* How much input before you started output (time estimated preferably)?:
* How fast did you speaking improve after/How long until you were comfortable speaking:
* How fast did your accent improve when you started practicing (time estimated preferably):
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\-In retrospect it was three questions. My mistake.
2 comments
I’ll let other people answer your questions since it’s been way too long ago for me to give specifics (and because I technically don’t qualify as a pure “immersion” learner since I was taking classes at the same time).
I do feel the need to get on my soapbox and say that — in my not-so-humble opinion — this idea of avoiding output like the plague until you’ve reached an incredibly high level of comprehension is the biggest fallacy propagated by the AJATT/Refold/etc. crowd.
I will agree that it is *based* in one fundamental truth — that being the idea that outputting crappy Japanese and letting that go unchecked will (at best) not help you get better and (at worst) reinforce bad habits and mistaken knowledge.
But I have no idea why certain people (Matt and others?) take this to the extreme of “outputting too early is DANGEROUS AND WILL SCREW UP YOUR JAPANESE FOREVER” instead of the (much more rational, in my view) approach that output at the early stages should always be done in the presence of a teacher/tutor/native speaker who can correct you.
**TL;DR — The idea that you need to avoid output completely until a certain stage is overplayed. If output is important to you, you should start practicing as soon as you want to, provided you’re in an environment where you can receive feedback/corrections.**
Again, I’m sorry for not directly answering your question — though I hope you get good responses from others — but I just feel like the whole “avoid output” issue has to be addressed.
1. I started practicing output as soon as I got to maybe N4 number of vocab. Obviously not full sentences, it was even as caveman-like as seeing an object like a window and grunting 窓 by myself.
2. Depends on the topic. Talking about daily life and some office related interactions I can pull up words in my mind no problem after 3 months of italki session. But for anything else, I might know the word, but it’s still passive vocabularly – it takes a second or more. Grinds conversations to a slow crawl when I hit those subjects. Politics, technical vocabulary (i.e. trying to get a drivers license)
3. My accent isn’t even close to perfect and I honestly don’t think it’s worthwhile to care about it at my level, as long as they can understand what I’m trying to say. I can comfortably make all the sounds but the pitch and cadence can be often off still.