Hey all,
I’ve made a similar post before, but I’m still rather anxious about this topic.
As a background: I’m 19. I’ve been in a language school in Tokyo for 3 weeks. I live at a sharehouse with a roommate that speaks English. I have a below N5 level of knowledge. It is my goal to be as fluent as possible as quickly as possible.
So, I have joined a club (boxing). I go to School. I study. All in all that takes up 8 hours of my day at most. And at the gym, I’m realistically only talking to people for ~10 minutes. It’s mostly silent. Plus, not everyone there is a native japanese speaker (nobody speaks English, though). Most people are above my age.
I’m just super anxious. I don’t want to ruin my friendship with my roommate, but I feel that I need to stop speaking English. I want to find opportunities to speak Japanese, but my level is low. Plus, I dont even know how to fill my time. What I should do. Etc.
If I do stop speaking English, do I do so entirely? Do I still search things in English? Will speaking for even 5 minutes break the cycle? What do I do in the meantime if I’m not even using Japanese?
In short, I’m an anxious kid who’s eager to learn a language but has no idea how to go about this. I just have doubts everywhere I go. I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this, but I could really use some advice. Thank you for listening.
3 comments
As long as you take advantage of opportunities to use Japanese, you don’t need to worry about sometimes continuing to use English. In fact, if you were to entirely stop using English in your day to day life for months on end, you will likely find that your speaking and writing ability in English will drop. That’s probably not something you want.
It would probably be good for both you and your roommate to practice more Japanese, so maybe the 2 of you could work out a daily practice routine. Or you could just talk to them on Japanese and let them respond in English, that’s still practicing your output.
Don’t worry too much about “maximizing efficiency”. What’s import is persistence: even the most efficient study paths for Japanese take months to be effective and even the most dedicated learners reach fluency only after years of practice. So just make sure you are practicing every day and that you aren’t working so hard you’ll burn out and give up.
One more unrelated thought:
Because “immersion” has started to be used to mean “consumption of target language content” instead of “immersion language education”, you might want rename your topic to something like “How do I maximize my input/output opportunities in Japan?”. Otherwise people might think you want suggestions where to find books to read or anime to watch, and you may not get as many high quality responses as you want.
Having an English speaking roommate isn’t an issue unless you rely exclusively on English for the entire time. Speaking for 5 minutes in Japanese won’t make you a master, speaking in ze flush for 5 minutes won’t wreck your progress.
I’d suggest talking to your roommate in short bursts as practice. Aim for 10 minutes to start, then try going to 15, 20, 25 and finally 30 minutes straight. Make it a regular thing, make it an opportunity for you two to get closer and let him/her practice English too. The focus is on USING the language, not instruction.
As your ability in your respective TLs improve you can add more variety in topics, go deeper, add complexity and so on.
When you’re really good, do alternate days. Japanese-English-Japanese….
Also, they may introduce you to their friends, so you’ll be meeting more people and hopefully using Japanese more and more as well.