This is not true in a strict sense; Standard Japanese has a pitch accent that has a "culminative" pitch countour over a word. Culminativity means that there is a single point of prominence at maximum. In Japanese, this gets realised as a drop in the pitch. (In variants of Japanese, there are more elaborare systems.)
Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words.
(Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
In the same way that Swedish has two tones. Bitonal systems aren't quite as difficult as language like monosyllabic polytonal languages like Mandarin or Cantonese though. There are a handful of words in Japanese which are differentiated in pronunciation only by tone, but these are relatively rare. If you screw up the tone in Japanese it will sound like a bad foreign accent but you will likely still be understood. Just about every word in Mandarin on the other hand has one or more conjugate tone pairings, and if you screw up the tone you're speaking nonsense.
(Source: 10 years learning Japanese, followed by marrying someone from Taiwan.)
GolDDranks|2 years ago
Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words.
(Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
throwaway2037|2 years ago
adastra22|2 years ago
(Source: 10 years learning Japanese, followed by marrying someone from Taiwan.)