Hi All,

My girlfriend may come stay with me in Japan for a little while but she speaks zero Japanese. However, she is willing and interested to learn some of the laguage, but is not dedicated in the long-term sense of becoming literate (but she'll learn Hiragana and Katakana for basics). This has its limitations, but she is a very social person and willing to study the spoken language, so I think she may make some decent progress.

I know the study methods discussed on this forum often promote input over output, but are there any resources or approaches to an slightly more output-based approach? I'm thinking of setting her up with anki and a purely aural deck that prints some basic vocab for each sentence. The anki deck and audio blogs (Japanese P0D 101 etc) will help get her up to natural, common questions and short phrases (I think/hope), but what about something that actively gets her speaking more?

This question also kind of applies to me, as my interest in Japanese is much more about literature and I find myself reading far more than speaking, so some suggestions to start actively prompting myself with output demands or some ways that people have found really help with their output generation would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
k.

Just start with an accurate travel phrase book, Rhinospike it, make an Anki deck out of it, and go from there, I say. Would be a good way to get up to speed for her if she's willing to jump right into Anki.

Holy smokes, just looked up rhinospike! sounds awesome -- is that really good in practice? Thanks for the recommendation!

Is SRSing really the best way to learn to speak? Believe it or not, but you don't need a SRS to remember stuff, and for speaking, you probably need more exposure than an SRS will give (in terms of spaced repetition).

Something like Michel Thomas may be the way to go, in terms of quickly grasping some basic conversation skill.

Well I've met some foreigners here in Japan that are at the JLPT N4 level or so that focus pretty much solely on conversation and are quite competent. I am somewhere around N2 level now and I'd say some of these people are much better at conversation than I am, but all I ever do is read and listen -- point is, my current impression is that whatever one focuses on they will get good at and any formal study beyond basic grammar isn't a huge necessity (as far as intro conversation skills go).