Pitch of 「見た目より」

Question

Consider the sentence

鈴木さんは&見た目より若く見えますね。

Mr. Suzuki's not as old as he looks.

According to my dictionary:

Yet according to OJAD placing these two words together causes 見た目 to have two accents(!?):

As far as I knew, Japanese words can never have more than one accent?

Question: Is there something deep going on here, or is this just OJAD getting it wrong?

Darius Jahandarie · Accepted Answer · 2022-11-24 00:51:01Z

4

Your dictionary is outdated, 見た目 is heiban in modern Japanese.
OJAD is also wrong, it’s parsing it as two separate words 見た+目 (the eye which saw).

It should be みためよ＼り.

answered Nov 24, 2022 at 0:51

Darius Jahandarie

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Thank you for the correction! I'm wondering if there is a way that will allow me to more clearly distinguish between 尾高 and 平板. As a problem I have a lot of self-awareness of, I often get the particle's pitch wrong. Sometimes I hear a fall on the particle but turns out there is no fall, as is the case here. I can't remember where I read it but a study put 平板 words through Audacity or something similar and the waveform shows a half-dropped particle. I seem to hear that with 平板 words. I can't seem to tell much difference between 見た目より and 花より. Would you have any suggestions for me to improve?
– Eddie Kal
Nov 24, 2022 at 3:34

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