You have alot suggestions already. I’ll just mention I prefer to have productive exercises like writing and getting reliable feed back, preferably from a native if I can’t say what I want. With writing I can take my time to gather thoughts or use lesser practiced grammar/vocab I wouldn’t be able to do in real time conversation. If there is something I really want to talk about, but don’t have it quite there, I will use writing before a conversation and it takes out some of the tension/embarrassment of not being able to execute it how I want to…and it then it transitions into speech much better for me. I’ve found input study like vocab SRS hasn’t really improved my speaking directly unless I use a Eng → Jp platform of some kind.
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Because I indicated that I had some Japanese ability, part of my interview for the JET Programme was in Japanese. I was asked to introduce myself, so I said シェリキンズとおもういます (I think I’m Chellykins) instead of シェリキンズともうします (My name is Chellykins).
Still got the job!
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Specifically for word recall, I’d recommend supplementing wanikani vocab along with some other SRS based system that will allow you to practice the other vocab you’re learning. There is a lot of vocab in Genki and if you aren’t using an SRS to help you memorize them that could really help with your recall of words. You can also add any new words that you hear when you’re taking lessons to your deck so you can work on your recall of those words as well.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to recommend one, but Anki is free and open source if you want to give that a shot.
I feel this. I take lessons on italki for Japanese somewhat sporadically and every time I start with a new teacher I’m just waiting for them to realize that I have no clue what they’re talking about. I know they’re asking a question…but what specifically???..for some reason that’s difficult for me to grasp in real time.
One thing I have found helpful though is finding a reliable and patient language exchange partner(easier said than done). My partner and I write out sentences/paragraphs etc in our target languages in shared google docs and then when we chat we go over the sentences, correct each other’s mistakes and use them as jumping off points for more conversation. I think having sentences already written down (even if they aren’t perfect) and a specific topic in mind really helps me few more comfortable. 
The other thing that’s nice about doing it with a partner and not a tutor or teacher is that generally only half the time is you being stressed out about your skills, the other half of the time you’re the pro!
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Yikes, just re-discovered this thread after booking my first Italki lesson, it’s with a Japanese woman in Nagasaki. I hope it goes smoothly, it’s disheartening that I am considered very confident when speaking my own language, but when I try Japanese it’s just word blubber. OP, have you had any other Italki experiences so far? I just started it and am overwhelmed by the vast selection of promising tutors.
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Dogen made a great video about this exact situation:
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I just started working on this recently myself. I’m exactly two years into studying Japanese but never really practice it. I’ve started putting together a “build your own adventure” set of flash cards for complete sentences I might use on either end of a conversation (card fronts are English, backs are Japanese, sentences are generally simple enough that there wouldn’t be 500 different ways to construct them). I’m planning on getting an italki partner later this year and I figured in the mean time, this would boost my confidence in actually speaking.
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I know what you mean! I know what vocab words I know, so when I talk to my Japanese friend I try to substitute the Japanese word for the English word in a sentence, but I just can’t recall the Japanese word fast enough. On the flip side if the word was given to me in Japanese I can quickly produce the English. This language substitution is how I’m working now towards speaking fluency.
I was guessing early on at why I couldn’t produce Japanese words and wondering if other people had the same problem.
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I’m sorry to hear you had such a bad first experience - I hope the second lesson will be better! 
Producing sentences orally really is the most difficult aspect of a language I think, especially if you don’t practice at all. What helped me a lot with English for example is that I read out loud the dialogues in my text book at first. Then I checked out Harry Potter youtube videos and imitated the dialogues countless times.
I try to do the same with Japanese. I practice reading dialogues or new vocab out loud religiously or imitate phrases/sentences I hear in anime or youtube videos. I repeat what my italki teacher tells me. So producing my very own stuff orally still is nowehere near easy for me, but it happens quicker now, at least with easy sentence structures or phrases I’ve heard before 
Please don’t be afraid to try next time! Speaking skills don’t come to you over night but if you practice a bit every day, you will get there sooner or later 
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You have had many replies about how to improve your speaking. I think you should place less of the «blame» on yourself and more on the teacher.
My first lesson on iTalki was great. My tutor helped me a lot and I felt like I could say anything in Japanese.
Then I tried another teacher and it was horrible. She didn’t help me at all and I felt so stupid. I almost didn’t study at all for a week after.
Then I decided to try again with yet another teacher and it was great again. She helps me when I need it and I learn a lot from her.
Try another tutor, and if that doesn’t help, book a lesson with a teacher on iTalki. It can be more expensive but I think it’s worth it.
Good luck! When you find the right tutor or teacher, iTalki is amazing!
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This thread fascinates me. Thanks for starting it (and for your willingness to share despite embarrassment — that’s commendable).
