Pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese
Preface:Many students of Spoken Japanese hope to eventually develop a level of fluency similar to that of a native speaker. In order to do so, however, it is necessary that they study proper accent. Unfortunately, this important aspect of language study is absent for most students, due in large part to the fact there are very few teachers outside Japan who have the specialized knowledge or pedagogical techniques required to teach the proper Japanese accent. We therefore rushed to develop this web-based material in an effort to help mitigate this problem by providing as many students as possible with a fast and effective method for learning proper pronunciation.
This material has several important features. First, it enables the student to understand the nature of the Tokyo accent by emphasizing the following characteristics of Japanese as it is spoken in the Tokyo metropolitan area:
• Tokyo Japanese is spoken with a high/low pitch-based accent.
• Rhythm is determined by the count of both “Moras” and syllables.
• The pitch falls between the Moras.
These concepts are explained through the use of various techniques including visual aids.
Secondly, because we believe that the student should begin learning proper accent as early as possible, we have made this material available in Japanese, English, and Korean versions. Thus, it will be possible for many students to benefit from it by working in a language with which they are already familiar, even before they have developed any proficiency in Japanese.
In summary, we believe that this material can properly be described as embodying a revolutionary method of web-based teaching that we developed in the sincere hope that it will be useful to a large number of students.
Lastly, we express our sincere gratitude to the people whose help, encouragement and friendship has kept us going and enabled us to complete this task. A special note of thanks goes to Professor Jiro Nishigori for his advice and support.
How to use this material:
There are serveral buttons that the student can click to activate different portions of the syllabus:
“What is the Tokyo Accent”
This button brings up a module containing a basic overview of Tokyo Japanese pronunciation and accent
“head-high”,“mid-high”, “flat”, “tail-high”
Clicking these buttons bring up modules covering each of the four types of accent found in Tokyo Japanese. After reading the explanation of the accent type, the student should click the “practice material” button and try to properly reproduce the accent. Clicking the、 
button plays an audio of a native speaker which allows the student to check their own pronunciation.
“Languages”
The student should first try to follow what is being taught in the original Japanese. However, if this proves to be beyond the student's present ability, clicking the “languages” button will bring up an explanation of the current screen in either , English, Chinese, or Korean.