Basically the title. I’ve gotten to point I’m pretty happy with in regards to my reading and listening. I can watch most shows and read quite a few books, manga, and newspaper with minimal trouble. However, when I’m trying to speak to write in Japanese, my construction always feels so amateur. I just keep using the same few grammar points over and over. Whenever I try to branch out and make more advanced sentences my brain just blanks. It’s like I forget all the phrases and grammar I learn from reading/watching.
tl;dr Basically it feels neither input nor output are helping me get better at output. Am I going about it the wrong way? Should I shift my focus to mainly output or just keep reading and listening until I start to absorb more of it?
13 comments
>I just keep using the same few grammar points over and over.
Past a certain threshold, you don’t need to be too fancy with your sentences anyway. So as long as you’re not stuck on just “XはYです” all the time, you’re probably fine.
>Whenever I try to branch out and make more advanced sentences my brain just blanks.
For what it’s worth, a conversationally fluent English speaker won’t just be able to whip up a paper in formal language used in academia without some planning and practice. Why do you think high school and college kids are made to write so much? By the same token, if this conversationally fluent person wasn’t comfortable with public speaking, they probably won’t be able to just spew out an awe-inspiring speech delivered with confidence and passion on the spot.
As for your question, I’m always of the opinion that people improve at what they practice and do not improve on what they neglect. Sure, constant input will give you a good idea of what would sound natural to native speakers, but it doesn’t actually mean you’ll be able to speak or write as eloquently unless you put in the focus, time, and effort into developing those writing and speaking skills.
Both. You need to know what a good sentence looks like in Japanese, and you have to get used to making similar sentences yourself.
If possible, hire a tutor. Re-examine textbooks (especially intermediate books) to get a sense of how these sentences are getting more complex. Try the writing assignments with the newly introduced grammar and vocab.
Do targeted output. Pick some grammar points and a topic and write a paragraph or give a short speech that incorporates them. If you find yourself using particular grammar patterns too much, seek out variations on those to practice. The more you use new bits of grammar intentionally in practice, the more easily they’ll come to you spontaneously. If they don’t, keep adding them to your practices till they do.
I’m pretty much just echoing what the others are already saying but, obviously you need both.
You obviously need to practice outputting to get better at output, but unless you’re also constantly taking in natural Japanese, you’re never going to grow beyond your current ability level.
If your comprehension is good enough, I recommend that you do what I did and find a certain native speaker (or native speakers) — it can be anyone, a YouTuber, an actor, a radio host, an お笑い芸人, whoever — who kind of represents the sort of personality and speaking style you’d like to aspire to in Japanese, and listen to them a lot while either shadowing them or envisioning yourself responding to them in conversation.
Also, I very much agree with u/ignoremesenpie in that speaking naturally doesn’t necessarily always using “advanced” vocabulary or grammar. Sometimes it’s about how you can use the simple stuff appropriately at the right time. I’d focus less on trying to use specific words and grammar, and more on listening to a lot of natural native Japanese, seeing when natives use what, and gradually trying to get to the point where doing that yourself is second nature.
I’m facing the same issue as you. I have little trouble reading manga or LN and I can watch anime without subs but if you ask me to write or speak, it would take me a lot of effort and I can’t form sentences anywhere as complex as those I hear or see.
This doesn’t sound so helpful, but the only way to get better at output… is more output. I thought this can be mostly solved by just reading, watching, and listening to a lot of stuff but the only thing really getting practiced in that is input. You improve input by doing input. As another comment said, why else would we be subjected to a lot of writing and essays and shit back when we were in school?
Now as for HOW to get better at output, that’s still something I’m trying to figure out myself. Try writing a journal regularly. It’s helpful even if you start with simple stuff like what did you do for the day or what did you eat. Then maybe branch out to other topics or topics you’re most likely to talk about in Japanese. Translation from English to Japanese is something I’m trying to do and I think it’s good output practice. Look at your chat or post history, try translating them to Japanese, and take note of words you need. While it would be nice to be able to form complex sentences and use complex words like those you encounter in anime, manga, news, etc., you don’t exactly need to rush to get to that level cause you’ll get there eventually as long as you keep practicing.
In English input alone has given me enough speaking and writing skills for professional communication. Do note though that my comprehension is the same as in my native language so I’ve had a lot of input. My speaking however is not native level. Whenever I speak I feel my mouth having a hard time with certain sounds or combination of sounds. Speaking quickly and effortlessly definitely takes practice. I recommend reading out loud to train the muscels and practice accent. To practice coming up with the words to convey meaning I recommend filming yourself explaining random topics.
They really go hand in hand… when you output you discover stuff you can’t express as well as you’d like to, and that experience sort of primes you to notice when a sentence structure you could have used comes up while you’re consuming content.
What I think people forget is that it works the same way in our native language, too. I taught for a couple years and it was a major pain in the ass trying to get ten year olds to organize their thoughts into 5-sentence paragraphs. We can talk and write as we do in our native language because it was beaten into us by teachers, parents, and peers.
I work as an editor… in the past I’ve done blog writing, PR, copywriting, technical writing, academic writing, and all sorts of stuff. Currently I’m playing with fiction. Each one requires a totally different approach. The fact that I’m a native speaker of English doesn’t mean that just off the top of my head I know what sort of language is used in a camera’s user manual.
So… you know… I reference an existing document, boil it down into a template, make note of what tone the article is written in, who the target audience is, who the assumed speaker is, the length of the sentences, and all sorts of stuff like that. As I reference and write more documents I eventually get a feel for it and can mostly do it by myself, though I still seek references if I need to do something specific.
It just takes time and trials. You’ll feel dumb for awhile and you don’t get to skip that part (if you didn’t feel dumb, you probably wouldn’t feel a need to improve.)
Are you in Japan? You would benefit from real human interaction and learning how to socialise in Japanese and copy how people speak around you to gauge what’s appropriate.
Conversation and lots of it is what you need – that way you get to practice both input and output. Text-based or spoken doesn’t matter, just find yourself an environment that forces you to use Japanese to communicate in a meaningful way.
It’s not a very fast process but for me reading **a lot** has always had the biggest influence on my writing ability (both for style and subconscious use of proper grammar).
Note: I’m basing this on my personal experience over the last 20ish years with my native language (German) as well as with the language I use most nowadays (English)… so reading will very likely become my primary activity in Japanese, too.
~~at least once I’ve reached a comfortable level of grammar and vocabulary~~
See [this video](https://youtu.be/hin1HGhbGdo). This approach seems to make a lot of sense. The video is about learning to speak french, but the same general technique could be adapted and applied to any language. I haven’t tried it (yet), but I intend to eventually.
Edit: Some further thoughts…DeepL may be good for French translations, but it shouldn’t be relied upon for Japanese. In order to get stories to tell, it may be better to find existing Japanese stories and repeat them (or paraphrase them). Even better might be to get stories that have good quality English translations – learn an English translation and then try to re-tell it in Japanese. Finally compare & contrast with the original Japanese version.
Input is important for skill growth but output is what makes it worth it. A fine balance is needed.
If you want to get more fluent at speaking, you can try shadowing and then think of different situations and try changing up the sentence or phrase. That way you can get “physically” used to a particular grammar point in a specific context, and then “stretch your speaking muscles” by playing around with it. At a certain point, it can then transfer to muscle memory, so you don’t have to dig it out of your brain to use it.