Welcome to the “Speak/Write in Japanese Every Day” Challenge, Winter 2025 Edition!
This is a thread dedicated to output of the Japanese language. What that means for you may vary. You may choose to:
Write a diary about your everyday life
Write essays from textbook assignments
Speak by talking to a friend, acquaintance, or tutor, in real life or on a language exchange site
Speak by talking to yourself in the shower
Speak by shadowing native audio like an audiobook or podcast
Or anything else that works for you!
Where does this challenge come from?
@Redglare originally hosted the Read Japanese Every Day Challenge, and since then many of us have participated in that and the Listen Every Day Challenge. The Speak/Write Every Day Challenge was first hosted by @softlyraining !
Please help us keep this a positive, encouraging, and fun space! Feel free to bribe encourage fellow participants with cute pet and animal photos or recipes even.
While the name of the challenge is “Speak/Write Every Day,” you may have noticed that it also has a season attached. That’s because each challenge only lasts 2 months. Forever would be a long commitment. By having clear start and end dates, it becomes a much more manageable goal. At the end of the challenge, please consider what worked or didn’t work for you. Did you have fun? Then you can take a break or decide to keep going.
Also, please don’t worry about starting late or not completing the challenge! Life happens. This is an open opportunity for everyone who wants to set speaking/writing goals. Everyone is welcome.
This is a thread for people who: want to improve their output want to hold themselves accountable and have a place to document their progress simply want to join in on the challenge of speaking/writing every day for two or so months
Time frame: January 1- February 28
Late starts are totally welcome! Usually people will continue posting through March and some may give some updates even later. It’s all good! You can start and finish your personal challenge at any point during that time, and shorten or lengthen the challenge to the time period that works best for you.
I am pretty awful at sticking with posting in threads like this, but it’s not because I “fail” the challenges but because I end up skipping posting on the forums and doing Japanese practice instead so that’s a good problem lol. But I’ve decided this coming year is the time that I should finally get some ability to output Japanese and if there’s anything in the language I need to sort of push myself to do, that doesn’t just come automatically, it’s this sort of thing. So maybe I’ll see you all around?
I have a few Japanese friends in Splatoon willing to (wanting to, even, crazy) talk to me while playing so I can get in real conversation, but I’ve sort of put that off after doing it a couple times because I struggle to get out a coherent thought and it’s kind of frustrating and discouraging.
So right now I’ve been making myself do some shadowing (half an hour a day, roughly) for the last few days and I’m probably going to start writing today, at least for now just aimlessly to myself. Hopefully I can fit in both of these daily around all the input and anki I still do.
Yaaay Daisoujou! I definitely am going to do a shadowing challenge, since I just got a shadowing book, but not sure if I’ll do it in Jan or Feb. Going to get my study routine together later and decide what I want to do with Japanese in Jan.
Also, I realized I forgot to make the extra post with the calendar templates and stuff so I’ll just edit those into the op later.
I’m going to try! I’m really bad about sticking to these challenges, but at least it will be on my mind. The last 3 months of 2024 have been chaotic, so I’m looking forward to the fresh start. My Japanese classes start back up on January 15, so this might be a nice way to ease back into the routine
So now you got voluntold too @soggyboy Thanks a lot for hosting again!
I want to work daily on my output this year. Both writing, handwriting, and talking to natives. But not all three at the same time. I am very slow at it and I want the majority of my time with Japanese to still be reading, I feel like I still need this to reinforce what I’ve learned so far, and get more exposure to real Japanese rather than trying to produce broken sentences! But a little bit everyday and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually!
Is everyone going to get furious at me if I make an early post? I wasn’t in the previous challenge so I’m just gonna go on and start right here.
I did my shadowing earlier, certain phrases I stumble over so hard when he’s talking quickly but overall I’m not feeling too terribly about how it’s going on the whole. I think I’m feeling slightly more primed to work through Japanese stuff already, I just can’t do it super quickly. I actually feel pretty good about what I managed to write as well, I didn’t stumble TOO hard thinking about how to phrase things and was largely confident, needed to remind myself of the word 比喩 cause it was driving me crazy, but otherwise this is kinda off the top of my head. I intended to maybe just write to myself but because I’m feeling pretty good about this start, I’ll share this segment if anyone is curious. I should write way more in the future, but we’re easing in. Also I am near finishing a VN and want to do that today
Edit, took time to add a second paragraph. Having more fun than I expected tbh; it’s not TOO hard and I like to ramble.
