Just to share a small victory with everyone.
I’ve been studying Japanese for a little under 2 years via immersion. One of my goals for 2022 was to be able to actually speak some Japanese by the end of the year, I decided to push myself and film a whole video in Japanese too!
In this video, I interviewed people at a Hong Kong anime festival to see how many of them could actually speak Japanese. This is also my first time actually speaking Japanese to people IRL, so 2 victories in 1 challenge basically!
The experience was kinda nerve-wracking. At first, I spoke really quickly because I was clearly nervous and wasn’t sure how I was gonna sound, but eventually, I stopped worrying about myself and focused more on trying to interview interesting people and hearing how they’ve studied Japanese.
Editing the video also took really long. Despite me being a YouTube vet and uploading videos for more than 10 years, I discovered I’m only really used to my own voice in English. When I heard myself in Japanese, I honestly cringed for the first 3 days.
But I knew that if I DIDN’T upload the video, I’d regret it much more. So I pushed through the cringe and uploaded it anyway. It will all work out in the long run because I plan to use my channel to document my own improvements, so it’ll be interesting to see how I compare 1 more year later.
Here’s a link to the video (approved by the mods): [https://youtu.be/3tWvfG-0op0](https://youtu.be/3tWvfG-0op0)
Personally I think the star of the video is at 5:27, where I interviewed a cosplayer cosplaying Chloe from Hololive, but she didn’t know how to speak Japanese. Fortunately, some random guy came over and helped her out. Turns out the random guy was a half.
And despite all of us behind the camera thinking these 2 were dating, apparently they were complete strangers?!
It was very fun to be able to do this and actually use my Japanese in real life (despite really only saying like 5 different things). I felt that the video itself was a bit repetitive and I could’ve cut out a lot of things like myself asking the same question over and over, and just had the answers of the people instead.
But that’s all room for improvement for next time!
Hope you all enjoy the video and hope it motivates you to keep going!