese-audio-is-back.html

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