Pretty much the title; between Wanikani, Kaniwani, Bunpro, and textbook learning I feel like I’m improving my language skills well enough - except for Speaking.
It takes me ages to string basic sentences together that if I read, I would immediately grasp the meaning of.
Does anyone know of an app that focuses on speaking practice? Something like asking for a sentence you have to say out loud, and gradually increasing the difficulty.
I know the general advice is ‘speak to people’ but I’m pretty shy when it comes to that kind of stuff, and I don’t really want to subject anyone to the torture that would be trying to have a conversation with me in Japanese.
You may be interested in the Pimsleur or Paul Noble Japanese courses. They are purely speaking/listening centric audiobook courses that walk you through various phrases and grammatical points. They are both structured in 30-minute lessons to be completed once-per-day, and are fairly similar with subtle differences in overall structure and feel. I’d recommend sampling both before committing to either, and they are both available on Audible.
Big disclaimer, neither are cheap, and at least Pimsleur can be a bit outdated on the cultural footnotes as “level 1” of the course was developed a good number of years ago. They also both teach fairly formal textbook Japanese, so your mileage may vary depending on the type of conversations you find yourself in with actual people from Japan.
I actually started with Pimsleur as my first “real” resource for learning Japanese back in 2016, and I feel like it did laid a solid foundation for me to build on later with WaniKani, LingoDeer, and Bunpro. I used to do them on my way to and from work everyday.
Lingodeer has a little bit of speaking practice mixed in with grammar lessons. It will make your audio discoverable by other users however. I don’t think it does enough to highlight that up front.
What I like about it is that it’s exactly the things you’re looking for a “say out loud” practice, alongside recorded native speaker’s pronunciations, and you could compare it with your recorded voice and fixing it shortly after. Plus points for being able to choose male or female native speakers. I think you could also jump to any levels that you like to add them in your SRS queue.
The downside for me is that it’s another SRS load in my current studies, so I’m not sure when I’ll be picking it up again.
If some randoms stumble across your recording, I wouldn’t use that as a reason not to use it. Nobody will know YOU said it. They don’t have a clue who the person is who recorded it.
If you mean Lipsurf, I used that for a good while before throwing in the towel because it would frequently mishear me, or even worse hear me correctly but then I’d get the review wrong because it would input kanji instead of kana. Haven’t used it in a while though, so take that with a grain of salt.
You can upload recording of yourself/sentences you’ve made/questions/whatever and people will help you improve and give tips. It’s a really nice community and by just recording yourself, it takes away the pressure to come up with something on the spot and it’s great when you’re shy
This isn’t an app… but I think on this page is a link to a free Wasabi audio file for shadowing while improving grammar which I found beneficial. It was hard to find again!! I downloaded it ages ago, and thought that it was really great! and FREE!
I started messing around with Speechling over the weekend and I really like it - the audio shadowing is great and I love the ‘describe the picture’ activities - I think that’s a great substitution for conversation practice.
