K so I'm still learning and I've only been at it for 1.5 years now but I can understand quite a bit and generally follow what I'm watching/reading. Recently made quite a few Japanese friends and they all speak Japanese to each other... trouble is it feels like I don't understand even half of what they hell they say to each other.

Makes me think though, like anything the only way to learn to understand real conversation is to just listen to it endlessly until it becomes clear. Scripted stuff is helpful but still quite different I think.

I'm interested to know others experience that have studied Japanese outside of Japan for an extended period of time, doesn't matter which method, then suddenly been immersed in lots of real Japanese conversation. What was it like for you?

Scary at first. Although it does become easier when you just keep listening to it over and over again. For me I could understand what was being said, but there was phrases/words i didn't understand at all.

I remember there was a site about people talking about a variety of subjects. All audio, so you can keep listening to it over and over again until you understand it also you can download the audios. I think personally that once you've reached a certain level, you can learn purely by listening/reading only.

Real conversation is much tougher than scripted stuff. Playing games, reading novels, watching drama, it's all pretty simple to follow.

I came to Japan last September, and my conversation-following has improved greatly, but is still much poorer than when watching things like drama. For instance, I'll be in a group of Japanese people having fun, and I can follow their conversation, but can't necessarily participate too actively. Granted, this varies on how well I know the people and my own personality, etc, etc

One thing I've found helpful is to watch game shows/gaki no tsukai/unscripted things.
I've often heard people way "watch/listen to the news, it's the best way to get used to spoken Japanese"
The news is actually one of the easier(est?) things to understand.

I agree with Asriel. Unscripted stuff is wayyyyy harder than scripted stuff. For me personally I'm finding that nowadays my mind has switched to full Japanese when watching things or trying to go into a conversation. I don't really worry about translating stuff, i had that problem with auto-translating in my head. But nowadays all i did was watch/listen to a lot of japanese and it corrected it.

I've found out through experience that, if you keep watching things over and over again you will eventually understand all of it. So news, keep watching it/srs stuff related to it and you will be able to understand all of it in due time, same with music,dramas,animes and anything else in japanese that one has difficulties with.

Yeah news definitely isn't too hard especially cos it follows a set format every single time. Conversation is so sporadic, fast and choppy and it changes from one moment to the next. The good part is it's super interesting

Few of my friends we're telling scary stories for like an hour straight cos this one girl was real into them and one of them kept giving her a fright. She screamed pretty loud right in the middle of a busy mcdonalds, twice. Haha. Good times.

One thing I noticed though is that there are certain patterns in real speech that everyone seems to follow and it's pretty much the only way to pick them up by listening to real conversation. Sucks not being able to participate to actively though...

You may not want to judge your ability based on Japanese people talking to each other. I've been studying for over 10 years now and I still have trouble understanding some Japanese people when they speak to each other. I've been told the same thing about even my own speech when I talk to other Americans (in English) vs. directly to the Japanese people.

Yeah, there are plenty of subtleties in native speech that are pretty hard to pick out but I want to be able to follow conversations well enough to participate actively in them.

I find that podcasts like the ones from TBS I listen to are an equivalent level of speech. Although the topic is predefined the presenters just talk shit to eachother about the subject and it's fast and difficult to understand.

What i do nowadays is listen/watch a lot of things that aren't subtitled in Japanese. It increases my understanding now the more i listen to it. Also nowadays I'm also aiming on reading 20-50 pages of Japanese daily.
A lot of drama scripts,news,music I love to read daily.

For me it is almost the other way round. I can understand a good portion, probably the majority, of when Japanese people are talking to each other but I am pretty much lost when it comes to news.

That probably comes from the fact that I started studying Japanese BECAUSE I had a lot of Japanese friends around me who would always talk in Japanese. I remember the days when I would spend hours without them saying an English word and I had no Japanese ability whatsoever. I guess subconsciously I picked up something...

ThomasB Wrote:For me it is almost the other way round. I can understand a good portion, probably the majority, of when Japanese people are talking to each other but I am pretty much lost when it comes to news.

That probably comes from the fact that I started studying Japanese BECAUSE I had a lot of Japanese friends around me who would always talk in Japanese. I remember the days when I would spend hours without them saying an English word and I had no Japanese ability whatsoever. I guess subconsciously I picked up something...

If you keep listening/exposing yourself to Japanese you learn a lot of things subconsciously. Just this month I noticed I could understand japanese for japanese. Without inner-translation. Which I hated at times, because it was automatic. Once you reach a certain level, you can learn a lot from just listening to something over and over again. Same applies to readings. I'm trying to read a lot of japanese things nowadays. At least 20 pages daily.