Hi everybody,

So, my 先生 suckered me into participating in a Japanese speech contest that's coming up in April. I've got to have my first draft finished by this weekend, though. I'm in the 一年生 division, so I only need to fill 3-4 minutes, no more and no less, or else I am docked a few points.

My first problem is that I can't think of anything to talk about! My Japanese isn't great. I've been following the philosophy of "input before output", which has served me well until now.

So, any ideas on a speech topic? What would be something easy to talk about for 3-4 minutes in Japanese? It doesn't have to be incredibly simple. I can memorize like crazy I just need a topic right now. Any ideas? Also, if anyone knows some good jokes I could incorporate (もちろん、日本語で!） with the suggested topic, that would be awesome.

Thanks! I hope somebody can come up with something... because I can't think of anything.

-セス

Hydroponics.

~J

Just toss a "yes we can" in the end and you'll rock it.

はい、我々は出来ます!

Hydroponics? Eh... I only know what I learned from Weeds. It's unfortunate, but true.

Anymore ideas?

Talk about how you think watching movies, reading manga, using real Japanese sources and not made up conversations from textbooks is a better way to learn.

Also say in your speech that this speech was difficult to do because you're forced to output at such an early stage, you spent more time thinking "Is this right or not?" instead of actually making the speech.

Then your teachers corrects you, so the teacher pretty much makes your speech and you feel no sense of accomplishment and your confidence in Japanese plummets to such low levels that you need medication

I was seriously considering trying to talk about the importance of input in this speech. How could I go about that, though?

Also, are there any things Japanese people always do when making a speech? Any big things not to do? I know Japanese culture is against hand-waving and such.

Some general advice:

* You're low level, I doubt you have to care about the proper Japanese way to hold a speech. I mean you COULD write the whole speech in keigo, but I doubt it would sound good.
* Talk about something you know the keywords for. If you don't know the Japanese way to say "input before output", don't write about it. If you notice you need a dictionary to write the speech, that's a good sign that you're writing about something too hard.
* Do NOT write an English draft. Write it in Japanese from the get go. It's classic when students write an English speech, translate it into Japanese and then notice it sounds extremely bad.

Wow, you have an excuse to use filler words, just make them Japanese! Just repeat them for 4 minutes and say you're imitating a Japanese person who gives poor speeches. Also, you might have recently read about how Japanese people are okay with racial caricatures such as blackface, but I recommend against that here. ;p

sethg Wrote:I was seriously considering trying to talk about the importance of input in this speech. How could I go about that, though?.

私の経験で文法を覚えることや実勢的な日本語を使わないでことなどをつまらないんですから、どうしようかなと思っています。私が漫画や日本語である映画を大好きなので・・・

Perhaps that helps? I'm sure some of it's not correct Japanese

sethg Wrote:Also, are there any things Japanese people always do when making a speech? Any big things not to do? I know Japanese culture is against hand-waving and such.

Japanese speeches are boring, so act like a robot without emotion and you should be OK. And more often than not, they read from a piece of paper, at least from my experience.

Actually, there's a good way to work humor in there. I was subjected to a speech (in English - well, sorta - I was the only one who understood every word he said. Try to imagine the phrase "road flares" pronounced without distinguishing L and R) by the Japanese president of a company we were working with. He worked in some English jokes that we're pretty sure he found on the Internet somewhere, but since his intonation was so robotic, it was the perfect deadpan delivery and ended up being really hilarious. Apparently he does a speech like this every year, and he really does have a great sense of humor, so by now I have to believe that it's intentional. So if you could pull off the "robotic" Japanese speech with some authentic but really bad and barely related jokes (the longer the setup and lamer the punchline, the better), you could end up with a pretty humorous result.

I just saw some of the last episodes of the office and Michael gave a speech like that. Well, it was Michael-like, so take care.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. Yeah, I'm gonna do my best to keep to the grammar I know. Right now the strongest possibility for such a thing, I'm thinkin, would be a speech on the usefulness of kanji. I could maybe bring up the ease with which one can guess the meanings of difficult/unusual words with kanji.

