>>11209472Japanese is tonal in the sense that a mere change in pitch can change the meaning of a word into something completely unrelated. But because it's only a question of which is the accented syllable of a word, it's actually closer to how stress can change the meaning of a word in English, is just that there are other indicators besides pitch (length, volume, even the quality of consonants and vowels can be affected) in stress. In Japanese pitch accent, the only indicator for the accent is that the pitch is highest at the accented syllable, and sound length for example is distinct from that.
Even though it can sometimes distinguish words, in practice it's not very important for being comprehensible, and it's basically never taught to foreigners nor indicated in most dictionaries.
