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English and Japanese Pronunciation Resources

Pronunciation Resources

Comment if you would like to see a resource added to the list.

Guides / Courses

あいうえおフォニックス (🇬🇧 English, Web, Free)
English phonetics video series made for a Japanese audience.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCX2tvXwAItLs5RhFFSGn9LQ

Dogen: Japanese Phonetics Series (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Paid)
(Patreon) http://www.patreon.com/dogen
(10 Minute Crash Course) https://youtu.be/O6AoilGEers

Misa: Japanese Pitch Accent (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
Condensed introductory video on pitch accent.
https://youtu.be/k-bk_4WvY58

Waseda's Japanese Pronunciation for Communication Course (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
https://www.edx.org/course/japanese-pronunciation-for-communication

Books

日本語アクセント入門 (🇯🇵 Japanese, Book, Paid)
Introductory book that teaches and explains the structure of Japanese Accent and explores the accents of regions outside of Tokyo.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/日本語アクセント入門-松森-晶子/dp/4385365318/

日本語の発音教室 理論と練習 (🇯🇵 Japanese, Book, Paid)
A digestible book (written in Japanese) that teaches from vowels and consonants up to rhythm, accent and intonation.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/日本語の発音教室―理論と練習-田中-真一/dp/487424176X

Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology (🇯🇵 Japanese, Book / Web)
A compilation of chapters written by different experts in the respective fields.
Here is a PDF of the chapter on pitch accent (provided by the author):
http://user.keio.ac.jp/~kawahara/pdf/HandbookAccentPublished.pdf

The Sounds of Japanese (🇯🇵 Japanese, Book, Paid)
Introduction to Japanese phonology in English. Covers vowels, consonants, syllables, accents, intonations, and phonemics.
https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Japanese-Audio-CD-Timothy/dp/B00SQAM9ZA

Dictionaries

JAccent: Accent Dictionary (🇯🇵 Japanese, Android / iOS, Free)
Offline pitch accent lookup. Includes conjugations, common counters, suffixes, names and places, in addition to user contributed data. The base data comes from OJAD and U-biq.
(Android) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dttrinh.gm.jaccent&hl=en_US&gl=US
(iOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jaccent-japanese-accent-dict/id1252200087

macOS Dictionary (🇯🇵 Japanese, macOS, Free)
Includes Super Daijirin (w/ pitch accent).

Monokakido: Dictionaries (🇬🇧 English / 🇯🇵 Japanese, iOS, Paid)
Offers in-app purchases of several monolingual and a couple bilingual dictionaries including the NHK Accent Dictionary (2016), the most recently published and most accurate dictionary for pitch accent. Other available dictionaries with pitch accent include: Daijirin and Shinmeikai. Several English / Japanese dictionaries include audio.
https://www.monokakido.jp/ja/dictionaries/app/

Shinmeikei Japanese Accent Dictionary (🇯🇵 Japanese, Book, Paid)
The appendix to this offers a pretty vast collection of pitch accent trends / rules.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/新明解日本語アクセント辞典-第2版-CD付き-金田一-春彦/dp/4385136726

Surname Accent Dictionary (🇯🇵 Japanese, Android, Free)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.chojingumi.myoji&hl=ja

Takoboto (🇯🇵 Japanese, Android / Web, Free)
(Android) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.takoboto
(Web) https://takoboto.jp

U-Biq: Accent Study Site (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
Small pitch accent dictionary. Includes names counters and conjugations.
https://accent.u-biq.org

Audio

Forvo (🇬🇧 English / 🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
A pronunciation dictionary with native audio for user-contributed words / phrases.
https://forvo.com

YouGlish (Web, Free)
Search YouTube videos for instances of words.
(🇬🇧 English) https://youglish.com
(🇯🇵 Japanese) https://youglish.com/japanese

Tools

OJAD Prosody Tutor Suzuki-kun (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
Generates pitch accent graphs for a given input with a high level of accuracy.
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/phrasing/index

Other

Tips for Japanese Pitch Accent (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
A cheat sheet for experienced learners of Japanese looking for a survey of rules, patterns and concepts of pitch accent.
(One Page) https://gist.github.com/k3zi/3f38070efffa38db83cd5745d83b1235
(Naviagtable Site) https://kez.io/notes/japanese/accent

Japanese Accent Patterns (🇯🇵 Japanese, Web, Free)
Lists the pitch accent patterns for several particles, suffixes, and prefixes.
https://github.com/Japanese-Accent-Circle/japanese-accent

@xerpi
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xerpi commented Jun 5, 2021

Hi @k3zi! Thanks for your Japanese resources, they are very useful :)
Just wanted to mention that the Takoboto dictionary also includes pitch accent, so you might want to add it to the list: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.takoboto

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