View Content #24079

From http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/pages/home

OJAD is an online Japanese accent database for learners and teachers of Japanese. The goal of this tool is to enhance the awareness and understanding of the Japanese pitch accent with a suite of four features. The words in the dictionary encompass over 9000 nouns and 35 declinable words including verbs, i-adjectives, and na-adjectives, making it possible to search approximately 42,300 conjunctions of words. What’s more, each conjugated form given in the dictionary is accompanied by both male and female audio. This suite provides three other useful tools in addition to word search. With Verb-Suffix Search, you can look up the accent types for a verb followed by a suffix. With Text-Search, you can look up the accent types for words in an excerpt of text. Lastly, with Suzuki-kun, you can predict and display the pitch contour for an excerpt of text. 

Access OJAD at http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/pages/home

Japanese teachers and students near Eugene, Oregon, will be interested in an upcoming workshop by Dr. Nobuaki Minematsu of Toyko University to be held November 21, 2017, 5-7 PM. Here is the summary: 

“In Japanese, dialect variations are often heard as lexical accent variations, and native Japanese generally use Tokyo Japanese (TJ) when they speak in public. This means that 1) Japanese spoken with non-TJ accents is still intelligible enough, 2) but it is often unnatural as Japanese spoken in public. Why are you learning Japanese? If you’re learning Japanese to do some social activities in Japan, learning TJ is strongly recommended. In this talk, fundamentals of TJ are introduced and it is explained now to use OJAD to learn TJ. Tokyo accented Japanese or my own accent Japanese (オレオレ日本語), that is the question.”