My friend is fluent in English. At least mostly. She speaks well, went to high school in the states.
I’m a beginner in Japanese (Minna no Nihongo book 1 completed, working through book 2 with a tutor now).
So far I’ve taught some nuance to advanced English to her, and I’m really struggling to work through any real Japanese with her. Casual Japanese is very different from textbook Japanese.
What suggestions do any of you have for topics for us to chat about that I can pre-read/study a bit on in order to discuss in our next meeting? We did basic family stuff today. Probably continue on that for another session or two.
3 comments
There’s always the hobbies topic.
You’re gonna have to either start trying to say more things in Japanese before you even meet her (things that you usually find yourself asking during exchange sessions) or you should learn more “immersion classroom” Japanese like
「これはペンですか」タメ語で何という？
「食う」はいつ使う？etc etc
If you can’t ask basic questions to keep the lesson going in Japanese then you can’t really language exchange and you’ll just have to learn casual stuff through like YouTube or something.
As for topics? Stuff like family and food can be a lot harder than you think when trying to discuss beyond your typical “i like/i don’t like, so just talk about anything you’d normally wanna talk about in English.
If all else fails and you find yourself defaulting to English too much, she may know too much English/you’ll probably just wanna find someone online who’ll be more strict with the Japanese only.
It’s going to be hard in the beginning.
One strategy is to ask questions and then do follow up.
___の町はどうですか。
町に何がありますか。
名物は何ですか。何で有名ですか。
町にある好きな場所は何ですか。
写真を見せてくれませんか。
Create your own answers to your own questions too, if she asks or so you can jump in. “Oh, she said the park – we have a famous park here, let me tell her about it!”
Out of an hour, spend maybe spend your time doing about 10-15 minutes in Japanese and the remainder in English. As you get better, stretch to maybe 20-25, 25-30 and so on until you can have a simple, but natural conversation for an hour.
Then get into the weeds with more in-depth topics, opinions and so on:
そうですね。自分の意見ですけど、原子発電力所は危険な所があっても、温暖化に対する方法として効果的なエネルギー資源じゃないかと思います。