After a three year hiatus, I am back learning Japanese using the Genki textbooks! I’m finding that I understand the grammar concepts, but need to think about them too much, and feel like I need to speak more to solve this. How do you guys practice or even find conversation? I don’t want to use one of those web conversation starters as I found that not much talking goes on there, but instead some other stuff 😭 What are your solutions?
3 comments
By far the most reliable method is to pay someone – iTalki is good for this.
You can try language exchange sites and meetups, but my general results with them are very mixed.
I second italki! A lot of the tutors are affordable, native Japanese speakers. Also, a handful of them are familiar with the Genki series and will set up lessons/practice based on where you are in the books. That’s been working really well for me recently, I was running into the same problem
Not related to conversation, but back then I used an anki deck with all ~800 example sentences from tae kim’s grammar (front: japanese, no furigana – back: translation and chapter reference). It was very helpful because you had to try to read and understand japanese sentences instead of just memorizing rules.