Since you’re already at level 28, you’ve definitely acquired enough vocabulary to have simple conversations. As everyone else has already stated, you just need more practice actually conversing.
re: practice
I know full well that “more practice” is almost always the precisely correct, but frustratingly useless, answer to any problem when learning to speak a language, play a musical instrument, create better art, or learn a handicraft.
Knowing what and how to practice is challenge. In this case it’s about finding a native speaker willing to have informal conversations with you.
I’m unfamiliar with iTalk, but I suspect you might benefit as much from regular, informal, zero pressure, everyday conversation as from formal “teaching”. Unless you live in Japan or have Japanese friends though, that may be difficult.
If iTalk doesn’t enforce any particular structure, though, perhaps it would be useful to start a session by stating your desire to simply have a conversation and practice conversing. Tell them (in English or Japanese) that you’ve no immediate aim to improve your vocabulary or better understand the grammar, you just want to practice speaking rather than reading or studying.
That should take much of the pressure off, and hopefully let you be less hard on yourself.
I’m amazed, however, that nobody has yet mentioned KameSame.
Production is a very different skill from recognition. While nothing is more important than actually conversing in Japanese as often as possible, I think KameSame should help you focus on production specifically and boost your confidence.
Be sure to click the box for “Skip recognition lessons for WaniKani items” in your KameSame account preferences. Continue with WaniKani for recognition, and use KameSame only for production. I’ve been quite pleased so far with this combination.
FWIW, I’ve got almost exactly the opposite problem. Even native Japanese speakers think my spoken Japanese is way better than it really is.
I’ve been conversing (poorly) in Japanese for over forty years, but I’m just now starting to learn to read the language (finally — ありがとう Wanikani!).
I’ve become an absolute expert at keeping conversations going, using every trick imaginable to ignore words I don’t know and steer toward topics toward more comfortable vocabulary. “あれ！それは赤いえんぴつですか?” 
I’ve developed a (probably bad) habit of just nodding along and blithely ignoring whatever I don’t understand or can’t remember how to say. If I notice an expectant pause with their eyes on me, I’ll just confidently fill in with some random response I know how to say.
If I can’t remember the right way to say something directly, I’ll just take the long, long, way around, attempting to steer toward what I’m trying to say (相手 will often fill in what I’m trying to say before I get there!).
It won’t work in a formal “lesson” context, but, in my experience, “loud, confident, and wrong”** keeps an every day conversation going much better than “slow, hesitant, and possibly correct”!
My honest recommendation is to find a native speaker to converse with and try hard to keep the conversation going no matter what. Even if you recall incorrectly (the "と思います” vs. “と申します” story cracked me up) it’s helpful to keep the conversation flowing.
** I was going to explain that the “loud, confident, and wrong” line was from the liner notes of an old Brand X album. But I suspected most here wouldn’t know who Phil Collins was, much less recognize the band before the band before he went solo. Then I realized I might have to explain liner notes. Finally, I gave up in disgust once I realized that even LPs are now ancient technology.
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I think you’ve just described every conversation I’ve ever had, in every language I’ve ever attempted to converse in 
Except for the bit about being an expert.
This reminded me of a somewhat relevant quote from an article about how writing changes the complexity of spoken language. It was something like “We start speaking before we’ve even worked out what we want to say, with the faith that the rest will fall into place as we go along.”
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I just made an Italki account a couple days ago, and my observation is that the certified tutors on there aren’t just “formal” teachers (ones that show powerpoints, assign readings, rigid conversation, if any, etc), there’s also a plethora of native speakers that are certified to teach their language, and offer sessions that are meant to be raw conversation in the target language, using as much of it as possible. Cost is surely a barrier, but this might be the best way to practice speaking in this day and age. In my neck of the woods, yeah, there are many friendly Japanese people, and I know a lot of them, but how many are willing to have an authentic conversation with me in Japanese and not English, AND also have the heart to correct my mistakes and successfully mold their speaking to MY speaking?
Whereas, these community tutors on Italki cut out the formality and provide quality conversation, while being certified. In my situation, and I’m sure many others, it’s better than pestering Japanese friends to practice with them. They’re not all gonna be easy to talk to or particularly informative. In short, I think OP’s using Italki is just as good, if not better, than hitting up their Japanese friend that only speaks Japanese in the household, once every blue moon.
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Yup. I think children have an easier time of learning to converse first, then read and write. They simply don’t care about mistakes as long as they can be understood. Adults often care more about getting it right than communicating.
Kids also intuitively understand they’ll pick things up by osmosis eventually. Adults hate inefficiency almost as much as being wrong.
It’s good to be child-like with respect to mistakes.
