I’m sure we’ve all heard stories of people who’ve studied Japanese day in and out, thought they had could engage in full in discussions during their visit to Osaka, only to freeze up when someone asks them their name or to keep asking the person to repeat themselves because of how hard it is to understand speech at a normal conversational pace vs slower annunciated speech they learned with.
So what was your experience with speech and comprehension after leaving a classroom setting? Did you have one of those “I forgot everything I learned” moments during your first convo with a native? Which one did you struggle with, was one more difficult for you than the other? Not looking for a “right answer”,by the way, just looking to hear some stories of my fellow japanese learners and their experiences.
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I’ve had a long-standing audio processing issue when it comes to Japanese. It’s something I’ve fixed mostly, and continue to work on, but has absolutely lead to a lot of issues with things like understanding media, or understanding the few people I’ve spoken to in the past.
Largely it’s a matter of not catching words that I know. Pressure or no pressure.
My ex volunteered me to use my Japanese when we were traveling at one point, and to my total embarrassment I had to ask them what they said in English, and then I was able to respond in Japanese. T-T It was awful!
That was a decade ago. More recently, especially since working on audio processing, I’ve used things like Hellotalk and VR Chat. I preferred to buddy up with some other English speakers to talk with a native because I found we were able to fill in each others gaps. Those settings are nice because there’s no real judgement, and you can ask the people you’ve buddied up with what a word was, and you also get the joy of knowing a word or two that someone else didn’t. It also takes away some of the anxiety.
Speed is certainly still an issue. It’s something I work on with things like Netflix and Language Reactor, since I can auto-pause and play back things, and have the convenience of Japanese subtitles. It’s been great for fixing my audio processing issues, my comprehension speed, and just adding to my vocabulary in general.
I think the biggest slap in the face between coursework and native things though has been the phrasing. A lot of learning materials seem to teach English phrasing in Japanese words. Which is fine, it helps the learning process. But then you pick up a native piece of material or talk to a person and you find yourself at best in a situation of “I know all those words but not strung together like that” and at worst “I don’t know half of those words….. what now?!”
And then on the OTHER SIDE of things maybe you can hold a conversation and you think you’re doing well and then the “I don’t know what that means” starts coming up. Because you phrased something unnaturally and it couldn’t be understood. x_x
I’m trying to consume native materials to correct that latter portion. But I’ve more or less quit talking/typing for related but unrelated reasons.
my freezing up moment was when i met my great aunt and she spoke to me in Japanese.
my family is not Japanese. their native language is neither Japanese nor English. since those are my 2 main languages I had resigned myself to never being able to converse with our elders.
so the mere fact of understanding what she said was a shock to my system. then trying to reply, no matter how I racked my brain, I couldn’t figure out what tone in which to speak to her, keigo, tamego, teineigo… in the end I never was able to respond lol.
I really regret missing that chance to potentially hear gossip about my parents and others in their generation, or first hand historical accounts.