I live in a more rural area in Germany and I don’t really now any Japanese speakers living near me. And even if there was I would feel kinda weird going up to a random guy or girl “Hey aren’t you Japanese, wanna help me speak Japanese?”, yeah would feel strange I think.
Also there aren’t really any Japanese courses offered near where I live.
What I currently try to do is
1) Trying to say every sentence out loud I read in Japanese (unless the situation doesn’t allow me to speak loudly)
2) Stupid things like trying to comment on the activities I’m doing or trying to name random things I see in Japanese.
3) Sometimes I try to use the speech feature of DeepL translator and see if it gets the sentence correct that I wanted to say.
But of course without any correction it is difficult to know if my pronunciation or sentence structure is correct.
4 comments
I have heard about Italki and a couple other resources of places to practice speaking. Maybe do a search for tutors? Might be worth the investment.
Shadowing spoken material that you understand might be one way of improving. Not enough on it’s own maybe but perhaps a start?
I wouldn’t rely on DeepL (or any other machine translators) for improving your grammar – they can be helpful (to a degree) when analyzing stuff you don’t understand, but they are not to be relied on.
Primsleur is really good for pronunciation. I haven’t done the Japanese course yet but their German course helped me a lot. They have free trials so you can definitely try it out.
Auch wenn es in deiner Nähe keine Japanischkurse gibt, würde ich versuchen eher in diese Richtung zu gehen. Vielleicht gibt es eine Volkshochschule in der Nähe, die manchmal japanische Events ins Programm nimmt. Oder vielleicht gibt es eine kleine Städte- oder Sportlerpartnerschaft, wo du dich etwas engagieren kannst. Dazu gibt es vermutlich Infos bei einer lokalen Deutsch-Japanischen Gesellschaft, was natürlich auch eine super Anlaufstelle ist.
Diese Optionen wären dann eher selten mal im Jahr, für regelmäßigen Sprachaustausch (such auf Deutsch auch mal nach dem begriff Tandem!) wirst du aber bestimmt online fündig.