A little panic thread. I won’t bore you with details so here is a quick rundown:
Im going to be visting Japan for the first time in my life. I’ve been (slowly, at my own pace) learning japanese for like 4 years. Last year I passed N3 with decent score. The trip to Japan was planned.
And suddenly I was like “Let’s practice speaking!”. I tried to start talking to myself and having fake conversation and… It wasn’t even N5 level. It was throwing nouns, verbs and adjectives but failing to coherently connect them. Turns out writing wasn’t much better.
I finally understood how some japanese people passed english at school but fail to speak any of it. I just did the same thing. I can pass tests, i can do tasks or read and listen but actively using the language? Sub-trash level.
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Anyway, I know best advice would be “just start speaking bro” but…
I was thinking of degrading myself to N5 level materials and start writing simple sentences. Then in march do the same but with speaking. Maybe throw in a little N4. And then just hope for the best that if I have to use japanese, n5 grammar + decent vocab would carry me in a pinch.
If there are any good resources or miracle methods I’m all ears
6 comments
Hire a tutor and practice
1) Listen to many hours of level appropriate spoken Japanese
2) Get an Italki tutor and practice, or if you’re broke then do some language exchange (ideally both)
Do these things and you will get better. You’re not gonna get better at speaking by writing out N5 level sentences.
Edit:
Imagine you want to get better at driving. No matter how meticulously you plan your route, if you don’t fuel up (comprehensible input) and get behind the wheel (speaking practice) you’re not gonna improve. Obviously not a perfect analogy but you get the idea.
Someone just posted here the other day, I forget the title, but it was about transitioning to “thinking in Japanese” in order to cut down on the mentally expensive, real-time translation effort. I think some of the tips given would yield gains for speaking, too..
The one tips I remembered most were:
– whenever you have a chance to take a breather, look around you, and mentally name the items around you in your environment. Get used to vocalizing things in Japanese without translating
– make a habit of narrating, to yourself, what you’re doing, in Japanese – in the other post, the goal is to just brute force your mind into using Japanese as a “first language” more and more, but I think since we’re talking “narration”, it’s going to involve proper grammar and structure. This will get you to practice making proper sentences.
Of course, chatting in Japanese is probably the most helpful—speaking out loud, preferably.
However, I just had a thought: does chatgpt support japanese? I think it does. I went to the site just now to confirm, but…it’s too busy. Can’t get in >_<
If you can’t find real people, maybe something like that could be an option. If its 日本語 is as good as its English, it’d probably be helpful. It’d probably be good to read everything out loud as you use it—both what you type, and its responses.
Pimsleur method is actually really good at this, as is shadowing practice. You get a core of stuff that just comes out.
I remember how it happened for me and english. Granted, the gap between my mother tongue (french) and english is not as wide as the gap between english and japanese, but maybe it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
I studied english at school like everyone, starting when I was 10. When I was 14-15, I started looking up the lyrics of songs I liked and watching stuff in english with french subtitles. Read some graded readers as well.
I was 17 when Harry Potter and the deathly hallows came out, and was like “fuck this, let’s just read it in English”. It was the first real book I read and was pleasantly surprised to see that I could totally do it. Soon after that, I started watching english videos on youtube without subtitles (auto subs were not a thing back then).
At this point, I was able to consume english media without too much trouble.
Speaking was something else, tho. At school, we had (graded) one-on-one conversations with native speakers and it was very hard. But it only took me a few month to “unlock” that skill, and soon those one-on-one were not harder than the French ones. I’m fairly sure that it’s heavily linked with my becoming able consume english media. Actually, back then I was watching quite a lot of “angry video game nerd” and I could often hear his voice and accent in my head when I was talking.
My point is : do not try to go back to N5 or something. The ability to speak is within reach ! Keep immersing in raw spoken japanese, and find a tutor to force yourself to speak. You’ll get there.
Here is what I did
1. Find your favourite Japanese drama with Japanese subtitle
2. Mute audio and try saying the dialogue
3. Unmute and listen to how actor pronounced that dialogue
4. Repeat
Obviously other forms of media will work but don’t go with anime or News