Resources to practice speaking?

[fjdksleiwoqp]

Any favorite sites/apps/etc. to help practice speaking? I’ve done some of the conversation partner apps, and that definitely helps, but I’d also love to have something that I can practice with solo and on my own schedule. Even just a simple audio chatbot would be amazing, but I couldn’t find much.

Shadowing is helpful, but my weak point is in recalling vocab and grammar in the moment. I made a tiny app that contains a bunch of simple prompts, and that in itself has been really helpful, but I need more variety.

[EbonyMidget]

Online games might be a useful place to try speaking on your own schedule, though I can’t guarantee the quality of the conversation. The other thing that comes to mind is discord. It’s not necessarily spoken but at least in english the text based conversations seem fairly high paced and colloquial so I assume the same would be true of japanese.

[sirati97]

for speaking. either go to japan and there go to nomikais.

if you aint in japan italki is your best bet period

[Gorganite]

Do people just come up to you and talk to you?

[severian]

Nope. I’ve had a random guy on the street once, and he spoke great English, and just wanted to know where I was from out of curiosity. And I’ve chatted to people at concerts, because they’re usually a little interested in why a foreigner in their 20s is interested in enka. Typically, nobody goes out of their way to speak to you though.

Speaking is by far my lowest skill and I’ve been here a year now. I’m not a nomikai kinda guy, so I can’t really use that as a break-in point. I’m actually joining iTalki purely so I can start getting somewhere.

[qwerth8]

iTalki is great. If you just want conversation practice, the community teachers are nearly half the price of professional teachers.

If you’re interested in shadowing, there’s a book called Let’s Speak Japanese that can really help you practice on your own.

[severian]

I had my first trial lesson last night and really enjoyed it, so it’s definitely something I’m going to keep going with. It was a bit surprising realising I spent the entire time speaking Japanese, so I think it’ll help me over a mental hurdle, haha.

I have Let’s Speak Japanese, but I definitely need more practice in actually thinking on the spot and responding in conversation. I need to be more disciplined with learning from it too.

[Gorganite]

I used that book too much never finished it. I got maybe halfway through it. I took if off my bookshelf and said I would read it again…but haven’t done that. Have you found it beneficial for you?

[qwerth8]

I used that book too much never finished it. I got maybe halfway through it. I took if off my bookshelf and said I would read it again…but haven’t done that. Have you found it beneficial for you?

Not super a lot but I like to use it to warm up for my iTalki lessons!

[kakapo]

Typically, nobody goes out of their way to speak to you though.

With that said, I have found that owners of tiny restaurants often like to speak to their foreign customers, especially when there aren’t so many people around (I often take my lunch at 1:30 PM). Maybe I’ve just been lucky

[distantflower]

A casual virtual Japanese class that I’m attending every Saturday might be a decent resource to practice speaking Japanese with native speakers.

If you want less structure without having to follow Genki textbook, on Fridays at the same place has a Japanese & English language exchange, in the form of Shiritori.

Other than that, there are tons of Japanese owned places in Second Life that operate on different days (not all have Voice chat enabled though) but since my Japanese is still basic, I haven’t done the deep dive to crash their events yet. Perhaps someday I’ll work up some courage to do so

[wandering]

Very, very late reply here. But I was looking up speaking resources on the forum and this sounds like exactly what I’m after. I’m wondering if anyone has any advice about which version to get, the beginner one or the intermediate? I’m ~N4ish level/a couple of chapters away from completing Minna no Nihongo 2/level 10 on WK.

[severian]

I’d say get the beginner to intermediate one, and then move up on them. The start of it might feel a little basic, but it’s all gonna be stuff that you need to build on. Basics are basics because they’re often used often, after all.

[wandering]

Thanks for such a swift reply. I was leaning towards the beginner one, I think you’re right. Got to get those basics down

[scarrera]

Join Tandem. Make friends with a japanese obaachan and you can try and set up a chat. I’ve done it a couple of times. But usually a lot of them don’t speak much english so you have to be at a good level of japanese to maintain the conversation.

[FredKore]

Get the beginner one. The grammar and vocab feels really basic but the trick is being able to say it all with the same speed and ease as the native speakers. I’ve used the beginner book and it’s a challenge!

[Asher]

Happy to have people disagree with me on this one, as I know it definitely does not work for some people/may be inconvenient. But imo speech time/even the naturalness of your speech is affected a lot by your speed of thinking, and thinking is something you can practice all day every day.

As an example, narrate everything you are doing in your head (or verbally if no one is around), either are fine. Also, create situations where you can think using uncommon words. For example, if you see two guys standing next to each other on the train, imagine they had a fight, who would win? why? Describe in your head.

At least for me, my speech is directly affected by how much I force myself to think in Japanese. I mainly recommend this because you mention that recalling vocab is your weak point, rather than actually conversing with another person. Half of the trouble with a conversation is knowing what you want to say afterall.

[fjdksleiwoqp]

I finally picked up that Shadowing - Let’s Speak Japanese book / CD (mp3s) and it’s fantastic.

Wish I got it years ago -_-

[s1212z]

For anyone interested, I posted this speech deck on Kitsun last week that uses speech-to-text as a pronunciation threshold for productive entry SRS.

The general idea to have a method to shadow/read/output and develop pronunciation habits independently.

Summary

Get Deck here

What is it?

Using FORVO’s useful travel phrases and expression, this deck is intended to be used by a verbal dictation keyboard speech to text (STT). Each card includes two distinctive native audio samples.

Everyday phrases
Banking
Receiving care
Flirting
Shopping
Getting around
Drinking & dining
Directions & locating

Layouts include:
Reading from Japanese - Read aloud the phrase, dictate verbal entry

Audio Shadow - Listen to the native audio phrase, repeat via dictate verbal entry

Sentence Recall from English - Test your recall to remember the Japanese phrase from English

All my STT tests we done with iphone. I check most entries and were able to reproduce the text entry (if you have issue, please let me know and I can test to confirm).

Be sure to have a Japanese keyboard enabled for speech dictation

Samples