Learn to speak from natives

Japanese
#1

I‘ve started learning at the beginning of this year

I‘ve tried my best but i‘m really busy so i‘ve only managed to get 125 Grammar and 1600~ Vocab in SRS

I‘m mainly learning to speak with my girlfriend so we call a lot but often quickly switch to english

So i was wondering what are techniques or tricks to best learn from phone calls with natives
What worked for you,
what worked without distracting the natural conversations too much
and what worked the best overall if you just want to learn together

My second question is: i’ll visit her for the first time in february so how would you use the time untill than?

My goal is to maybe speak with her parents so i wonder if someone tried to learn a more specific area of vocab instead of following the JLPT route

How did this turn out for you? I‘d be happy to hear some experiences from people with similar situations.

Thank you all

#2

You will get much more out of using a frequency list and grabbing as much vocab as you can from casual slice of life scenes in anime/drama/manga about school/work/family life. I’d put extra focus on verbs/adjectives because for nouns you can always point on the thing and ask what it’s called, but explaining a movement or feeling is more difficult.

Be careful with general core/frequency decks, they are also influenced by entertainment media about fantasy and military which might not be that relevant for your conversations yet (though they are absurdly common and worth learning in the long run).

I cannot recommend doing N5 → N4 - N3 vocab in order, there are far too many common and vital words in each category so make sure to go by frequency and you will only hold yourself back for a long time doing that. Maybe check out the core 2k deck first.

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