Recently, I had a speaking test in my Jpn class and I did real badly on it. I completely blanked multiple times and struggled to understand my classmates even if they used words and grammar I’ve studied before.
Does anyone have any tips on how to improve on these? Sources, techniques, routines, etc. The more specific the better. I’m at a real loss as for how I should go about this.
If you’re in class, I highly, highly recommend finding a study buddy and practicing the material you’re learning. I’d start with going over the book work, and then practicing what you’ve learned to practice more natural conversations with one another.
The only way to improve your speaking and listening is really to do it, and if you’re in class you’re lucky because you have a lot of other people who probably would like practice with this, too.
Sorry I forgot to add. Classes are ending soon and I won’t be able to attend any JPN classes for a few months. So I’ll be running it solo for a while.
If you have spare money, I recommend something like italki tutor sessions. Where you can have a native Japanese tutor help you with everything! This is the most time efficient, but it’s also the most expensive per minute.
If you don’t have money but have a LOT of time to throw at the problem, you can find some really good language partners on Hellotalk, or Tandem. But between the searching time (1/50 people you meet will be good partners in my experience), and the expectation that half of your time is used to teach the other person it’s VERY time intensive.
If you need cheap and fast, then you lose on quality. Reading on a site like NHK Easy. You can practice speaking and listening by shadowing what you’re reading. Most of the articles have native reading videos to pair with them! But the downside is you don’t get a partner to practice with.
Thank you! I’ve heard that watching shows in Japanese helps too. But I’m not sure how to go about that. Do I just watch and see what I catch and what I don’t?
I’m still trying to get in to watching shows. I think it’s still a little too far out of reach for me.
I watch with Japanese subtitles at 75% speed and I feel like it takes me 90 minutes or more to watch a 20 minutes show because I have to rewind so much and look stuff up.
I think NHK might be a bit easier to practice, before you move on to find yourself some easy shows. But if you enjoy anime, perhaps you won’t mind the difficulty. It’s definitely more fun than NHK.
Websites like learnnatively.com can help you find some easy shows and movies for your level. But even the lowest shows are n4, and quite hard in my opinion.
And when watching anime, you lose out on the speaking practice. It’s probably not the best shadowing material, if you want to sound like a normal person.
Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts! In my experience even without opportunities for speaking, lots of listening practice drills your knowledge in to the point where you can be comfortable enough to use it without thinking. It’s by far been the study tool that’s helped me the most for actual conversations.
For beginner levels I recommend Nihongo con Teppei and for intermediate level YuYu no Nihongo Podcast is fantastic.
My goal is just to listen to one 20 min podcast a day while I commute and try to do shadowing when I have the energy (and don’t mind looking like a crazy person muttering on the train) and it really adds up without you noticing. I think I’ve listened to over 100 hours of content at this point and it’s only been a year since I made it a habit.
For speaking practice, why not join a discord server where others are also learning Japanese? A quick google search gives me a promising one with a lot of members which I would definitely try out myself if I was looking for something like that (and I might join it in the future!). With so many people, there’s bound to be someone in your timezone who also wants to practice speaking.
As for listening, there’s a lot of ‘learn japanese through stories’ videos on Youtube which I put on in the background when doing chores or the like. And yes, watching shows in Japanese (I just use Netflix for this, there’s so much on there!); but don’t limit yourself only to intensive study with no subs. Turning on subtitles gives you a different kind of input, but it’s still listening practice as long as you are actively listening to what they’re saying. And even if you aren’t, you’re still hearing the language and slowly getting a feel for it. Even just putting on Japanese music in the background while you’re doing other things can be worth it; I do so a lot and regularly realise I could understand a part of the lyrics without really even paying attention to it.
Thank you!
Just out of curiosity, how much is italki per minute? I’ve been working with a Nihongo instructor living in the same province as me for almost a year now and I pay CAD25 for 1 hour. The biggest advantage with having a private tutor was that I was no longer embarrassed to speak up and make mistakes.
