In this lesson you will learn about Japanese pitch accent. This is a pretty advanced topic, and it varies largely by dialect.
It is often said that Japanese is just spoken out with flat sounds, without tonal changes or pitch. This is actually pretty close to the truth, as you will make your way with flat sounds in most cases. However, there are some cases when words with the same spelling are indicating different words, just by changing the pitch accent.
This lesson shows a few examples of how common words are pronounced in Tokyo dialect. Just beware that the pitch does vary a lot around the country. As wrong pitch is a sure sign of a gaijin, beginners are strongly recommended to keep the general pitch as flat as possible.
Listen
Listen to and compare the sounds in the following table of examples, going from left to right, one row at a time. The part of the word with accent is underlined in the romaji spelling.