Hello everyone!
I’ve just watched this Youtube video about improving speaking skills with input training only. In the video, he said that he studied English for a year without training his speaking skills at all. When he tried speaking English with a stranger for the first time after a year of listening only, he was surprised by how fluent he was. What do you think? Do you agree? I’m trying to improve my speaking skills, but I don’t have the opportunity to speak with Japanese people, so I’m wondering if it can really work.
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As someone who has been learning for almost two years and has had almost zero output during that time, I can tell you that this isn’t my case. Lately, I’ve been using HelloTalk to talk with native Japanese speakers, and oh boy, do I struggle. I mean, I can understand what they’re saying to me, but whenever I try to reply in Japanese, I can barely form complete sentences. Sure input has help me a lot to understand different kinds of media but speaking is a different skill so Im currently implementing output on my daily studying.
You could try hellotalk or other similar apps to find Japanese speakers. There are many Japanese people that are looking for english speakers to practice as well so you can make a language exchange.
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Well, I speak once every few months, and every time I’m like “wow I speak so much better!”. I feel I don’t really have to do much output to reach a high level, even as it’s now, my output abbilities are quite good, but my understanding is not even at a level of 18 y.o native yet, so I’m just working towards that point, the point where I can read books easily, and understand everyting in great detail. So I can feel progress in my output each time I take in a good portion of a language, starting from the begining.
On the other side, I’m helping (teaching) my granny learn Italin, and while her comprehension is at a certain level, she struggles soo much with output (even though we do a lot of speaking).
Again, my mom understands italian better then me, but I can see a lot of her mistakes that I already don’t make. But she’s not neccessery much worse at speaking than I am, and also her studying was based more on textbooks and courses, while mine on youtube and a few books.
All above, and some more thinking of mine, and I decided to think that age plays a big role in output, and less in input.
A lot of people who talk about input only, especially in japanese learning community, have learned Japanese while being pretty young, so a lot of them might no realise it doesn’t neccessery work like that for all groups of people.
The person in the video is also young, and getting good at output with only input was probably true for him.
Again, I think it’s possible to kind of develop some kind of passive language. I knew Ukrainian for a long time, from televition, school books, films, some other stuff, but have never used it, and when I would start to use it, it would’t sound to fluent even though I was native (I was thinking a lot about words choise, and now after 3 years I still do, now mostly for sounding good). Now my russian is like that, I haven’t spoken it for 3 years and when I start for some reason, I sound incredibly strage, and cannot find words for simple sentences without effort.
But to know if you do progress or not, you have to speak form time to time to catch that