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Below is an example of what I mean. Is there something similar to this but for English?

This is a Japanese prosody tools developed by labs at The University of Tokyo. You can try inserting this sentence 商品を受け取りました。. Click Analyze and it'll show intonations and stresses of the sentence.

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  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the question is not directly related to English.
    – Michael Rybkin
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 12:43
  • @MichaelRybkin I think the OP is asking about English while using another language to make a comparison. However, the question could be improved by the OP explaining why they need such a tool for English learning and what they find difficult about English prosody.
    – Eddie Kal
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 12:53
  • The site's rules do not allow us to recommend external resources. But if you search for "text to speech" or "natural readers" you might find your way to a website where you can paste a sentence in and the site will read it back to you. If you find your way there, choose "Sharon" as the speaker and speed = -1. It's not bad, but some of the other voices are.
    – TimR
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 12:53
  • I went ahead and migrated this to meta since requests for tools aren't a good fit for the main site. We do have a Resources for Learning English thread that might (or might not) be helpful.
    – ColleenV Mod
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 13:52
  • Meaning through stress and intonation is very complicated in English. A simple sentence like /I like cats/ can be stressed on the I, like, or cats. That then changes what the speaker is actually saying. This site unfortunately only deals with written language including written forms of spoken language. An interesting note: The Aussies have a rising intonation in declarative statements that are not questions. My advice: the best thing is a private tutor who can teach you basic patterns, over the arc of sentences. There is no set intonation for anything in English.
    – Lambie
    Commented Sep 19, 2018 at 20:06

1 Answer 1

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AFAIK, no. Japan has a national standard variety of Japanese 標準語, dictating and proscribing the accent and vocabulary, on which school instruction across the country is based, whereas English is more diverse. You can speak of GA, RP, and so on, but there's thousands of different English speaking traditions and varieties, with a multitude of different stress patterns and intonations.

Compared to English, the salience of such a tool for Japanese is more obvious, as pitch accent is of semantic significance in Japanese.

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