Jarvik7 Wrote:Then again, if you aren't terribly interested in speaking with people why care about your speaking level?

Does anyone else find that comment slightly insulting or is it just me　

Edited to add '' to make comment sound less whiny

pudding cat Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:

pudding cat Wrote:I can't imagine ever going on Skype or shared talk to practise speaking to a stranger. It sounds like my worst nightmare. I wouldn't IM people I didn't know either...

Even if it was someone from a penpal search site? :S

I've never been on a pen-pal search site, is it like a match-making kind of thing?

Just a site to find someone of your target language to practice with.

How can you make friends if you never talk to people you don't know? :S You definitely need to make Japanese friends to become good at the language.

Hmmm, this is an interesting thread, but like the others i don't see the point of artificially practising. Why not just *do* output to practise?

My initial though is...is it even possible to go from not being to speak to speaking full complex sentences, just by studying books and on a PC? Has anyone on this site actually done that?
Surely all language learners start off only being able to say one word replies, then two or three words, then a bit of connecting grammar, it goes from there. Speaking like a baby/idiot and making tons of mistakes is all part of the process, and I'm not sure you can just skip it; just find a good language swap partner, who will correct your mistakes and give constant examples of the right usage.

Next thought - how much are you writing currently? Do you still keep a Japanese diary on lang-8, and if not start one again! That way you can practise output slowly (in non-real time), and look up things you don't know. If you don't know how to say a certain phrase, find an example of what you want to say and copy it. Do this again and again, eventually you should have to look them up anymore.
I've always assumed written output would train spoken output, bit like reading trains our understanding of audio (you just need to "activate" the audio part).

Finally where's mezup when you need him? He says he went from non-speaking (but good understanding ability) to almost fluent in 4 months, via daily conversations with his Japanese house-mates. He's probably a good person to ask how to achieved that.

aphasiac Wrote:My initial though is...is it even possible to go from not being to speak to speaking full complex sentences, just by studying books and on a PC? Has anyone on this site actually done that?

When I first went to Japan I'd just done the core 6000 thing, Genki I and Tae Kim without ever having spoken in the language before, but did fine. I could communicate my thoughts fine right off the plane and after a couple of weeks I was having proper flowing conversations, but my listening ability and vocab was still sucky then.

Before that time I used IM quite a bit though. Basically, if you can write Japanese sentences, you should be able to speak them, albeit with some delay so you can think before you speak.

aphasiac Wrote:Speaking like a baby/idiot and making tons of mistakes is all part of the process, and I'm not sure you can just skip it; just find a good language swap partner, who will correct your mistakes and give constant examples of the right usage.

I don't even think this kind of mistake correction is even necessary. As long as you keep improving your general language level, by listening, reading, conversing and writing then your speaking will improve too. I would just find it annoying to be corrected all the time. Not to mention once you're beyond a certain level, you don't actually think about grammar at all when you speak, it's just automatic. So I'm not mindful enough to apply grammar corrections when I speak let alone even remembering which mistake needs to be corrected.
Anyway, I tend to correct myself a lot when I speak. This is evidence that my ability is improving because I immediately pick up on things that sound odd that I may not have picked up on half a year ago.

IceCream Wrote:@everyone else... yeah, i speak to friends on skype sometimes, and i used shared talk once. i like speaking to friends, and that's nice, and i do understand that real practise is important, etcetc.

But... can we just pretend i didn't mention it's for speaking at all, and go with the resources? Because, i really really think that some structured materials will do me a lot more good than speaking randomly in poor japanese right now. Most of you have used these kinds of materials at some point, but i haven't, so... maybe that's the difference? Anyway, i think that that would give me more confidence.

Especially, i'd like to get to the level in speaking where i can talk about interesting things. I just think that's gonna take a bit more work than just speaking. Because, already i can string together sentences that are understandable but grammatically incorrect... slowly. If i have the sentence patterns, grammar, etc, then surely i'll both be quicker, and more accurate? I'm not sure what's so strange about that idea...?

If that's the case, then why not go through something like Kanzen Master or some other sort of structured grammar workbook while backing it up with a good reference like ADXJG. Should be easy if you already understand a lot of it. The practice questions are enough to make you aware of your weaknesses too. You could even aim for N2 or N1 in December to give yourself a bit of motivation.

