So I’ve been studying Japanese for about a year now and I’m no where near to fluent and I definitely understand that but Yesterday I hung out with some native speakers from Tokyo that I met from my school and they are really cool and I really want to build a relationship with them all but the language gap between us is so huge and I felt really bad because they would try to speak to me in Japanese and I would only understand about 10 percent of the things they were saying…dare is say 5%…. A lot of the time I had to ask them what they where trying to say. We are all in our 20s so I know a lot of the time they where talking to me and each other pretty informal and just by listening to them talk I could tell too. I guess the point im trying to get at is that I feel like a lot of the Japanese taught online and in schools is no where near compared to they way Japanese people actually speak to each other especially friends and to be honest I don’t want to learn formal any more I just want to start focusing on my informal/slang way of speaking because that’s the way my friends talk to each other. I’m not worried about about getting a job in Japan so I’m not worried about learning formal but that’s the only thing a lot of these teachers push on to you. can anyone help me out and give me some options or good resources of where I can start learning this informal/slang type way of speaking so I can actually understand my friends and talk to them?
You May Also Like
Trying to relearn Japanese but at a very specific point right now… (How would you go about this)
- May 6, 2023
- 9 comments
I’ll try to keep this short but basically my mother is Japanese and my father is Canadian, and…
Help! How do I pronounce these 2 words differently so that they NEVER get mixed up in a conversation?
- April 8, 2024
- No comments
I learned that unfortunately 「しゃせい」 can be spelled like 「写生」 to mean *“sketching; drawing from nature; portrayal; description“*,…
Does gaijin mean “foreigner” or “non-japanese”?
- November 10, 2022
- 15 comments
A friend and I know fairly basic Japanese, and this topic came up I argued that the word…
4 comments
If you only understood 5-10% of what they were saying then the problem isn’t formal/informal it’s a problem of knowing the language in general.
Some native speakers on YouTube give really good advice about this sort of thing. Japanese ammo with Misa is a good one to start with I think, maybe others can give you more suggestions.
Studying a language for one year is not enough to learn very much. Also studying “for one year” can mean many things – if you spent a couple of hours every day + classes with a professional teacher – yeah you can get pretty far in a year.
But as a normal person just spending a normal amount of time – you will not really achieve more than a basic knowledge of the language in the first year.
very common experience. casual japanese is filled with constructs that are shortened versions of things you learn at various different points but never put together until much later. just to name one that i think is common is the concept-quoting of Xということ which is a way of either talking about a word or phrase, or also saying “stuff like X”, but in casual it comes out Xってこと. while the first one is brought up by any respectable learning plan, it’s not really focused on, and yet it comes up in what seems like every third sentence. i also almost wonder whether passive should be taught even earlier than potential, but that’s a different can of worms. tl;dr just practice and keep up with it and get what you can from the conversations – the more you do the better you’ll get.