Today is my last chance to break the rules so hello again for update 2.
Another half hour or so of shadowing, today is… day 4? 5? Something like that? It kinda felt easier today, could just be that the material was a little more chill but I wonder if I’m getting slightly more used to the process. I’m feeling pretty confident already as I’ve started ramping these things up – a part of me wants to try a proper talk with a friend soonish already, but I bet that’ll crash me back down to no confidence so maybe I’ll keep preparing a little while longer haha.
I wrote more last night for a bit, got in the mood, so I’m happy about that going well. Decided I’m gonna share what I did so far today too, started writing about Emio having finished that VN recently. I still have some writing to do, stopping this midway, but here it is if you’re interested. Struggled a little more with how to phrase certain things, I suppose because I was freestyling nonsense yesterday but now I kinda have specific ideas I want to get across haha. Still, I barely looked anything up except double checking a few things (a few occasional corrections I checked into but) so I’m happy with how this turned out, though there was more sitting and thinking.
I’ll be joining this challenge too! I don’t know a lot of Japanese yet so I’ll just start out writing random sentences. Looking forward to seeing how all of our writing evolves over a few months of daily practice!
And posting another home thread for another challenge here. This one I’m the least sure I’ll actually do every day, and it’s going to be more of a grab bag of stuff, but maybe have a tracker will motivate me to do some!
And to start off, some handwriting practice! Uhh… it’s been over a year since I last handwrote any Japanese so the result isn’t great (and my English handwriting is also not great lol). Anyway, a good example of how skills can be surprisingly disconnected, I did find myself thinking “uhh, which way around is き again?” while writing
Anyway, for now I’ve mostly stuck with Kanji I had practiced in 2024, but part of this is a small hope that learning to hand write them will help some of the confusables with harder kanji.
Transcript (including some bits I forgot to handwrite in bold, oops. And yes, not sure why I randomly switched to keigo for one sentence, it’s a lot easier to take back when typed)
I really need to practice a lot more Japanese output because my ability to output is abysmal compared to reading so… I think I will try following this as much as I can. First time participating but I hope that the accountability will help me make progress.
Ok, done for today! Another half hour + of shadowing. Getting a little easier on the whole. Haven’t shared what I shadow, it sounds absurd maybe but it’s exactly the right thing for me:
This Splatoon player’s streams. He’s got a nice chill voice and just kinda talks unlike a lot of streams haha. Opens with an explanation of all the weapons and how they work together this time which is nice focused practice for ~10 minutes before he starts playing and commenting on what he’s doing. I know these words well, and I plan to be talking to a Japanese friend while playing this game (as I have very badly a few times in the past) so this is very directly the stuff that is 100% relevant for me to know how to say right now. I’m already slightly better linking the exact types of words used with certain things, so feeling good about it.
I also continued writing about Emio! Here’s what I got today. Getting all this out took… kind of a long time. I was double checking some grammar I was unsure about and looking up a few tip of the tongue type words so this is LARGELY off the top of my head, all things I’ve “learned,” but definitely with a little rechecking in cases where I know what I want to say but am forgetting exactly what the sounds are. Also google docs yelled at me and fixed a few errors haha. I figured this way is best because I’m training to be able to talk and write closer to this in the future so there’s no harm in making sure I’m getting it right now, using them here is how I’ll remember them better next time. Not that I think it’s all exactly right now, but it’s close enough for day 3 of writing. Outside of occasional discord messages to a few Japanese friends I haven’t really done this so I’m very pleased to see 99% input really did get the output ready to come out, eventually.
Welcome to the “Speak/Write in Japanese Every Day” Challenge, Winter 2025 Edition!
Speak/Write Every Day Challenge (Fall 2024)
Speak/Write Every Day Challenge (Spring 2024)
Speak/Write Every Day Challenge (Summer-to-Fall 2023)want to improve their output
Going to get my study routine together later and decide what I want to do with Japanese in Jan.
Thanks a lot for hosting again!
I wasn’t in the previous challenge so I’m just gonna go on and start right here.
みんな、がんばってね！
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