Natural Emergence of Speech

Japanese
#1

Hi everybody :slight_smile:

I would love to hear about your experience becoming conversational in Japanese, and whether it happened naturally or required a lot of training.

I speak German as my native language and more or less taught myself a lot of English just by consuming English-speaking media in my teens. Interestingly, at one point speech just magically emerged, and speaking was no problem at all. However, I never practiced for it.

Now I wonder: my approach to learning Japanese is quite different as Japanese is so much different than german that I can’t rely on immersion only. Therefore, I split my study into kanji, vocab, grammar and immersion. I basically brute-forced my way through kanji and vocab for the first 2-3 years of my journey, and now relised I need to focus on my grammar to make the immersion work better. I feel like I’m pretty close now to “snowballing” through immersion, which is great, but I’d really love to become conversational.

Now my question: did any of you experience such a speech breakthrough in Japanese as well or did you have to put in the same effort as for vocab, kanji and grammar?

As an interesting read, I think there is an actual theory behind this but I’m not sure if it’s quite the same or even an effective way of reaching speech.

#2

Practicing speaking is important. Yeah, listening helps speaking and reading helps writing- but the only way to get good at speaking is listening.

As far as the order I learned Japanese,

  1. I took classes with genki. Teacher has you practice all 4
    (approx 400 hours) (2009-2016)
  2. After I graduated I reviewed (bunpro n5, lingo deer) and studied kanji
    (approx 200 hours) (2020)
  3. Moved to Japan. Plenty of speaking practice and reading shonen manga. Used Nihongo Lessons’ Japanese dictionary. Did listening reviews.
    (approx 400 hours) (2022)
  4. I did the N3 Quartet grammar deck. Passed N4. Watched Anime with subs. Continued Nihongo Lessons. Became an active poster on Bunpro
    (approx 400 hours)(2024)
  5. Read my first novel. Played visual novels. Started reading Japanese dictonary Weblio. Got a mining work flow that works for me. Got a Japanese tutor. Wrote two essays from Quartet.
    (approx 200 hours) (now)

I decided in 2024, I’m at the level where immersion is more important than drills. My grammar is way behind my vocab- but if I can read a novel it’s apparently good enough. The sentences I say are all 五年間ここで勤めています。日本語が難しいけど、毎日どんどん上手になります。ゆっくりと言ってください。日本語分かるように頑張ります！
(I said this when I requested a quote on Kankaku and then they called me 怖い) Which - I’m pretty sure every word and grammar used is N4 or N5 but my friends say I sound like N3?