So I have a trip to Japan coming up in a month and a half, and I’ve been having classes with a couple tutors since August to prepare for it. I’m generally doing decent, but the one point where I become a total mess is speaking: whenever I try to say something I get completely stuck for up to a few minutes trying to find the words I’m looking for, failing at basic structures, forgetting how to use particles, generally unable to put a clause together. The problem isn’t that I’m doing it wrong, that’s to be expected, it’s that I can barely output any form of coherent speech and it feels impossibly slow to practice with. As an L2 English speaker I’m used to having a gap between speech and writing, but here it’s more of an abyss.
Has anyone else had a problem like this?
After reading a bunch of threads, I’m thinking of doing some transcription and shadowing of podcasts like Nihongo con Teppei, but I don’t know if that’ll help my production skills as much as my listening. There’s also the Pera chatbot mtzmsa advertised that I might take a look at (which I first found linked to elsewhere because of its Teppei transcriptions), and the daily challenge thread of course.
FWIW, I have found it productive to practice certain sentences in advance, so that I can speak them without even thinking. Some of those are from textbook dialogs that I have remembered, others are more the sort of ‘answers to questions that people are likely to pose’.
I can generally handle myself OK with impromptu speaking, but it is indeed a whole other level of difficulty to do so, especially when there’s so much vocabulary that I don’t know.
I keep promising myself to try some active ‘shadowing’, in the hope that it will help me with producing somewhat correct sentence structure. I have had people tell me that they understand my words, but that I don’t sound ‘Japanese’ - which I fully understand, because I have a bad habit of using English speech patterns with Japanese words. When I become aware that that’s what I’m doing, I can (sometimes) correct it, but it’s an easy trap for me to fall into.
When I was learning Chinese quite a few years back, the biggest thing that helped improved my speaking was writing practice. It was an in-person college course and we would have to write weekly essays about basic topics (fav movie, food, holidays etc), and occasionally we would present to the class. Having to reuse the same patterns constantly meant that when I came to speak I could just focus on switching out the words but the pattern itself was so ingrained that it took some of the stress off.
With Japanese, because I’ve mainly focused on input through reading, my reading level far surpasses where I ever got with Chinese but my ability to speak is pretty bad because I just don’t really do output practice in any form. So I would suggest maybe trying more writing? It lets you output but without the pressure of someone waiting for you, and you can even post to places such as LangCorrect to get corrections from natives.
Yeah, I’ll really have to drill that stuff in. My current tutor’s doing the usual deal of only speaking in Japanese and we’re going over all those kinds of basic situations and simple ways to approach them, which is what really makes it frustrating when I can’t formulate a spoken answer. Thankfully Pera works, so I’ll be trying that out and seeing if I can get quicker.
As for the structure part, yeah, that’s actually something I was talking about today with a few other students at a meetup, how hard it generally is for anyone to use Japanese’s subordinate clauses that leave the head way at the end when they’re accustomed to different orders.
At a relatively basic level, more or less, I don’t want to oversell myself. What I can do for sure is finish the damn sentences, possibly because having their WIP taking space somewhere external frees up resources.
Yeap, that’s what my teacher tells me as well, and it makes sense. Generalization does rely on learning basic patters.
LangCorrect
Nice! This site looks great, will be trying it out. Thank you.
Sounds like you’ve got some ideas on how to improve!
I just wanted to mention, I was just in Japan a few weeks ago and something that helped me a lot was practicing to say lines like “すみません、わからなかった…” and “日本語があまりわかりませんから… もう一回ください”
Like trying to remember all the different phrases that might be useful the many social situations I could face was hard. Saying “hey I’m not good at Japanese” was applicable potentially anywhere, and saying it makes people slow down, use easier vocabulary with you, and be more patient with your responses. It’s basically a crutch, and as my trip went on I was able to use it less and less.
Even in lessons, saying “I don’t understand” in Japanese instead of English meant I was technically giving an appropriate response to my teacher’s statements in Japanese, and so funnily enough it helped me get other the mental block of “oh man I can’t do this,” and made it easier to say other sentences after.
To help reduce pauses in your speech, try using あいずち if you don’t already. Phrases like なるほど, たしかに, and そうです{か,ね} are great for buying time to think of a natural response and avoiding awkward silence. These work especially well when paired with the suggestions from @zucchi. Have you tried doing timed writing practice and showing it to your tutor? I found that regular timed writing helped improve my speech a lot since it made me learn grammar more thoroughly, especially for tricky forms like なら, たら, and ば for “if.”
For specific situations like ordering food, buying something, or asking for directions, roleplaying might help. It might feel a bit odd, but practicing with a partner (pretending they’re the waiter and you’re the customer) can make expressions you would use in ordering (like 〜にする and 〜の代わりに) feel natural. When I was in Japan, everyday interactions like these became automatic, and memorizing common phrases really helped lower the mental effort of speaking.