There are a handful of unique words/phrases in hokkaido but essentially no difference in accent. Don’t know your circumstances but good luck in tokachi lol you will move fast from N3 if you try
They don’t really open their mouth when they talk but otherwise it’s normal I’d say?
Hokkaido doesn’t really have an accent. It’s like the American West. Pioneers came from all over Japan to Hokkaido during the Meiji era, so they speak pretty much standard Japanese. You’ll hear more colorful expressions the further you get from Sapporo. Tokachi people might sound a bit country bumpkin, but not shockingly or incomprehensibly different from the Tokyo standard.
From my experiences, Hokkaido inhabitants sometimes speak strange grammars. For example:
今日はこちらにお泊まりでしたか? This meant to be “Were you staying at this hotel?” in our standard Japanese grammar but they mean “Are you going to stay in this hotel tonight?” politely. I thought the hotel reception is a foreign labour and doesn’t know Japanese well, but it seems this grammar is popular in Hokkaido. I don’t know all of these kinds of local rules, but they are from 19th century descendants of Japanese immigrants or prisoners sent to Hokkaido for some reasons.
And staying in Hokkaido for a few weeks, I found the Hokkaido is so independent from Japanese main land inhabitants. Their Japanese is comparable to New Zealand English to British English.
Not that different and a lot of people don’t use the really stereotypical stuff anyway. But the thing /u/SinkingJapanese17 mentioned about using the past tense to be polite I agree with; you hear that constantly (though because English speakers are prone to doing something similar you might not even notice if nobody told you). Also I went a long time thinking 手袋を履く was the standard way to say it but that’s a Hokkaido-ism and the standard verb is はめる.
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There are a handful of unique words/phrases in hokkaido but essentially no difference in accent. Don’t know your circumstances but good luck in tokachi lol you will move fast from N3 if you try
They don’t really open their mouth when they talk but otherwise it’s normal I’d say?
Hokkaido doesn’t really have an accent. It’s like the American West. Pioneers came from all over Japan to Hokkaido during the Meiji era, so they speak pretty much standard Japanese. You’ll hear more colorful expressions the further you get from Sapporo. Tokachi people might sound a bit country bumpkin, but not shockingly or incomprehensibly different from the Tokyo standard.
From my experiences, Hokkaido inhabitants sometimes speak strange grammars. For example:
今日はこちらにお泊まりでしたか? This meant to be “Were you staying at this hotel?” in our standard Japanese grammar but they mean “Are you going to stay in this hotel tonight?” politely. I thought the hotel reception is a foreign labour and doesn’t know Japanese well, but it seems this grammar is popular in Hokkaido. I don’t know all of these kinds of local rules, but they are from 19th century descendants of Japanese immigrants or prisoners sent to Hokkaido for some reasons.
And staying in Hokkaido for a few weeks, I found the Hokkaido is so independent from Japanese main land inhabitants. Their Japanese is comparable to New Zealand English to British English.
Not that different and a lot of people don’t use the really stereotypical stuff anyway. But the thing /u/SinkingJapanese17 mentioned about using the past tense to be polite I agree with; you hear that constantly (though because English speakers are prone to doing something similar you might not even notice if nobody told you). Also I went a long time thinking 手袋を履く was the standard way to say it but that’s a Hokkaido-ism and the standard verb is はめる.