Why do English sources for learning Japanese leave out pitch?

Question

I always thought that besides Kanji, one of the most difficult things about Japanese was its immense amount of homophones. For example, 花 (はな), which means flower, and 鼻 (also はな) which means nose. In the sources and books I read, I am simply supposed to tell the difference by context, and this isn't always easy. Let me elaborate:

[甘美]{うまみ}の花は赤く見える
[Talking to Umami] Your flower looks red.

[甘美]{うまみ}の鼻は赤く見える
[Talking to Umami] Your nose looks red.

If I was talking to Umami before that statement and it was clear we were taking about her flower or her nose than yes, I suppose context would help. However, if this was the starting statement, it might not be completely clear. Hypothetically, if she was sick and bringing me a red flower, she wouldn't know from the context and I would have wasted my time specifying that I was talking about the organ or the plant.

Would pitch be helpful or even necessary to differentiate the subject in this case? If so, then why do English sources leave it out? If anything, it should be one of the first things learned, seeing that I basically had to re-learn all of the words I thought I knew how to pronounce perfectly.

Answer 1

Not all ambiguous pairs can be distinguished by pitch, and we could just as easily provide you with loads of other ambiguous statements where NOTHING other than context could lead you to the right meaning.

This kind of thing happens in all languages: in English, if I tell a female friend "You have a nice pair/pear", she'll rely on context (I hope) to tell which I meant.

As for why pitch isn't dealt with in general in Japanese courses, my conclusion so far is that 1) the vast majority of teachers (at least non-university teachers outside of Japan) do no possess enough knowledge about how pitch accent works to be able to teach it, and 2) not all Japanese native speakers are comfortable enough with the pronunciation of Standard/Tokyo Japanese to be able to dictate how words should be pronounced.

Similarly, most English teachers would probably struggle to explain why plural -s sounds different in 'houses', 'cats' and 'dogs', or how stress is assigned in noun compounds -- although these are generally simpler issues than pitch accent as a whole.

Unfortunately, minimal pairs are not generally a very conducive way to argue in favour of teaching pitch accent. Personally, I would think that allowing students to be more easily understood would form a better argument. I also think that having a better understanding of how Japanese is pronounced leads to better comprehension, communication, vocabulary retention and fluency.

Answer 2

Very insightful point! I think you are right that pitch matters. As a case in point, say if my daughter is reading a textbook aloud in homework and gets a pitch wrong, I would correct her, because it's noticable.

On the other hand, Japanese dictionaries written for Japanese do not have the pitch information either, and people from different regions often speak the same word with drastically different pitch, yet that doesn't make it any harder to understand what they are saying.

So all in all, I'd say it's not outrageous that many English sources leave this out.