I have been learning for a few months now and learned quite a bit of vocabulary and learned quite a bit about the grammar and how sentences are formed, and I can usually figure out what sentences mean as long as I know most of the vocab that comes in the sentence, but I have some trouble forming sentences just because I don’t really know how to practice it. I have been writing a little diary every few nights where I try my best to form thoughts about my past few days in Japanese, but that’s about it and I don’t get anything that tells me if those sentences are right or wrong. Any help would be awesome, even just a link to a website.
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I wrote an entire article [here](https://morg.systems/Learning-to-Output) on how I approached (and am still approaching) output myself that I think it might be useful. I’d just like to point out a couple of things:
> I have been learning for **a few months**
You’re still extremely new to the language. Japanese is a very different language from English or other western languages. A lot of things will be phrased differently, sentences will appear like they are flipped upside down to you. Not just grammar, but word choice, how you react to things, how people joke, how certain things are being said or left unsaid, etc.
Generally speaking, **you cannot make natural sentences that you haven’t seen yourself a million times before in immersion**. While I don’t think it’s necessarily “a waste of time” to try and force some unnatural/ungrammatical/odd sentences out of you if you really want to communicate, I think it’s good to be aware that:
– Languages are created to **communicate** between people, so unless you have a reason/way to communicate with other people (preferably native speakers), it’s hard to justify spending a lot of time squeezing your brain out to leave some sentences on a piece of paper when you could be doing more “productive” things instead
– It’s okay to put off outputting until you’re more comfortable with how the language works
Again, I’m not saying you **shouldn’t** do it, but also I don’t think you should spend too much time on that now **if you don’t want to**.
Try to focus more on getting yourself to a level where you are relatively comfortable consuming native Japanese content (even if it’s simple stuff) like manga, anime, books, videogames, etc and that will slowly give you a lot of intuition on how native speakers communicate with each other. It will show you common expressions, chunks of the language that are often repeated, situations that come up all the time (that might not come up in English), how people react to them, etc. All of this will build intuition that will make it easier for you to start communicating in Japanese later.
Ask ChatGPT for some writing prompts