And if yes, how ? 
I am focusing for my studies on reading, but my end goal would definitely be to be an average/good speaker, so I was wondering if any of you made the jump from reading a lot to using this knowledge toward output
Thanks a lot 
I did, yes. I have a very long video I posted on here outlining how, but the TLDR is just practice. I would practice trying to hear audio for my listening ability and I would practice typing output for my output ability and get corrections. Once I could listen better and produce written output, spoken output became a lot easier. You still have to do the same stuff, itâs just that if you have a foundation in reading you will see progress faster. If Iâd say there was anything I did specially that my reading level enabled me to do, it was listening to audio books as practice early into my transition.
Oh hey!
I actually have watched all of your first video, are you talking about this one or the latest (3 year+ update) one? I might have forgotten, the amount of information was dense and at the time, I was mostly interested about the âprocessâ / wanikani aspect of it .
I think it makes a lot of sense to me! Writing seems like a good way to start the brain processing output, without the friction of sounding silly, and probably itâs easier to catch the mistakes too. I might follow this path too (I have time ahead of me lol), thanks !
How did you find that reading / having a lot of written input helped you before output ?
The second video would be the one relevant to this thread. Iâm on my phone right now but I can go find it if you have trouble locating it.
It may come as a disappointment, but it didnât really set me up with much base ability at all. I was more or less literate but I couldnât naturally produce Japanese, let alone at a speed needed for conversation, let alone while having good pronunciation.
I had to learn how to output still. The only difference was in that learning to output my thoughts, I almost never had to worry about learning a new word or new grammar. Everything I practiced I was already familiar with more or less so it was a lot easier to remember and use. If youâre looking to have an easier time, unfortunately you donât get a whole lot of bang for your buck. I just happened to put in a large amount of bucks.
If I had someone who spent 1000 hours listening and 1000 hours reading and another person who spent 2000 hours reading, honestly I would expect the person who did listening to be significantly better at outputting . And then someone who actually did output practice to do better than the two of them. But listening input will matter way more than reading input when outputting imo
While my speaking ability is still a mess, my experience aligns with what @Vanilla said: the only thing that really helped speaking was speaking.
Words that I effortlessly recognise while reading often arenât available in my mental speaking database, so to say. The overall speed of conversation, the need to construct grammar on the fly, and keeping proper politeness in mind means that my head often still only throws the low-hanging fruits of word choice and sentence structure at me.
Recognition and production feel very different for me, and while reading is of course helpful with familiarising myself with words and grammar, I then still have to really drill that pure usage time just as much.
My reading level isnât nearly as high as a lot of others, but I will mention that listening has helped me a lot more than reading has with outputting. I went from just not knowing how to transform my thoughts into Japanese to having a few words that didnât have a lot of grammar to connect them, to my current skill level where I have a number of building blocks of grammar that I can slot in to make understandable sentences. Sometimes full paragraphs come out without me really thinking, but I need to be very motivated about what Iâm saying and I need all the vocabulary. But almost all of those building blocks got into my brain from things I have heard before, not what I have read before.
As other people have mentioned, your passive vocabulary and your active vocabulary are different, with the former generally much much larger. And the less you use active vocabulary, the smaller it will be. An additional issue that a lot of people donât talk about a lot of that your mouth and face muscles arenât really primed to speak Japanese if youâre not speaking Japanese. So even if you could come up with perfect sentences in your head, youâre unlikely to be able to actually pronounce them without some regular practice.
Also one of the really useful skills that Iâve found only really comes with speaking more, is talking around the word that you donât know or canât remember. Iâm a lot faster at just pivoting my sentences into ways to express what Iâm trying to say instead of getting stuck fumbling for a word I donât have. I think in a perfect world I wouldnât need this skill at all, but itâs helped me probably more than anything else has, and it has only come with me commiting to two weekly lessons.
Could you go from a ton of reading to speaking? Probably, but the difference in your skill sets are almost certainly going to frustrate you, even if you started at a very high level of speaking. It probably makes sense to find a way to practice speaking along the way if itâs a skill that you want to eventually have.
I will find it no worries
Honestly itâs good to know this before I get my hopes up too much or misconstruct things in my mind. I thought the brain was much better at connecting passive into active than it seems to be. Especially since I think I learned to speak english without really speaking it that much (through 1000 of hours of passive listening / reading probably).
My assumption was that the grammar skills as well as the vocabulary learned in reading would help a lot in constructing sentences and outputting, but the ability to cast out sentences from the void of passive knowledge we got is probably a whole other muscle in itself. Itâs probably easier to disassemble stuff than to assemble it
Itâs true, itâs good to know!
I will probably keep learning grammar and vocab through reading, and I will try to output through various techniques.
Aside of Vanilla video / experience, @shitsurei @Omun what have been your study methods for output ? If you have any tips for a beginner
I just needed to look it up anyway since you reminded me I still want to watch it:
Iâm afraid I have no good tips. My output has been mostly non-existent, and was otherwise very minimal.
I think I lurked on HiNative a few years ago, but didnât know how to find the time to both write things and give decent feedback to other users, so I never used it.
Edit: just realised I meant LangCorrect and not HiNative.
I canât think of the correct term in English, but I took âhobby classes.â A Japanese class that isnât any form of official accreditation, aimed at working adults with Japanese as a hobby that have no real time for homework, tests, or a strict curriculum.
