Has anyone else experienced this?? When I was very young I had a mild lisp and sometimes stuttered when I was excited or emotional. Never got speech lessons, just grew out of it. Haven’t thought about it for over a decade.
Now I’m trying to repeat back Japanese sentences from Anki and immersion, and holy shit. I’m so tongue tied. Stutter AND lisp back Full Force.
I’ve been learning a few months and my comprehension has recently taken off. And I know a lot of people think you shouldn’t output for a hella long time. But I’m worried that I’m going to get fluent in Japanese and then realize that I have a fucking speech impediment 😅
French is my L2 and I sorta had a problem feeling tongue-tied when I first moved to France, but def not this bad.
Has anyone else had this problem?
6 comments
To be fair, most people who started few months ago trying to speak is going to (at least, mildly) resemble stuttering.
I have this exact problem! Even had a teacher as a child to train away my lisp but now I can’t help it when I try long Japanese words and such. No idea tho how to overcome it so far. Been studying for two years but still get stuck 🥲
It really takes a lot of practice for your mouth to get used to making all the sounds. It goes away by time the more you speak.
100% get tongue tied all the time but is early days for us both with new tongue movements we will get the hang of it eventually.
It’s definitely not uncommon. It’s not even unusual to have the opposite: you might develop speech traits/issues in your secondary language you didn’t have originally. Different languages can be tied to different issues or even different personalities. Some people are dyslexic in their native language, but not in their second. Some people have different voices in different languages (I know people have commented that mine is deeper and more…direct, I guess? Intentional? in Japanese than in English). And some people stutter in one language but not in another. I sometimes stammer when speaking English and getting worked up/ranting about something, but I don’t do it in Japanese.
It’s about the muscle memory I think