Any suggestions for examples? Example sentences would be great, too. I'm pretty nervous about this thing. My knowledge of grammar doesn't go far beyond the particles は、が、も、て、に、を and へ. We're just now using ~ました and ～です, and although I can read and understand more grammatically complex structures than that, I'm not sure I can use them myself.

Tobberoth Wrote:Some general advice:
* Talk about something you know the keywords for. If you don't know the Japanese way to say "input before output", don't write about it. If you notice you need a dictionary to write the speech, that's a good sign that you're writing about something too hard.
* Do NOT write an English draft. Write it in Japanese from the get go. It's classic when students write an English speech, translate it into Japanese and then notice it sounds extremely bad.

I beg to disagree. From my experience, making a speech is a great opportunity to learn new words, sentence patterns, collocations, cultural differences and other things - even kanji.

IMHO, when you make a speech you have to try to speak about something that

you

like and care about
would like to share with other people
have something that only you can say, something unique/original

and at the same time, you have to speak about something that your audience

will find interesting in some way
will gain something from it

Then, if you lack some words, sentence patterns or anything, put your list of references into work. You can use online or offline dictionaries (monolingual or J-E), Lang-8 (unless you think that would be unfair to use it for a public speech because the other participants probably don't know it), your 先生 and 先輩 (せんぱい), websites, etc...

Of course, you have to be careful with your writing, and check it lots of times. Anyway, unless you make lots of mistakes -and you will- you won't learn much from the experience, so take courage and play with your ideas and the language!

頑張れ！

sethg Wrote:Hey guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. Yeah, I'm gonna do my best to keep to the grammar I know. Right now the strongest possibility for such a thing, I'm thinkin, would be a speech on the usefulness of kanji. I could maybe bring up the ease with which one can guess the meanings of difficult/unusual words with kanji.

Any suggestions for examples? Example sentences would be great, too. I'm pretty nervous about this thing. My knowledge of grammar doesn't go far beyond the particles は、が、も、て、に、を and へ. We're just now using ~ました and ～です, and although I can read and understand more grammatically complex structures than that, I'm not sure I can use them myself.

I have no idea how you can pull off a 3-4 minute speech with such a limited range of grammar. I've learned a bit more, and I probably still couldn't pull off a 3-4 minute speech.

I would suggest if you don't know it already, learn the　～のが　and 楽しみにするconstructions--that way to can talk about what you like, what is hard, what you are looking forward to, like:

ゴルフするのが好きです。 - I like playing golf.
毎日日本語のクラスに来るの楽しみにします。-I look forward to coming to Japanese class everyday.
日本語を学ぶのが易しいです。 -Learning Japanese is pleasant.

Knowing て form for adjectives is helpful to:

先生は優しくて、面白いです。 Professor is kind and fun/interesting.

Hopefully these are all correct and can give you some ideas of what to write.

頑張ってください！

EDIT: Took extra い　out of 楽しみ. Hopefully you can read the kanji I used (either by rikaichan or be having them memorized already)

Maybe we're putting the cart before the horse (wait, is that a kanji?). Anyway, do you have to make up this speech from scratch? Is this one of those where it's obvious the winner's speech was NOT written by the speaker based on the level of vocabulary, flow, and feel?

Basically are you having to show your ability at speaking Japanese from a prepared source, or on the preparing of the source?

Yeah, yeah, we always assume the later.

Sebastian Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Some general advice:
* Talk about something you know the keywords for. If you don't know the Japanese way to say "input before output", don't write about it. If you notice you need a dictionary to write the speech, that's a good sign that you're writing about something too hard.
* Do NOT write an English draft. Write it in Japanese from the get go. It's classic when students write an English speech, translate it into Japanese and then notice it sounds extremely bad.

I beg to disagree. From my experience, making a speech is a great opportunity to learn new words, sentence patterns, collocations, cultural differences and other things - even kanji.

It goes against the whole idea of input before output. Trying to make a speech using words and patterns you don't know = outputting stuff you haven't had enough input of. You won't learn much from it (since you were the one writing it, not a native, you can't expect it to be natural good Japanese). It's also extremely error prone.

Output what you know to get better at outputting it. Don't output things you don't know since you will fail.

