In the last few months, I’ve been using a tutor to help prepare me for an exam. She always asks questions about my week, or to do with the subject matter she’s explaining. Most of the time, all I can say in response in ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Sometimes’, which is frustrating to me as my level of expressing myself and grammar is fairly decent, it’s just trying to think on the spot. I’m barely good at thinking on the spot in English, so trying to do it in another language is even worse.
Any advice on how to get better at this? I hoped it’d get easier as we chatted, but most of the time I have to switch back to English or give stupidly simple answers.
3 comments
There’s nothing wrong with giving stupidly simple answers if that’s all you can do, but try not to switch back to English, just ask for the missing terms.
ex.
Tutor:朝ごはんはどうでしたのか
Student:おいしかったです。トーストをたべました。ええと、「egg」は日本語でどう言いますか。
Tutor：「たまご」です。
Student：ああ、「たまご」ですね。たまごもたべました。
Most of the time long sentences can be broken down into multiple small sentences, and over time you can start joining them up as you get comfortable with conjunctions. It can get a little tiresome because you can end up doing a lot of repeating, but you won’t succeed in the spoken language by formulating a complex English sentence in your head and translating the whole of it to Japanese.
Using what is simple and familiar to you makes it easier to ‘think in Japanese’ or at least quickly and accurately mentally translate until you can think in Japanese for simple sentences. From there it’s just a matter of building on it and expanding the scope of what is ‘simple and familiar’ to you.
I have this problem also, I feel like writing in a daily journal can help with this. Usually I just use hellotalk
I often do similar or simple things everyday so recalling the words or phrases of past events might prove easier to remember and help with holding a conversation especially if you wrote it down often.
Also maybe you just don’t know many words to express yourself yet, don’t be hard on yourself.
How do you deal with the same situation in your native language? Do you use filler words to give yourself more time to think? Do ask a question to keep the conversation going? Try to Analyse your speech pattern in your native language and try to find a similar way in Japanese. That helped me in the end (even though I also still struggle with that, but I did see progress that way)