It’s often pointed out here that you never stop learning a language, including your native language(s).
And while that’s certainly true, I feel from my experience with other foreign languages that there’s a sort of transition point, where you go from just being a learner of a language to being a user of that language (who’s still progressing).
Did you feel that way with Japanese? Or was it more of a long, gradual process? If you did feel that way, did that happen around a certain JLPT level, or by studying a certain way?
2 comments
I have 2000 hours of study and I don’t feel even remotely near that point
But I decided to try iTalki and I was surprised what I could actually say. Keep in mind, I talked in Japanese very briefly before that, like < 10 times with one nice guy who decided to randomly tutor me for a bit.
Like, I told my teacher where I was from, what I like to do, some of my personal history, the difference in crime from USA to Japan, natural disasters, different people I met at work, and also we talked about boring things like weather, and all this stuff in one lesson.
It was so weird, I’m sure it happened. But IDK how it happened.
(I’m sure he was speaking very slowly for me, my listening is shit-tier)
I’m still very early into the learning journey but I constantly wonder this. I think because japanese is so different to English, it’s not like when I was learning other latin languages and was able to start speaking and communicating quite quickly due to the language similarities in sentence structure and grammar, as well as being members of the same language family.
I do know someone though, a fellow Australian, who can communicate pretty fluently in japanese. He said that from zero japanese, after about six months in Japan with nothing but a Japanese English dictionary and a phrase book, he could converse on most daily conversation topics. He is a very outgoing individual, so was very proactive in trying even if he wasn’t sure how to say something. I don’t know his progress from there went, only that his wife is japanese and after 10 years speaking the language he mentioned he still struggles speaking with her parents as they use uncommon vocabulary and unfamiliar phrasing.
I feel as if I will never be someone that knows the language, or can even proficiently use it.
With japanese, everything is new. I can’t just apply English grammar concepts and spit out a sentence because I have the vocabulary for it. Everytime I feel like i know something, I discover there is 10 other ways to say it, and six of them are more natural. Sometimes I’ll run something I learnt past my japanese friend, and she’ll just be like ‘huh?’. I’ll repeat it in English and she will be like ohhh, you mean ‘(says something entirely different)’. Usually, whatever I said is technically correct, but not something a native would say, making it confusing to hear. Not to mention, appropriate usuage of certain phrases seems to be a matter of opinion much of the time. For example, using どういたしまして in response to a friend saying thankyou for something you’ve done for them. Online, many people seem to say it is a bit too stiff and polite for casual conversation. My tutor, too, a native japanese lady, said that in the context of friends and family, she could only think of it being used passive aggressively (for example in response to someone failing to say thankyou, similar to how we might use ‘you’re welcome’ in english’). Whereas a friend of mine uses it and says she thinks it’s perfectly casual and fine to use between friends for little things. I don’t know if it’s perhaps because my friend is a bit older while my tutor is in her mid twenties, and so language usage has evolved and they speak a little differently.
Sorry that’s super long and kind of irrelevant. I get going and it’s hard to stop.