I've been trying to test my pronunciation of words of their pitch by saying the word into google translate to see if it detects me saying the correct word and was trying with 席/せき for instance and every time I try to say it it always comes out as 咳 or 性器, and when I was trying to pronounce 橋/はし, 箸/はし, and 端/はし, I always was getting it wrong. What am I doing wrong and why is it so hard to make a higher pitch?
Most of trouble English speakers have with pitch accents come from conflation with stress accents. We have to work hard to disentangle the two. Also, remember that pitch patterns are relative, and can vary depending on what follows.
However, I’m not sure that Google speech recognition is even capable of disambiguating minimal pairs based on accent alone. You may be testing yourself with a task even native speakers can’t accomplish reliably.
