I was born and raised in America and the only language I speak is English. I graduated high school last year, and right now I work retail full time whilst trying to figure out what to do with my life. Anyways, I’ve started to learn Japanese, and I just finished up learning hiragana. The problem is that I don’t see myself in a situation where I have to actually speak Japanese, and I fear that if I do end up learning how to speak it, I’ll just slowly forget it because I have no Japanese friends and am surrounded by people speaking English all day. I don’t have plans for living in Japan or visiting it anytime soon either. I’m still gonna keep learning it because I enjoy it as a hobby, but when I do learn how to speak it, will I eventually just forget it? If so, what are some things I can do to not that that happen?
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If you learn to speak, it won’t be by accident. It will require lots of practice. By the time you learn to speak it, you’ll know where to go to practice it, and at that point it’s on you to keep it going.
If you practice regularly you won’t.
Since you’ve just graduated high school if college is on the horizon, you can practice speaking there. You can hire Japanese tutors. You can go to Japan and make friends there. When there’s a will, there’s a way
Ah, well, I think one thing to consider is why you want to learn it in the first place. It sounds like you are figuring out quite a bit of things and trying to decide what you want to do in life. To be honest, learning Japanese is a really challenging thing. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it, but I would suggest some context in terms of the time investment you might put into this skill. It’s a skill that, if you put in like an hour of time a day every day, you could still take years to be good enough at it to have decent conversations with people. Now, if you do spend time learning it and such you are going to need to start to use it to talk to others in Japanese if you want to progress. That means language tutors on places like italki or making Japanese friends.
Forgetting japanese is super common for a lot of people. ^^;; I’m a pretty good example of this. I’ve studied japanese off and on since I was about 15 and I’m 32. The last time I actually took studying serious I got through Genki book one and half way through 2, and that was like 8ish years ago. I started back up like 8 months ago and I *did* remember some things and it felt like I was reviewing a lot of things, but I had to go through all that work again. You definitely lose it if you don’t use it. So why am I learning it again? Well, this time I have a goal of actually living in japan. Not some sort of “fanciful” wish or something like that, I’m working every day to do it and the difference could not be more apparent. Every day I feel more motivated to learn and I’m enjoying it so much. Essentially, I have some *motive* for doing it and that gives me *motivation.*
So my advice is this.. really reflect on why you are learning japanese. Maybe it’s hard to find motivation for you and that’s ok. It’s hard for me in general. But figure out why you are learning japanese and if that thing is worth putting in the time. Maybe once you figure out what you want to achieve with Japanese, come ask us what to expect in terms of the amount of studying you would have to do to achieve that goal. After that, if you decide you want to learn Japanese then you won’t be so blindsided. For me, I feel like I’m essentially studying to get a masters because that is how good I want to be at Japanese.. but your goals might be a bit less.
I’ve said this somewhere else, but in my opinion you don’t have to speak Japanese if you don’t want to. Or if you only want to watch anime you don’t necessarily need to learn to read. It’s not a binary choice of everything or nothing, and you’re not violating some sacred purity of the language by choosing how you study it.
Just like if your hobby was baking doesn’t mean you need to open a bakery or even share your cakes on social media. Or maybe you just like making chocolate chip cookies and that’s fine too. You can enjoy something how you want to enjoy it.
That said, thanks to the internet there’s lots of ways to talk to others. Apps like VR Chat, Hellotalk, /r/language_exchange , etc… so you may not be surrounded by it, but you can still find time to practice it if that’s important to you.
As a beginner myself, I like to mirror or repeat phrases, lyrics, grammar points, vocabulary etc and try to just repeat anything Japanese to memorize it. It starts to become a habit when you can often say something you remembered.
The other day I ate rice. I said to myself “gohan o tabemasu” at the time “I eat rice” or “ご飯を食べま” anyways it little simple things like that make me keep practicing and appreciating every milestone I’m making.
OP you don’t owe anyone an explanation to why you’re learning a new language. We all are learning Japanese for our own reasons. There’s so many posts on this sub and even comments that are VERY motivational and push us through. Keep finding something that motivates you so that you don’t give up on this journey. OP you got this!
I don’t speak English everyday and this has not stopped me to learn it at a fluent level. Do you really like Japanese language? Then go for it.
In an online world I’m not sure you have to learn to speak it if there’s no opportunity to do so. Learning to read, write, and understand will give you access to books, movies, podcasts, and online chatting/social media. That’s a lot of uses for the language without needing to speak a word.
The fact of being able to speak Japanese could change your life enough that you actually do wind up using it in your daily life. You might make friends locally with Japanese speakers or you might start doing something for work that uses Japanese, or you might start playing something online on a Japanese server with Japanese online friends. Who knows! That’s the great thing about learning a language – it opens new doors that you couldn’t even imagine before.
You don’t have to focus on learning to speak it if it’s just a hobby. And yes, you will forget it if you learned it but do not use it often. I learned Japanese in college as a hobby but I was serious about it. Ended up living in Japan for graduate school after college and I spoke quite well at the time. But since then I haven’t used it for more than 10 years and it was a bit tough to pick it up this year when I traveled to Japan. I could still speak basic things like order food etc, but cannot hold a conversation. I can still read novels, manga and watch anime. It’s super fun and I enjoy learning the language. If you have the chance to learn speaking at school, try it for fun and you might enjoy it. I remembered it was rather easy back in college because we have Japanese students on campus and there are courses offered. It’s quite cool to speak it and you might like it. And it’s totally ok just to learn reading and listening and still enjoy the language.
You can focus more on reading, writing, and listening if you don’t plan on speaking very often. It all depends on the reason you’re learning Japanese.
I had no idea before I started Japanese, but there’s insane value in just learning to understand it. I’m nearly three years in and I don’t even feel the need to practice speaking yet; I’d rather just learn more words so I can understand media better. And I have a mountain of anime/books I want to get through, so these days I barely speak to people in English let alone Japanese. Anyway, that’s just me, but I guess that’s the point; you can do in your own way, and you’re not obliged to do what you expect a typical language learner would do.
Also, I think if you build up a strong enough foundation, say to the point where you can automatically process many of the sentences you encounter, then that ability won’t vanish that easily. It does take a while to get there though.
You should find Japanese friends online, not right now but whenever you get better at speaking it. It’s not hard tbh, you could play a game in Japanese servers or you could download a language exchange app. Honestly if you don’t do this your speaking skills will develop at a very slow pace, practicing speech is very important and shadowing is not really fun.
I’ll be perfectly honest, there is no reason to learn Japanese if you don’t plan to use it.
I’d suggest you learn Spanish instead, you’ll have many more opportunities to use it.