I wasn’t aware of this. I’m going to have to check it out again after the exams.
The price range is really all over the place.
I think you can find a really good instructor for around 15 USD an hour, or 21 CAD an hour.
You pay a premium if you want someone who is also really good with English. High skill in English costs about $5-10 USD more. It’s worth it if you can’t understand grammar explanations in Japanese. Because a fast easy to understand explanation saves so much lesson time.
And if you don’t need a teacher, but just a conversation partner, you can save probably $4 USD an hour. They’ll tell you if you said something weird, and correct it, but they can’t really explain why.
Basically the better you are at Japanese, the cheaper it is. Being a beginner is the most expensive.
Pretty people also often charge significantly more. If that matters to any tutor seekers. Old retired men (especially professors) are often the best value!
With good prompting having a audio voice dialogue with ChatGPT or other AI assistant voice mode can be pretty good. Make sure to prompt her to your level, how casual vs polite you want it to be etc.
Listen daily to podcast that are aimed toward your level.
immersion is key, comprehensive input is even more important. Watching anime is not rewarding if you don’t understand more than 2/3rd of what’s going on without subtitles.
For output: ask chat gpt to make you translate short sentences from your mother tongue to japanese based on your level and the grammar you know (you can adjust your prompt accordingly). You can answer using romaji, this will help you work on your spontaneity and correctness of sentence formation using grammar and vocab that you know.
what’s your current jlpt level ?
I’m not too sure about the jlpt level but I’d say I’m around A2 level? I’ve gone through all of Genki 1.
Since I didn’t see it mentioned, “shadowing” technique can also be used to improve speaking. Basically just say the same thing as closely as possible to a given native audio clip. Your mouth will get used to making the sounds whether you understand it or not.
Also don’t underestimate just talking to yourself in your free time. You’ll force your brain to make concrete attempts at sentence construction. Only downside is you don’t get corrected, so the usefulness is sorta limited by your ability to recognize correct sentences
One thing too to remember is, assuming you’re college level(but even then) is that every day is different, and hell, hour by hour is drastically different in your ability. So much, at the beginning, goes into how well you do until that material is truly secondhand nature and even then. Stress levels from finals, how much sleep you got ect all goes into it.
What I do, and it works for me since I mostly study solo(though I do have a person I meet once a week to correct me) is this
Anki 2k(about to finish and ill start mining)
Ive been doing Genki 2 again
This is important in my opinion as sometimes going back to easier stuff helps cement random pieces of grammar because now you understand how it works at a higher level. If youll be doing classes again a month or so, I highly recommend just going through the genki １ workbook again, blank if possible.
You can (because I would although this is generally not recommended)
reset some of grammer points on bunpro too. With you being in classes I would almost recommend taking this time to just review all the material again. Grammar at least.
Having finished Genki 1, you can, with lookups, read Yotsubato with relative ease. Youll be missing some vocab but most of the important parts youll have down. Even finding a read with me will be nice like this guy
After ALL of that, podcasts or even just watching a show without subtitles. If you ride a bike or treadmill put on some anime of a story you know relatively well. The idea here is not to understand but just to listen and pick out words you DO know.
Biggest thing, dont stress to hard about perfect comprehension. It comes and youll never feel like you fully understand and kinda gotta get used to that even though it sucks lol
even though am still new to Japanese but when I used to learn English and French I used to act out dialogues by myself xD it was fun to be able to act both rules all by myself to get both reactions correctly! it worked! I don’t someone to practice with so I used that and it worked for me. Let’s hope it works just as well for me in Japanese! But try shadowing too. Listen and repeat. There is an new ai test I am in rn which is very fun to use as my vocab is barely there atm but i have never tried to speak and converse besides repeating what I hear while watching podcasts or utube videos But I see people use it and it is amazing how much ai is helpful. so try AI for speaking