Accent

Recently, I've been studying Japanese pitch accent through several websites. They're really helpful and they've made me aware of many of the mistakes that I've been making in my speech. But, the other day when I told some friends of mine ( whom are from Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Oosaka) that I'm studying Japanese pitch accent, they all told me to not worry about studying it. They all told me that accents vary in every region of Japan so it's not something that I have to pay too much attention to. So, I wanted to ask this:
Do you think that I should go ahead and study Japanese pitch accent in order to get rid of my foreign accent? Or, should I just let it come naturally by studying abroad (which would mean picking up the local accent of the place where I study).

Also, if anyone has NHK's日本語アクセント辞典, I'd like to hear your review of it.

I'd say it does matter, because western Japanese don't particularly like the sound of easterners trying to imitate their dialects without getting the accent, and vice-versa. Pick the one you want to emulate, and do lots of listening and repeating and listening to yourself and comparing with the original and repeating and repeat the whole process. They may say don't worry about it, but the fact of the matter is they have one (and probably only one), no matter how they got it, and I doubt they mix different ones together. Of course, it doesn't hurt to be familiar with lots of them (and dialects for that matter), but in my opinion you should at least pick one and study it and get it down (even if you want to emulate more, it's probably best to start with one). In my opinion it'd be a lot cooler to have someone say you sound like you're from Akita than to say you sound like a foreigner speaking with a strange accent. But then again I guess it depends what you're after. I suppose you could shoot for "sounds native Japanese but I couldn't say where" no matter where in the country you were. I'd still pick one, though, and I'd pick the standard one first then branch out from there.

I see. I've been focusing on learning the standard/Toukyou accent. I'm not quite sure if all the studying I've been doing has paid off or not, but a few days ago when I was talking (in Japanese) to a guy around my age from Toukyou on skype he told me that I sound 25. (??) I'm 18 so I'm not sure if that's a good thing or...what. But anyway, I guess for me, it'd be safe to stick with standard. I've heard that it sounds strange for a foreign to speak kansai-ben etc. I've also heard that a foreigner speaking Kansai-ben is the equivalent of a foreigner to the U.S speaking southern dialect. That would be strange...

Heh, I've done it here and there. If you can pull it off it would be strange, but sounding like a native Japanese from anywhere is still sounding like a native Japanese (plus the people in 関西 get a kick out of when you try). When I was in Boston I heard there was a Japanese guy who had spent lots of time in south Louisiana and spoke English with a southern drawl, and the guy telling me about it said it was strange. I unfortunately never got to hear it, although I wanted to. I'm sure it would have taken some getting used to, but it would have been pretty cool.

I once saw an east Asian guy speaking fluent Spanish with some people, and that threw me off, because those sounds should not have been coming out of that guy's mouth from my experience at the time. But the strangeness wears off when you're faced with something all the time, so the people you know would find if normal after a period of time if you spoke 関西弁, but if you sounded foreign, you'd always just sound foreign. Speaking of which, a westerner speaking Japanese period will be strange to lots of Japanese people.

About your age, that guy was probably going by the sound of your voice more than anything else.

True, I didn't think about it that way. Maybe I'll look into Hiroshima-ben. I've always liked how they use words like "buchi" "iken" and "~nanyo" even though their use of "~ja" sounds like old Japanese lol. It'll also be fun to be able to speak to my Hiroshima friends in their native dialect. So, thanks for the advice.

Yea, that's probably what he meant. I was afraid that he meant that I sounded like one of those announcer people. lol That wouldn't have been good.