Hi everyone. I’m Turkish who is learning Japanese. You may heard of Turkish and japanese are closer to each other in order to pronunciation rules etc.
I’ve met and chatted many japanese people, with both voice message and written form. All of them told me that they can understand me well I’ve told many times about my japanese is so clear and understandable.
2 weeks ago I’ve meet someone in a language exchange app, he’s japanese. While we were chatting on app, he was keep telling me I’m good at speaking japanese he compliment both my texts and voice messages
We’re living in same city, We’ve met once. Since that that he keeps telling me “he doesn’t understand what I meant” the guy suddenly changed his attitude and behave like I’m speaking something else? Seriously I’m so puzzled what’s going on here?
I’m so sorry if it’s not a sub for talking about this but I’m so sad kinda lost my confidence!
Edit: I’m not using textbook phrases. (Casual Japanese ) and I follow known teacher YouTubers language patterns only.
3 comments
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Unfortunately, some Japanese people can be incredibly narrow-minded and prone to gross stereotyping. I have had many Japanese people react with confusion to me speaking to them in perfectly good, clear Japanese (95% of Japanese people don’t have this problem and I say many, only because I have been here a long time).
It’s simply that some seeing a foreigner speak Japanese is confusing for them because they either expect you to speak English or to use very basic Japanese. Some will say “Sorry, no English!” Others will switch to trying to speak their own, much worse, English. In many cases I think they simply overthink analysing what is being said, because they worry that I might have some ‘foreign’ meaning other than the (correct) meaning their brain is telling them.
In this case, initially, your language partner probably didn’t think much about any small mistakes you made. Your meaning was clear enough that tiny grammar errors had no effect on his understanding. Now, after meeting you he has an image in his head of you as “a foreigner” and it might make him over-analyze the same small mistakes. Your language skills have not changed, his way of trying to understand them has. He is rejecting his more flexible and open-minded way of understanding and become more worried about himself possible making an error in analysing what you mean.
In my opinion, it has nothing to do with racism, and nothing to do with your Japanese ability, it is more likely that it is simply his ‘linguistic panic’ kicking in after having to deal with a foreigner directly. Don’t lose your confidence, this is likely to occur more than once.
At the opposite end, while you are still improving and at the intermediate level, you will also likely meet other Japanese people who hear you speak ‘okay’ Japanese and suddenly assume you can understand perfect, high-speed Japanese conversation about very complex topics. This can be just as frustrating but thankfully most people fall in the middle 🙂
You got [上手’d](https://youtu.be/r7SgI2mJ7Rs)