So I’m more of a tumblr person than a twitter one, but I was thinking of creating a Blue Sky (basically just a copy of twitter tbh) account because a creator I like is there and while I oppose making a twitter account I’ve always wanted to have an account for practicing Japanese
Does anyone here have any pointers for how an account made for practicing Japanese should look/how you should act?
That’s an interesting question, I do have a read-only twitter account that I mostly use to access some specific (non-Japanese) content I care about, I’d probably advise starting with something like that. Just make an account and follow Japanese accounts that seem interesting.
As far as how you should act, I guess just lurk at first and then imitate. From what I’ve seen of Japanese social media interactions, simple teineigo without any frills seems like a good starting point.
I have a hobby account for a hobby that’s big in Japan and generally make my posts bilingual, so I’ll give advice from that perspective. In my experience, most non-native speakers will put something like EN/JP or EN/日本語OK in the profile, as well as a flag emoji to indicate that they do (or do not) live in Japan. Sometimes (if character limits allow it) they also put in a blurb apologizing for mistakes/asking followers to excuse accidental rudeness. It helps followers know what to expect from you.
I agree with the advice in the above post. Lurk, imitate, and be polite. Don’t try to get too spicy with memes/netspeak unless you truly understand it. There was a non-native Japanese speaker in my hobby community that caused drama on the Japanese side by being…aggressively friendly is probably the best way to describe it. She used a lot of overly-cutesy anime-speak and made up ～たん nicknames for people who didn’t know her. It’s better to be boring while you learn the ropes.
Agreed with the above advice. A lot of Japanese social media tends to be a lot more polite in a lot of ways than ours, especially towards strangers. So it’s a good idea to lurk and feel out how people interact, and then learn to copy similar behavior and make that your own over time.
Being clear that you’re studying the language and will potentially make mistakes is advisable too. I mostly use social media in Japanese at this point, even voice chat, but most of the people I interact with know I’m a European studying Japanese, and for how long. They’ll politely point out mistakes when I make them and don’t get too offended by potential lack of accepted social graces.
I think it’s fair to say I owe a lot of my of my progress in learning the language to my experiences with the Japanese friends I’ve made online the past year.
Most of them tend to be very happy to see someone trying to make the efforts to communicate in their language and on their cultural terms, no matter how basic your grasp is. Because they do have an image of their language and customs being borderline impenetrable. So unless you really go in with ill intent, or get too aggressive, there isn’t too much need to be afraid of being shunned or anything.