I noticed there was a lack for a much needed speaking
practice in their Japanese langauge program.
The word for “nose” and “flower” have the same pronunciation.
But, they use different pitches with the particle that follows. Where “nose”
starts high and the particle stays high, “flower” starts high and
particle finishes low. And this is specifically for the accent of those
living in Kanto (Tokyoites-aka standard Japanese) Confusing, right?
This is where having an active practice in pitch accent
comes in. While context matters most in
a conversation, learning to hear and say these pitches
can help speed a learners progress.
In a survey of around 50 Japanese language students, of which almost 50% were beginner/elementary, only 10% felt confident in their ability to speak Japanese. Later, a
common complaint was “there's no way to study
speaking abilities alone.”
Most beginner to intermediate students were studying either alone using language apps or they a variety of self study textbooks. Others mentioned they joined private lessons or had a friend or partner that they would practice with.
All of these are great tools to help students with learning Japanese but, why do almost 50% of students still struggle with speaking?
Very few teachers teach pitch-accent directly.
As with most language lessons, dialect and
emotion is taught through a lot of practice,
teachers that were interviewed mentioned
they preffered using the "repeat after me"
method the most and would casually correct
students when necessary
After interviewing different Japanese teachers and learning that they all indirectly teach pitch accent, so the best outcome was to build upon Duo’s French/Spanish speaking program to
create a unique Japanese speaking program in the same style.
Pitch accent is best learned through imitation, as with speaking any language. Duolingo often encourages students to practice speaking out loud as they hear new phrases and words, but not everyone is able to hear the subtleties in Japanese pronunciation. So, adding a visual guide along with the listening is potentially the best option!
Being a well established brand, Duolingo has a set of brand guidelines that it adheres to. A natural first step was to create a style guide as well as recreating vectors that I would use throughout the project such as buttons, speech bubbles, and icons.
The first attempt was built upon Duolingo's conversation segment.
This proved to be unusable as the guideline was too thin and too close to other characters. There was also no clear way to show if a student had an error.
Other applications and some teachers use a slope display accent, but when attempting to add this into Duolingo's interface, the style was too jarring to work. It also created potential issues for visual inaccessibility.
When you google pitch accent, the most common example uses lines and dots. This ultimately became the best way to display pitch accent in Duolingo. It allows for a clear and concise way to display how either a single world or full phrase should be pronounced and it allows space for error.
For this example, the user is learning to to say “There is a dog.” They learn it in typical Duolingo style until they land on the speaking practice.
The user then proceeds to practice the sentance, only on the 3rd character, their pitch was a little too high. Duolingo shows this mistake but...
It's marked as correct! This is because in general Japanese practice, we are aiming pronunciation, not perfection. As mentioned before, context is what matters most.
Duolingo’s practice hub! A great feature already available in every language to practice mistakes. Duo reminds the user that their pitch and pronunciation are being practiced before starting.
This time as a user speaks with incorrect pitch, Duolingo marks them as wrong, not only showing them that they went too high but also reminding them which character to watch as they prepare to continue.
After a gentle reminder from Duo, the user then will try again to say the sentence correctly, and after completion, all the dots turn blue and the user can move forward.
