Hi everyone,
During conversations in Japanese, I often find myself planning sentences ahead of time. This causes me to:
1. not listen properly to what the other person is saying, because I am too preoccupied with delivering a proper response.
2. correct and go back to the beginning of the sentence when I realize halfway through that there is a mistake in there somewhere. This makes the conversation very stilted.
In my mother tongue or in English, I do not need to plan sentences ahead of time. I know what I want to say and construct the sentence while I am speaking. The different word order (subject-object-verb instead of subject-verb-object) seems to be the main thing stopping me from subdividing the sentences and constructing it along the way.
Are there any small tricks that I can apply to not have to keep the whole sentence in my head all the time, but instead process it bit by bit while speaking?
I know the obvious answer to this question will be: “Practice more and it will become second nature.”, but I am looking for some tips and tricks that could help me become less nervous in a conversation. Perhaps others here have overcome the same roadblock.
For reference, I have been doing self study for 4-5 years (vocabulary, kanji, grammar) and have gone through 2 years of weekly face-to-face group classes to practice conversation.
Hope to get some good suggestions. 🙂
7 comments
You’re probably translating it in your head, which is obviously going to make everything much slower. Are you using E-J and J-E dictionaries? If you are, it might help to switch to J-J dictionaries. Other than that, I don’t think there’s any quick fix. You have to put in the hours.
“I know what I want to say and construct the sentence while I am speaking.” Do you? Or do you insert minor corrections and clarifications as you think of them? I know I do, even as I’m typing this I’m backspacing and adding new stuff. I’d be willing to bet you don’t sound like a college essay as you’re speaking, and that’s fine. To me it’s the same with Japanese. It’s fine if you get your point across, even if it’s a bit jumbled. Let go of that stress and let your brain come up with the connections on the spot. I’m still just intermediate but letting go of the “must be perfectly grammatically correct” has helped me have actual conversations.
My advice is to just acknowledge that you’re gonna be shit for a long time and to just talk anyways. As you reference in your post, practice is the only way to get better
This is normal when you haven’t mastered the language yet. Maybe you lack vocabulary, or maybe you haven’t learnt yet some grammatical constructs that you need to express what you want to say, or maybe both (which is my case).
You have an idea of what you want to say, and your brain is trying to work around the gaps in your knowledge and put together a sentence with the bits and pieces that you know.
The only solution is study (to learn/understand the missing grammar and vocabulary) and practice.
Realizing you want to say something different partway through is natural in conversation. If you took a transcription of a conversation, in English or Japanese, you’d see plenty of fragments or phrases that would have been better in a different order. I’d try and embrace this
Speak in smaller sentences. Don’t worry about what you’re going to say until the time comes, and then say what you have to say as simply as possible.
Instead of saying like, 昨日、友達のジョンさんと一緒にフランス料理のレストランで美味しいい晩御飯を食べに行きました say like,
昨日、レストランに行きました。ジョンさんと一緒に。フランス料理でした。美味しかったです。
Very contrived example, but the concept of just using more small sentences should work for pretty much anything you want to say.
Assuming you know how to use and practice longer forms of sentences in the written language, then longer sentences should come naturally. After practicing speaking simply but in the moment for a bit, you’ll be thinking ahead by one simple sentence, and sometimes connecting them with a conjunction will just be the obvious thing to do.
If *simple* sentences are difficult to speak in the moment, then practice self-talk and writing sentences so you can improve at simple sentences without the pressure of someone waiting for you to speak. That practice should carry over, and make spoken sentences a bit easier.
Much the same problem I have & all good advice posted. My perception is that it’s because Japanese is not only a different order of grammar words in a sentence but there is also a completely different way of expressing concepts. So short sentences are fine to get over simple information, but it’s much harder to speak in a more complex fashion.