Correcting my spoken Japanese

8 comments

1. Maybe try another teacher or tutor? You can easily sign up for short lessons on iTalki and find someone who is more honest with you, or just try out talking to different people and see how comprehensible you are.

2. Book a tutor on italki. Preferably someone who lists teaching pronunciation as a specialty. Average people don’t often know how to help someone improve their accent past the “understandable” level. They just haven’t studied the phonetics of their own language enough. I coach for the English Recitation Contest at the school I work at in Japan and it was a huge learning curve to try and first *hear* what it exactly was wrong “they don’t sound like a native speaker, but I don’t know what specifically they’re doing wrong” and then be able to *explain* to someone what they should be doing differently.

   So yeah, if people, especially your pen pal, aren’t giving you the level of correction you want, it’s not because they’re going easy on you or being unhelpful, they just may not have the knowledge and skills to give you more detailed feedback.a

   That said though, don’t beat yourself up about it. Study pronunciation and phonetics in detail if it’s something of interest to you, but it’s not a requirement. Having an accent in a foreign language isn’t inherently a bad thing

3. I think that speaking fluently depends on the person.
   There’s a difference between different levels of what they are willing to do.

   Your teacher or friend might not give you any feedback any more because they might be thinking you can already speak fluently in a normal conversation.

   But if you are aiming for fluency and pronunciation like a native Japanese, you should have your teacher or friend know that you want to raise your speaking level to that level, and that you want to get feedback based on that 🙂

   Edited : Separated the words on different lines to make them read easily

   Edited #2 : Fixed a couple of silly mistakes 😅

4. HelloTalk lets you upload audio. People can listen and correct you.

5. A language YouTube video I came across used a technique which you record yourself and try to speak on a topic. Look back on the bad parts , go back and try to do it again better. Look up the words and grammar that you didn’t know before.

6. Hellotalk would work well for you. Yoy can post a voice recording of yourself speaking and people will correct you.

   Edit: i saw someone already posted but ill just second the suggestion.

7. What are the sites for written Japanese called?

8. My italk teacher does 10 minute of pronunciation practice with me every session. I read out a part and then he corrects it. It’s be super useful.