Calling all conversationally fluent people!

Finding a role model requires you to have some grounding in the language, which it sounds like you are fine in. The most important part is age and gender, but then you use your understanding of the language to pick the speaking style you like best amongst people of a similar demographic.

Usually, since natural speech and quantity of content is the big focus, people opt for either youtubers, people who participate in a podcast, or talk show hosts. I have even heard of some people doing comedians. The goal is to introduce naturalness and consistency into your speaking so really anyone is ok for that, but dramas might lack on the naturalness a bit.

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Drama lacks naturality more than everything else, that’s why I don’t like it. :sweat_smile: But for example youtubers or podcasts etc. usually cover only one type of speech while I am (in an ideal case) looking for one person who speaks to other people in different styles, to have a consistency of style in a way. Like to the boss, to their husband, to the parents in law, to clients etc. but just one person, because right now I have the feeling my speech is a kind of collage and lacks that coherency (besides other things…)

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Luckily I feel like the more formal people speak the more similar they get to other peoples style of speaking and individuality shines through less.

For youtubers and podcast members, you’re usually guaranteed to get a formal and informal version. Like if you’re watching a youtuber who does 雑談 or gives advice or something, its not uncommon to hear casual speech for talking to others and telling stories, but more formal speech when directly addressing the viewers. Podcasts might also be better in that sense because if its a 2+ person podcast, they are likely to speak to their partner casually. Then, whenever they have a guest on, they might speak more formally.

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So what you’re saying is that I’m not doing my speaking abilities any favors by mostly watching anime featuring high school girls. :laughing:

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Lol so long as you’re not shadowing a JK you’re prolly fine.

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Yeah, I kind of settled on Takayuki Yamada.

Even though he’s 6 years younger than me, he has a lot of interviews and random YouTube appearances to watch.

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So you’re saying that Takayuki Yamada is played by Steve Buscemi?

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I exclusively shadow with this video.

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Dude, spoilers. :joy:

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Unless you are one it’s totally ok. But if you want to make a good impression on them in reality I would avoid that exact situation like nothing else :rofl:

Eg I love to hear the voice of a Japanese male speaking in that typically Japanese male way. Problem is, automatically my voice drops lower after listening to something like this for a long time. Whatever I hear it rubs of quite fast.
As a test a few days ago, I responded to my husband in a soft feminine voice ending the sentence with は. I thought he would notice that I am not serious but instead that had an immediate unconscious effect on him, he smiled and relaxed and was very happy altogether just because of it.
When I came to Japan I thought of women language as something only people without any self respect would speak in and avoided the whole concept as much as possible. But now I came to realize that is better to be able to switch between as many possible patterns as possible. It seems it is especially important when communication to the other gender.

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@Vanilla
That’s soooooooooo cool! How did you get started in reading? Like did you jump right into Light Novels or graded readers or something else? Did you start WK before or after? What was your grammar knowledge/skills when you began? Sorry for all the questions but your case is super interesting to me.

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It’s hard to say when I became conversationally fluent, but I was able to hold regular daily conversations within two years or so.

I started with Pimsleur Japanese which gave me a really good base for sentence structure and pronunciation. Getting used to sentence structure and being able to get words out quickly was super integral. I used Pimsleur every day for 3 months. Looking back Pimsleur teaches super formal Japanese, but I digress. I focused on pronunciation on the get go (didn’t know tone accent was a thing back then, but I tried my best to imitate the lessons, and having a background in Vietnamese and Cantonese helped)

After that I made friends with the exchange students at my school, had a Japanese girl friend, made more Japanese friends, went to Japanese language exchanges, lived in Japan for a few years, also worked at an Izakaya.

Basically put yourself in as many situations as you can where you’d use Japanese. I know it might not apply to everyone, but I never once thought about how good or bad my Japanese ability was, just spoke what ever I knew (sometimes supplementing with grammar and vocabulary books.) If you don’t know any Japanese people directly, Japanese language exchange is a great way to practice.

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I’m heading out to work and won’t be able to answer till later, but the first part of the video in my bio might have some answers.

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I thought this said “Calling all controversially fluent people!”

Oops. Back to my Youtube comment sections and subreddits I go. uwu

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Wow, yeah that kinda had everything I was looking for. Thanks homie

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That’s very true for VTubers, actually :slight_smile: . One of them, Houshou Marine is actually very fluent in teineigo as well, so she switches readily between almost slang when talking about her own stuff (including self-narration) and very polite speech when talking to her fans watching the stream.

That seems to be a recurring theme, no? :smiley:
I’m working on dropping that わ (or at least pretending it’s a は) when self-narrating as well.

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Ha, well I do have enough experience in the language to know to avoid using obvious feminine language like わ. :slight_smile:

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