It’s been about four, five years since I’ve started studying Japanese and I’m starting to think I just can’t get good at producing it. I feel that I’ve progressed quite a bit when it comes to reading; I still miss very obvious things sometimes, but I can comprehend a lot more than in the beginning. Hearing is also bad, but I don’t listen as often as I should to pick up news, so that’s fair.
But I just never get good at speaking, even though I do practice speaking and am currently doing it daily. Even small talk trips me up a lot; for every simple conversation I forget words and grammar points (extremely simple words and grammar points at that) all the time, and when it comes to actually speaking I cannot really make a sentence. The other day I was actually trying to say in conversation “I haven’t felt like I’ve progressed in Japanese very much” and realized that, after 4ish years of study, I don’t know how to say that on the spot, even though it’s the kind of sentence I’ve seen in dialogues of Minna no Nihongo, Genki and Tobira all the time (yes, I used all of those). Why are they not internalized by now?
However, if I heard someone saying that in Japanese, I’d probably understand it and be like “oh, yes, of course, that’s how you say it. Why didn’t I think of that? I know all those grammar points and words.” I understand that language learning will take decades of studying. English is not my first language and I know I’ll never grasp all of it or sound natural, but at least I can make a post like this and tell someone my opinion about something. I don’t understand why I can’t at least make regular conversation in Japanese after all this time, just about day to day stuff, without forgetting how those things are said.
Not to mention, sometimes I will read a sentence and understand it, but there’s this overwhelming feeling that in a thousand years my brain would not form that sentence in that same, natural way. And this is something that does not change no matter how many times I study that grammar point.
It’s painful, especially when I see people with a lot less years of study being able to either talk very naturally or at least make sentences that, while not completely natural-sounding, perfectly sum up their thoughts. And they do it without even preparing for that subject (I see this in class daily). They just… know how to make sentences, even if not perfectly, and I can’t string words together to make a simple question.
I make mistakes while talking with people in Japanese, and this should in theory be fruitful (making mistakes is important, it’s better than not speaking and all that), but I don’t feel like I learn from my mistakes at all. I actually wish I made more actual grammar mistakes, but I’d have to be able to form actual sentences before that. Every conversation is a different struggle in terms of subject, but it does not really get “better”. The only times I feel like I can say something more or less worthwhile is when I repeat a sentence several times in my head, usually after having researched the grammar and words, and then say it, but I can’t exactly make conversations out of this; if the person talking to me goes off-script I’m lost again.
Anyone has a similar issue?
4 comments
How often are you having conversations and who are you conversing with?
God, I relate to feeling of “I understand this sentence completely, but I would never in a million years think to say it like that” so hard.
> And this is something that does not change no matter how many times I study that grammar point.
Conscious study, unfortunately, doesn’t just lead to natural output.
I still have a *long* ways to go in my output, but I’m at the stage where I can generally get my point across on most topics, despite some unnatural phrasing and grammatical mistakes.
The things I’ve noticed that have helped the most so far (in order):
1. Massive amounts of listening input. Reading helps too, but not as much as listening. Youtube in particular is better than dramas and anime for sounding natural. Once you’ve heard certain phrases hundreds or thousands of times, they just start popping into your head.
2. Monologuing and writing to find your weak points, and then finding out the natural way to say it. Sometimes I ask a native speaker, sometimes I search on Twitter to check if an expression is used by natives. If you’ve had enough immersion, when you do see the right phrase it will click.
3. Conversation practice. Sometimes messing up in a live conversation will burn the right phrase into your memory better than any other study technique.
4. Shadowing. Speaking is part muscle memory, and deliberately practicing that aspect makes it feel less awkward.
As I’m realizing at this point too, unfortunately it just takes *a lot* of time. Give it more time, we’ll all get there!
I’m not sure if this applies to you, but I find a lot of people get really tripped up when they can’t say exactly what they’re trying to say, when you need to be saying what you can say.
For example, you might have gotten flustered when you couldn’t say, “my Japanese hasn’t progressed much”, but would you instead be able to say, “my Japanese hasn’t gotten much better?”, or even just “my Japanese is bad?” Even if it’s not as eloquent as you’d like, once you get yourself speaking it’s easier to get corrections and improve.
You can also find a person who’s speech style you like and take some of their sentences as “template” sentences, then you practice swapping out words as needed.