Japanese pitch accent: look up a word, then see your own pitch line
Type a Japanese word in kanji or kana to see its Tokyo pitch pattern, drawn high and low mora by mora, with every pattern the dictionary lists. Listen to it, then record yourself: your own pitch line is drawn over the pattern so you can compare the shapes. It is a picture, not a score — pitch accent is not graded.
- Pitch patterns for over 120,000 words, from an open dictionary
- Type kana to see every word read that way: はし → 箸, 橋, 端
- Your pitch line over the pattern, drawn in your browser — free, nothing uploaded
What pitch accent is
Standard Japanese marks words with pitch, not stress. Each mora (roughly each kana) is said either high or low, and what matters is where the pitch falls: the downstep. 箸 (chopsticks) is high-low, はし with the fall after the first mora; 橋 (bridge) is low-high and falls only on the particle after it; 端 (edge) is low-high and stays high.
Two rules hold in Tokyo Japanese: the first and second morae always differ, and once the pitch has fallen inside a word it does not rise again. So a word's whole melody is fixed by one number, the mora after which the pitch drops, and that is the number dictionaries print and this page shows.
The four patterns
Every word falls into one of four shapes, named by where the drop is. The number is the accent: 0 means no drop at all.
| Word | Accent | Pattern | Shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| 桜 さくら | 0 | Heiban 平板 | low-high-high, particle high |
| 猫 ねこ | 1 | Atamadaka 頭高 | high-low, particle low |
| 大丈夫 だいじょうぶ | 3 | Nakadaka 中高 | low-high-high-low-low |
| 花 はな | 2 | Odaka 尾高 | low-high, particle low |
Words that only pitch tells apart
These pairs are spelled the same in kana and differ only in pitch. In context, a wrong pitch rarely stops you being understood, but it is one of the clearest things that makes a speaker sound foreign. Type the kana in the box above to see them side by side.
| Kana | Word | Accent | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| はし | 箸 / 橋 / 端 | 1 / 2 / 0 | chopsticks / bridge / edge |
| あめ | 雨 / 飴 | 1 / 0 | rain / candy |
| かみ | 神 / 紙・髪 | 1 / 2 | god / paper, hair |
| かき | 牡蠣 / 柿 | 1 / 0 | oyster / persimmon |
| はな | 花 / 鼻 | 2 / 0 | flower / nose |
| さけ | 鮭 / 酒 | 1 / 0 | salmon / sake |
| いま | 今 / 居間 | 1 / 2 | now / living room |
How to read your pitch line
Your line is drawn relative to your own voice, so a high voice and a low voice give the same picture. Look at the shape, not the exact height: does your line step up after the first mora, and does it drop where the pattern drops? Small wiggles are normal. Gaps are normal too, where a vowel is whispered (the す in です, the し in した) or a consonant has no voice.
The patterns are standard Tokyo Japanese, the accent of dictionaries and news. Many regions, Kansai above all, use different patterns, and some words have more than one accepted pattern; where the dictionary lists several, all are shown.
What is scored, and what is not
Pitch is shown, never scored. The pitch line is a picture for you to compare, computed in your browser; it is not a grade and nothing is sent anywhere. Score my sounds opens the recorder from the Japanese pronunciation practice page, which scores every word and every mora: the vowels, consonants and their timing, not the pitch.
Timing is where most learners lose points: long vowels and the small っ are full beats, as the guide to long and short vowels explains. To get the reading of a whole sentence first, paste it into the furigana and romaji converter.
Japanese pitch accent: questions
Does this score my pitch accent?+
No. Your pitch line is drawn over the dictionary pattern so you can compare the shapes yourself, but it is not scored or graded. The optional recorder scores your sounds and mora timing, not pitch.
Where do the pitch patterns come from?+
From Kanjium, an open dictionary database (CC BY-SA 4.0) with accent numbers for over 120,000 words, built on the EDICT word list. The patterns are standard Tokyo Japanese.
Is my recording uploaded?+
Not for the pitch line: it is computed in your browser and discarded. Only if you choose Score my sounds is that take sent for scoring, like on the practice page.
Why does a word show two patterns?+
Some words have more than one accepted pitch, and some change pattern with their use. The dictionary lists each, most common first, and the page draws all of them.
Why say the word with が?+
Heiban and odaka words sound the same on their own; only the particle after them shows the difference. 端が stays high on が, 橋が drops.
Practise Japanese out loud every day
The TonePerfect app gives you short daily speaking sessions in Japanese, with a score on every word and every mora.
Pitch accent: Kanjium (CC BY-SA 4.0) — the pitch accent notation was provided by Uros O. through his free database; word list from EDICT/JMdict by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG). Your pitch line is computed in your browser. Audio: your device's Japanese voice.