Thank you for this gem😂 I’ll internalize this to help me through those hesitant times. May even hang the quote on my wall
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Me: mom can we have japanese?
Mom: we have japanese at home.
japanese at home:
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Thanks, that helps a lot as well, let’s see how that goes. チェックするよ！ :3
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you’re right, I do encourage my language partners to speak in English or Japanese and I do the same, but still we tend to talk things rather than correct them and focus on the learning side of it, so I should pay more attention to that.
Thanks for your comment.
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I would say it’s important imo to not equate remembering the exact grammar point that an application wants you to use in a sentence to your ability to understand the language or even that specific grammar point.
There are multiple ways to express things in every language so as long as your language partners aren’t completely baffled or actually correct you on the expression then it is probably an okay way to express it.
I find myself as well being caught up in the perfect way to express the sentence like if it was something I read in a book(again written and spoken language also have differences). So I think it’s just important to listen to the natives and express things as they do and not worry so much about if you’re using all the grammar points and vocabulary you learn on these apps.
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I may be repeating what others have said, but I’ll just relate my own personal experience with learning Japanese, and another language that I achieved fluency in as an adult previously. The thing that made the big difference for me in internalizing the grammar and vocabulary of the language, i. e. make it automatic and intuitive rather than something you understand rationally and think about consciously, was to consume very large amounts of input. Reading a lot (many many books) and listening a lot (hundreds or thousands of hours of content). You obviously also need to do tons and tons of conversation, both in text and in person, in order to make outputting intuitive, but that felt like a relatively smaller conceptual hurdle to me, though the principle is the same. This obviously and unfortunately takes a long time and requires a lot of effort, but it’s just how this works. You can’t use a language in practice just by learning the rules from a textbook, you can’t apply it like you do math, you need to gradually rewire your brain so it becomes a part of how you think. Once you do that, the other language flows into and out of you in the same way your native one does. You can tell that this is happening when you can start to “feel” that something sounds right or wrong, rather than be able to explain exactly what’s right or wrong about it grammatically. Which is of course how it works with your native language. The good news is that it gets progressively easier as you go, since it gets less frustrating to use the language the better you are at it, so you’ll be more motivated to keep going and thus get even better at it, so it’s like a virtuous cycle.
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One thing that I didn’t see anyone citing before as an exercise on this level, is to think directly in Japanese. At first it’s very awkward, but even if you do it when you’re bored in a daily basis, eventually you will start to unlock the “feeling of right and wrong” and create a more intimate relationship with the language.
In English, there was things I only started to understand when I started doing this, for example, there’s some sentences that only sound right when structured on a very specific way, because if you try to construct it another way, the nuance differences destroy the meaning you wanted to convey and sound very wrong. I can’t remember those sentences anymore though, as it became second nature.
But as @dementati said, you need colossal amounts of input. Because when you’re thinking, the only feedback you will have, is comparison to other things you saw other people say. Some things will sound wrong immediately because you saw tens or hundreds of people saying the same thing with a different phrase, instead of the phrase you tried to construct.
Then, step by step you will refine your Japanese machine to understand what sounds correct, and will output other things, that will be judged by that machine, that will refine the machine further. A positive-feedback loop you can do at anytime, anywhere in your head.
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I’ve started doing this! I’m excited to see if it’s as beneficial as reading without auto-translating has been. Basically when I read things, after about a paragraph or two, I’ll go back and rethink everything I read in Japanese and maybe ask myself some rhetorical questions.
Say a girl goes to the grocery store to get food for her SO, I’ll think about what her favorite fruits might be, how long it took her to get home, that sort of thing.
I also added a whole Japanese man to my imagination world, who only speaks in Japanese, to force me to at least try 
.
I’m really hoping it helps but I’m very afraid I’ll internalize bad habits Anything super confusing I usually will try to look up to see how wrong I was.
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might as well xD please keep a copy for me as well :3
Sorry I wanted to reply earlier, but I hit my reply limit on my 1st day.
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Thanks for the suggestion…as for input, I’m almost there, I’m lacking in reading though, but over the years, I had great amounts of input…but now I need to push myself to output much more.
I also agree, thinking in your target language without translating first is the way to go, I just need to fix my stumbling that brings me back to English after a few short sentences xD
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An imaginary character where I would talk to only in Japanese seems like something right up my alley…however I’d worry about internalizing bad habits like you said, but that sounds like a good idea…maybe I can have a convo with that dude, and then have the same convo with a language partner later that day.
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Oooh having the same convo later with a real person is a great idea!
By our powers combined, we will achieve Japanese fluency
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depending on the kind of person you are, you can even feel like the man inside your head is real!
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I’ve heard of a mental illness that can help with that!
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gimme xD that would be useful