I also had a few language exchange partners over zoom with Japanese people that recently moved to my country looking to practice their English, and their Dutch as they started to pick that up. I also joined local face-to-face Japanese language exchange events.
Unfortunately, things are busy for me right now and Iâm not doing any of those things anymore.
Even with all that, i think I still have less than 300 hours of speaking experience, and a lot of it without receiving hardcore feedback or corrections. Iâm not worried about making myself understood on many things, I will just not do it well.
When I try (and struggle) to express myself in conversation, I become more aware when I encounter similar things in books or media. Itâs like the production part of my brain also pays more attention during the passive stuff if itâs activated a lot. So I feel like lots of output benefits all the other language disciplines in a way that just passive learning doesnât.
Which is why I should, ya know, actually do it? But itâs admittedly a big weak point of mine to find the time and courage to do it enough.
itâs not the same as conversation, admittedly, but oftentimes, Iâll try and mutter my inner monologue, if I have one, out loud to myself in Japanese if Iâm not in a situation where Iâd cross my (arbitrary) threshold for seeming weird or rude. for some reason I pride myself on doing the small âuhmâ type words (ăăź, ăăŒăŁăš, ăă) in Japanese rather than English, for example, and itâs fun to try and do the same type of variation of the same sentences you might do in your native language or hear if an anime character is mumbling to themselves.
Totally agree with this point as a multilingual dabbler. Developing muscle memory is probably the most important piece of language production that is under appreciated. My Japanese tutor also advised to do a lot of shadowing for speaking practice. Thankfully Japanese sounds are so much easier to produce than the other languages Iâve attempted in the past cough Korean cough French.
I have a university degree in Japanese studies, so I took 4 years of formal Japanese classes.
Worthless. Donât bother 
but I do mention that because it is part of my background, for better or worse.
I personally donât think itâs worth trying to speak before you have some of the words and grammar patterns in your brain, so you probably have a pass for actually speaking as a beginner. None of the speaking that I did in my Genki I/II equivalent courses really stuck with me, and Iâd probably have been fine without it.
But what I would recommend is shadowing. I didnât do it (and I still donât, but I probably should). It can be as easy as speaking along with TV, or a podcast, or as formal as getting one of the books made for shadowing and going through that. I personally, was really into Japanese music when I was younger, so I kiiiiinda did shadowing by singing along to songs. Itâs not as good as actual speech, but itâs better than nothing, if it sounds appealing (In my experience it helps with pronunciation, but not at all with pitch accent).
As a beginner, Iâd also do a bit of research in çžæ§ (aizuchi). I was just musing after a lesson the other day that Iâd be so annoyed at someone if they did that in English, but if you donât do it in Japanese itâs just as bad.
I didnât start speaking lessons until I was in very low N2 territory. You can definitely do it before then, but for me, thatâs when it started feeling like talking to a teacher once a week was worth my money and time invested.
I write this all with the caveat that my speaking is still very halting, and I have a long way to go. But if I were to do it over again, this is what Iâd do.
Thatâs interesting! Is it because of the fact ârealâ talked japanese is way different than in textbooks ? So why did you do Genki 1 /2 (probably for your classes I imagine), have they helped for reading and comprehension ?
My favorite band is maximum the hormone, am I screwed 
. More seriously, I heard a lot about shadowing, but it seemed kinda gimmick-y⊠until everyone in this thread recommended it, so I guess it should be done, at least for the âmuscleâ aspect of speaking/tones. I never really used shadowing to speak english, but I did have a lot of written output I think ( as well as thousand of hours of listening).
I am not familiar with it, what is it ?
Thanks for your feedbacks I learned a lot by posting this question
çžæ§ is just like putting in responses while in a conversation and listening to someone, like ăăŒăăăȘăă ïŒ ăȘăă»ă© æŹćœă§ăă?
and all that stuff
Obviously itâs kind of a thing in English but itâs more important for conversation in Japanese compared to English probably, if you donât do it it can be taken as a bit rude or like youâre not paying attention properly to what the other person is saying
And also just chiming in with everyone else to agree and say that listening has been much more directly useful for getting better at speaking than reading. Reading has helped, but in a more passive way like increasing vocab. Specifically for getting better at speaking, reading isnât so necessary, listening is. I feel like when you get better at listening, a lot of what you hear over and over again sits in the more accessible part of your knowledge, like you can associate responses/vocab with situations better in a way that allows you to use them more easily when speaking. Reading doesnât do that in the same way in my experience unless youâre really really putting specific attention towards that. But if you want to generally get better at Japanese more broadly, both are important
Iâm not a great speaker by any means but I did have an âahaâ moment once I had been studying for like 3 years that I wouldnât get better if I never tried and after doing a year or 2 of my once a week lesson I started to speak more. I signed up for iTalki lessons and did even more. It wasnât like I was good but I was outputting a lot and became âconversationalâ. I can speak pretty freely about some topics but unless weâre ordering Mos Burger or talking about video games I turn into a bumbled mess. However the reality is that the only way to get better is to try.
Oh yeah right I think I definitely know what you mean, it would be considered rude in my native language actually to do so aha.
Makes sense, thank you . Would you say that the reading helped with the listening then ?
Thatâs pretty good! Yeah I guess itâs like anything else.. Lot of focused work then
Itâs the answer I loathe the most, but it is genuinely the correct answer to all language learning aspect. You just have to do the thing you want to improve more.