Long, off topic digression follows:
I envy any adults learning Kanji before working on speaking skills. It’s a much easier path, in my opinion. I know my spelling, vocabulary, and grammar in even my native language (English) would be much, much worse if I didn’t spend so much time simply reading.
It’s a HUGE hurdle for me being unable to read much Japanese. Already at just level 10, my spoken Japanese has improved immensely even though I’ve learned very few new words. I’m far less likely to use じょう now when the correct pronunciation is じょ, for example (or vice versa).
It’s fun learning that, holy cow, “実験” (じっけん) a word I’ve known and used for decades not only means “experiment”, it’s literally “truth test”. How cool is that?!
My (adult) kids are completely fluent in both languages. My youngest daughter and I were talking about how weirdly our brains work when speaking either language. When we use the word “weigh” in English we tend to “see” that spelling in our mind’s eye somehow, not “way”.
Similarly Japanese homonyms work the same way — if you have the kanji vocabulary.
I can’t think of a better example, but if I use 一台 (いちだい, one system/machine) in conversation now, I “see” those characters. When I use 一代 (いちだい, lifetime or one generation) I “see” those characters.
Before, they were just sounds or romaji in my head, now it’s somehow easier for my brain to hang onto them.
In programmer-speak, I no longer have to worry about the hash collision on sound.
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Makes sense to me. Something for pay like iTalki seems ideal.
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If the “other direction is completely useless”, you might want to try KaniWani (https://kaniwani.com). It uses your WaniKani data to test from English to Japanese.
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Hi everyone! Once again, thank you for all the well wishes and advice. I wanted to share my short term changes.
First of all, I took one full day off studying at all, and then a few days of only doing enough SRS (WaniKani, Anki, Bunpro) to keep from falling underwater. My motivation was very low and I felt like I had to be careful not to push through it when I needed to “recover”. Yesterday, I resumed playing Animal Crossing in Japanese.
Today, I finally took the great advice in this thread of trying to talk about random things in my apartment. I did this for only about 15-20 minutes, but I think it is a good start. I have to figure out how I’m going to work this into my everyday life.
Also today, I started KameSame. Again, it’s going to be difficult to figure out how to find time for this with everything else, but it was instructive how few of my WaniKani-sourced lessons I passed.
Finally, I am doing another tutoring session on Monday on iTalki. I really considered cancelling it, but I figure it can’t possibly make me worse at the language.
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Most language learners have the same problem; with Japanese it’s even more pronounced because of the focus on grammar and kanji. It means students spend an inordinate amount of time on passive learning and not on active. You need to start adding more ACTIVE learning to your repertoire.
Passive: Watching shows, playing Animal Crossing, Reading manga.
Active: Writing short, silly stories, speaking, shadowing TV shows.
A good example of this are professors in Classics departments across the world. I know a few, myself. They have spent uncountable hours learning Ancient Greek and Latin, sometimes old Persian or another language of antiquity. They can read and translate these languages in a way that seems fluent, native. They can’t speak these languages though, because there is no one to speak to with it. Perhaps they joke amongst other Classics geeks (i’ve seen people do this in Latin) but that’s about it. Their profession is based on Passive learning; their active learning has mostly been terrible.
This is why you run into so many Japanese learners who can read advanced manga or read the news in Japanese, and still struggle to have a normal or nuanced conversation.
Activate the production side of you brain, and soon you’ll see the benefits.
We get caught up in Kanji, and we should because its the biggest barrier to learning Japanese, but we can’t get obsessed with it.
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Just adding my story and 2 cents:
My wife and I have been working with our teacher on italki for almost a year now. Our teacher is amazing (we are very fortunate to have them) but the first time for me was also a train wreck. I was SO nervous and vividly remember getting so flush and red I felt like I was going to faint (my wife on the other hand was fine! 
) It was a mixture of meeting someone new, speaking Japanese, and public speaking all rolled into one! But I still booked another, and then another, and then another… and now it’s one of the things we look forward to the most. We always come out of out lesson having learned, practiced and feeling good.
So my suggestion is give it another shot, if it doesn’t go well again try another teacher. Finding the right teacher and connection is very important so if it doesn’t work out after a lesson or two try to find someone who works better until you find the right one that you seem to jive with!
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Abandon all hope off speaking elegantly.
I’ve noticed for me and some other foreigners living in Japan that our Japanese production ability is just a compilation of conversation experiences stacked up.
An old YouTuber once said humbly “im fluent in what I know.” (And he seemed fluent).
We tell the same jokes, use the same expressions because they’ve worked before and have been tested against reality. But if you actually have to formulate something new out of scratch and pull up some of those complex words and structures for the first time, then the chances you are going to say it correctly like a native are slim. So don’t worry too much about accuracy for now.
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