What are your strategies for dealing with plateaus. When I'm in Japan, I spend a decent amount of my time speaking Japanese, but I find myself using the same forms and grammar over and over. Only my vocabulary seems to improve - so complex sentence structures elude me. Sometimes I know peculiar vocabulary (社交辞令 or that sort of thing), but don't know the simplest structures (things that would be in Intermediate Dictionary of Grammar).

I've tried to occasionally review and purposefully use new formats, but that rarely works. I've never made it through the full Core decks (did RTK, though), but I can do basic conversational Japanese without too many issues. But if I turn on NHK or something, I get a very small percentage.

Curious how you approach - do you find making your own sentence decks with new grammar is helpful? Do you put in multiple sentences with the same structure? I found Core was just adding vocabulary more than grammar for me.

You can phrase the same idea in an easy to understand or a hard to understand way, with the only differences being the rarity of the individual words used, and the number of words a speaker or author strings together into individual sentences. For instance, above, I used a long sentence to convey a thought, but I could've also phrased it this way: "Short sentences and common words make it easy to understand someone. Long sentences and rare words make it harder. You can express the same idea the easy way or the hard way."

There is no reason why you should want or need to be able to speak in long sentences, using complex patterns, as you're learning a language. You should just learn new things by exposing yourself to large amounts of comprehensible input. Once you're able to comprehend more complex patterns and new words, you should start practicing them by communicating in writing. Trying to use something for the first time in conversation is uncomfortable (both for you and the people you're speaking to, who have better things to do than being your audience as you're learning the intricacies of their language). Communicating in writing gives you the time you need to get it right, and it allows natives to read it at their own, faster pace.

That is how I approach Japanese, and it's how I approached it other languages in the past as well. Worked out fine.

I have heard that a lot of accomplished writers practice writing by copying writers that they admire. Simply typing or writing entire essays verbatim. I can say from experience that extensively "copying the masters" is how art schools the world over train painters and sculptors. It gives you the concentration to notice small details, how other artists solve problems, and gives you practice doing things in a variety of different ways.

I believe once you get to a certain linguistic skill level and set in your grammar and lexical habits, it's too easy to just keep doing things the way that works, so you need to consciously practice doing things out of your normal routine. I can say from experience that simply reading and possessing an extensive passive vocabulary doesn't translate into active practice. "Copying the masters" is probably the best exercise to train yourself out of your default patterns.

This isn't to say that I've tried any this, and the only "research" I'm aware of is anecdotal, but it's something I've been wanting to find time to do myself.

I'm having the same thing happen right now, myself! I'm in Japan for the first time, and while I'm proud of all the perfectly effective conversations I've had these past 2 months here, I feel like I'm just taking the same sentences and using find+replace to make the words fit the new context. I want to expand and grow more.

Unfortunately, I don't really know a solution either... but here's what I'm doing:

- Read a random chapter of Tae Kim every night. I've read the whole thing before, and now I have the app on my phone so it's easy to re-read any time. This keeps grammar rules fresh in my head, and I try to apply the thing I read about the night before the next day. For example, last night I re-read the "need to" chapter, so today I'm trying to find opportunities to use that grammar. 2 successes already and it's only 11am!

- Use lots of sentence-ending things like ね、よ、わ、ねえ and つもり、はず, etc. Things without an English equivalent. I guess this isn't really varying the grammar structure, but because there's no English equivalent for those, I tend to forget to use them unless I actively try to. I think they make your sentences sound more natural, and they help me remember I'm speaking a new language, not translating from English. I think trying to translate from English is what causes a lot of my redundant sentence patterns, unfortunately... gotta lose that mindset fast!

I like yogert's suggestion of "copying the masters" (how funny, I'm an art student at an atelier and we copy Rembrandt all the time!). I recently downloaded Durarara with Japanese subs and am watching a bit, then re-winding and saying the dialogue along with the seiyuu. This is good practice for accent/inflection of course, but I think it also helps expose you and really make you aware of a variety of sentence patterns. When you say them you get them into your head, and hopefully, with enough reps, you can recall those patterns and use them later. You're not learning grammar rules with the hope of doing word math in the middle of a conversation, you're memorizing chunks of phrases and patterns. That's how language works, in the end.
...that said, haven't practiced the anime-talk-along much yet, but I'm hopeful about it.

