Is anyone else’s Japanese speaking ability reduced when they are tired?

Why does this happen? I never have any issues speaking Japanese until I’m tired, and then suddenly it’s like I can’t speak it at all and my brain just reverts back to English

14 comments
  1. Yeah, this is a normal problem for any L2.

    Processing takes effort and calories. You might have the bandwidth to process your Japanese interlanguage smoothly when you’ve just woken up, had a light healthy breakfast and a coffee, but if your brain resources get low, it’s going to be harder and harder to simulate the kind of fluency where you don’t have to think about it.

  2. I think this is kind of obvious? I can’t even use my mother tongue properly when I am tired.

  3. You know what for me it doesn’t just happen when I am tired. I found that I have “good” speaking days and “bad” speaking days. I’m fluent in Japanese and English (I’m a native French speaker) and some days I don’t have to think at all I just make long sentences with fancy words and everything, then the next day I struggle to find the easiest vocabulary.

  4. Isn’t this a language thing in general, unrelated to Japanese or living in Japan? My English is shit when I’m tired enough.

  5. When I’m tired, I tend to speak in single words or very short phrases.

  6. Because you are tired and your cognitive abilities are decreased when you’re tired.

  7. My wife just sent me a link to an article on land boundaries in Japanese. Far too late to get into something like that.

  8. I mean the answer is obvious… get better. Just like any muscle, training and effort is required. If you get exahusted by just being exhausted, you need to get stronger in the language to not get exhausted.

  9. My Japanese brain functioning power usually goes down after drinking more than anything else, but certainly it’s more difficult to follow along when you’re tired too

  10. Do you snowboard better when you’re tired? No one does, that’s when the worst spills happen.

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