Tobberoth Wrote:It goes against the whole idea of input before output. Trying to make a speech using words and patterns you don't know = outputting stuff you haven't had enough input of. You won't learn much from it (since you were the one writing it, not a native, you can't expect it to be natural good Japanese). It's also extremely error prone.

Output what you know to get better at outputting it. Don't output things you don't know since you will fail.

I agree. This was obviously supposed to be a volunteer student thing that the teacher has turned into a 'I must pick someone' thing. Then railroaded a student into it that didn't want it.

If you really wanted it, you wouldn't even have asked us. If you don't really want it, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

I was in one of these short speech contest things my second year of high school Japanese. Basically, I wrote a speech in English; my teacher translated it and taught it to me. During the one-on-one time with the teacher, she focused on helping me with pronunciation and intonation. I wasn't very good, but I learned a lot from the extra time I spent on Japanese then. My pronunciation of "つ" improved. I got a little medal for participating (as did everyone else). It wasn't that bad.

I would suggest writing something in English first and doing your best to translate it with the tools you have--textbook, sample sentences, dictionary or whatever. If you have to turn in a first draft, that probably means your teacher expects to have to help you with problem areas.

Edit: Regarding the output thing -- I think it's safe to try and fail with the output here because it will be corrected (I assume). What you will be learning for the speech contest will not be what you've written but the fixed version.

Edit2: a topic -- I just saw in the member's list that you have 395 kanji. Make that at least 500 by the time of the contest, and then you can start out by saying how incredibly brilliant you are for knowing that many kanji when you're only in 1st year Japanese. I think you could make that work as a joke if you tie it in well with the rest of the speech. Talk about using stories to remember kanji and input to help with listening and speaking. If you don't know the word for input, you can say something like listening to Japanese music and watching Japanese movies as much as possible.

Toastmasters has a lot of tips and so forth for speeches. It's even possible they're the ones running the event, so it wouldn't hurt to see what they say: http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCate...aking.aspx (see also the links at the bottom of that page)

Pick a topic that people get passionate about. Then you can have fun with rhetorical questions. Top two rhetorical question tricks:

Pick a rhetorical question key to your topic. Ask this at least once every forty-five seconds.

Pick rhetorical questions whose answers will be opposite to what the audience will think "ought" to be the case. Ask each of these questions once normally, then again in an incredulous tone of voice.

Catchphrases you can repeat regularly help too. With a sprinkling of this, you can easily cut it down to a 2-3 minute speech in terms of unique content.

~J

Wow, thanks for all the help guys. And thanks for the grammar, strugglebunny! Those are incredibly useful!

Yes, I have to write the speech myself. On Wednesday I was planning to maybe meet a Japanese friend so he could help me flesh it out and get it to an acceptable level of Japanese. Nothing too complex, but error free and without TOO much repetition.

There's no real "first draft" phase that I'm aware of. I just know I have to read my speech by Friday. After that, I'll have until April 4th to memorize and perfect it. Although this does go against the path I'd like to follow in learning Japanese, I'm stuck with it and I'm going to attempt to make the most of it. If I can get the whole thing checked over by a couple of native Japanese, I'll feel a lot better and can eventually even use it for sentence mining

Anyway, I've got a geology exam to cram for...

I advise against using anything you produce yourself, even with assistance, for sentence mining.

Also, strugglebunny has an error; you want 楽しみ, not 楽しいみ.

~J

Tongue out was purposed to serve as an indication of sarcasm. Thanks for the advice, though.

Ah, fair enough. See edit for additional warning, though.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:I advise against using anything you produce yourself, even with assistance, for sentence mining.

Also, strugglebunny has an error; you want 楽しみ, not 楽しいみ.

~J

Whoops! I always do that. :/

theasianpleaser Wrote:私の経験では文法を覚えることや実勢的な日本語を使わないでことなどをつまらないんですから、どうしようかなと思っています。私が漫画や日本語である映画を大好きなので・・・

私の経験では、文法を覚えることや実勢的な日本語を使うなどはつまらないのですから、どうすればいいかなぁと思っていました。漫画や日本語である映画が大好きなので。。。

正しく書いたと思うんだけど。間違いあれば教えてね。

Using を next to つまらない is incorrect, it's が (due to being a preference/opinion)

It's late, so I might be wrong, blah.