I'm interested to see other's suggestions too. Of course speaking complexly isn't the most important thing in the word - it's not even necessary! - but it's something I'd like to be able to do in my quest to learn Japanese.

I have the same problem when using Korean and, though I've never tried it, have always thought some form of copying would be the best way. I can attest that it works with creative writing (you try to copy a writer's style and suddenly that style becomes yours), at least, and a popular Korean blogger used a variation of it to learn English, with great success:

"Then came reading and writing. I began by reading my favorite books that were available in English, starting with Les Miserables, then Brothers Karamazov. Even after I built a decent-sized mental storage of vocabularies, I still had trouble reading a long sentence with a complex structure. Well then – you can guess what’s coming. Whenever I had trouble deciphering a sentence, I wrote it down and memorized it whole. Whenever I had a chance to write, I tried to incorporate the new sentence structure I learned, plugging in different vocabularies that I memorized.

I did all this for roughly two years. (By the last semester of my senior year I no longer felt the necessity.)"

(http://askakorean.blogspot.kr/2010/01/ko...-best.html)

Of course, this mostly involves writing, but in my experience, once you know how to write a certain way it's not a huge leap to being able to speak that way in conversation as well.

書くのは自分のペースでできるので理解がよくでき、 自信がつき、とても大事なことです。

[RawToast]

haplology, I think you may with to try out lang8.com; many people on here have used lang8 for improving their output (writing). On lang8 you can push yourself and try new grammar patterns and vocabulary without worrying about being wrong. To give you an idea, many people start off writing sentences that are similar to Google's translations and no-one cares -- it's the effort that counts

You will have to try speaking later (sadly you don't learn to speak just from writing ), but it will give you a base to work from.

I second lang-8. Great resource.

So, how exactly do you practice "writing" by copying? You just re-write the sentence (type it? by hand?) and... maybe copy it a couple more times? Do you re-write the sentence exactly, and then play with it by replacing vocabulary or changing a couple things, just as an excuse to spend more time with it? Should you pop these in anki and systemically re-write sentences? How do you know you've re-written a sentence well enough?
I suggested copying speaking because once you can say it with good flow, you know you understand it as a whole and it's coming naturally. Writing seems more difficult to know if it's working. Maybe I should just try it...

By the way, I think pure exposure to native materiel is worth a mention here too. See a thousand complex sentences in books, games, TV shows, etc, and you're bound to produce one on your own without thinking about it. Monkey see monkey do.

Just copying essays verbatim. No need to srs them.

Regarding speaking over writing and handwriting over typing, it makes sense to practice what you want to get better at. If you are interested in becoming good at public speaking, practice reciting the speeches of someone you think gives great speeches. If you are more interested in becoming better at writing, find an essay that you really think is well written and type it(or part of it) out verbatim. If you are interested in being a good conversationalist, maybe shadowing someone you admire their conversation style on a talkshow, and/or reciting the script.

It's just a tool to get you used to producing different words and grammar patterns. I believe the "producing" part is what makes this technique different than reading or listening. But reading and listening are definitely part of the mix as well.

A friend and accomplished interpreter/translator put it to me this way: "If you want to improve, you have to change your situation." Language depends heavily upon context. If you find yourself saying the same things to the same people, go talk to different people. Do different things. The language required for chatting at a cafe is not the same as that required to participate in a film club, argue politics, or go to a coffee tasting. Do things that you haven't yet done in the language, and you'll pick up the appropriate language along the way.

In situations like that I've made progress only with the aid of a good teacher. They normally have curriculums that will introduce new grammer and vocabulary gradually. And every week they have part of the lesson as conversation, and will intentionally steer the conversation to make use of the grammer and vocbulary that was recently introduced. By reinforcing the new grammer in reading, writing, speaking and listening, week after week after week, the material gradually became natural to me.