Do you tend to skim over stuff for general meaning, or do you actually analyse the structure of sentences and eliminate any question of why a particular word is being used in a particular place? If it's the former, you need to start paying attention to the finer details, and going away to look up things you don't understand, since it's the little things that can make all the difference when you're trying to express yourself exactly how you want.

So yeah, focus on some bookwork if you feel your foundations are so unsteady, but I wouldn't completely eliminate speaking, even if it's just once a week. I initially had some problems that had nothing to do with my 理解力. For example, I'd use だ with よね, even after an い-adjective, which would've be unthinkable in writing or IM. I was using ね in annoying and unnatural ways, struggling with maintaining a consistent politeness level, neglecting to add さん etc. You probably have a ton of knowledge already that you can start to polish off in your speaking, plus you can practice and ask about the new stuff you're learning.

I'm playing around with my srs for speaking practice on my own. I have to get audio though for this one. It's question/reply. I have some basic stuff in there, as well as some random stuff in there. I haven't been doing this for long. But I will tell you how it goes in a few months from now.

IceCream Wrote:1. Grammar drills
i've never done any, and probably should. This should help when trying to make a sentence from scratch rather than saying a ready made phrase. I do have one excersise book, the companion to "an introduction to modern Japanese", which has got plenty... but... it's fairly basic, even at the end. And, it's pretty much textbook Japanese. I can probably work through it really quickly. Any suggestions for more advanced and colloquial workbooks are great! (i don't mind JLPT workbooks, as long as they are not JLPT for JLPT's sake ones, and are actually good).

2. Sentence pattern drills
I guess this is a lot like general grammar drills, and you can find these in textbooks. But i guess practising something like "The X thing about Y is Z" 「XのYところはZ」　with a lot of different X's, Y's, and Z's, might be pretty helpful. Any recommendations for where to find drills like this would be great. Another type of sentence pattern drill i'm looking to do is more academic. For instance, when asking academic questions, or explaining something, it seems like there are particular sentence structures it would be useful to use sometimes. Do i have to find these myself, or are there any resources for that?

How about Japanese: the Spoken Language (JSL) by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Mari Noda?

This series does exactly just that; grammar drills and sentence pattern drills. And it does it only by listening and speaking.

First there are about 10 small conversations (like 2 to 3 sentences), a vocabulary list and then the fun starts. There is a really good explanation of the grammar used in the example conversations and, like a lot of books out there, the author doesn't take you for a 12 year old retard, hell, some people would probably start doubting their English while learning Japanese with this series.

After this there are drills. Every sentence pattern has it's own drill with, usually, 8 to 12 sentences. The way this works is that there are 2 example sentences and for the other sentences there are just the words that need to be used in the conversation.

You listen to the audio where a question is asked or a statement is made and you respond accordingly. There is very little time so you quickly start adjusting to that and after some practice you really start responding very naturally.

The audio used to suck (yeah, it's an old method) but it was all re-recorded and it's available for free! You can either listen to it online or just make up some dandy script to rip the site.

http://languagelab.it.ohio-state.edu/index.php?id=1673

There are 3 books in the series. The first book is somewhere around 370 pages (and mind you, this is 370 pages worth of Japanese and no silly illustration to be found that thinks you're a 12 year old). The audio for the first book is just over 17 hours long so there is a lot of practise.

Now I know there are fans and people who hate it with passion and you can probably look around this forum to find people rooting and people bashing the method and just to be prepared:

Big numero uno bash: "It has only romaji! And how could she possibly think up such an awful way to do it?! Romaji is spelled romazi?!" Or something like that...

Yes, there are no cool kana and kanji... But this book is only about speaking so that should be no problem. When you use the audio you don't even need the book because the question/statement you have to respond to contains the words you need. And it really isn't that hard to read through the grammar explanations without kanji and kana.

And about the romaji being different from good ol' Hepburn, it's only slight different. The book contains a section with the differences and an explanation why she did it different. And it really isn't more than a few hours getting used to it.

If you really care about kanji and kana, there is a supplement for each book with everything in Japanese.

I guess I'm the one rooting for it now so I better quit. This book might not be suited for everyone but to me it seems a perfect solution to your problems.

Hope it helps!

Good article on introverts.. The sentence most relevant to this thread is:

"(Introvets) tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking."

A few years ago I knew a sixteen yr old girl who had studied Japanese completely on her own for a year and half, using books and tapes she borrowed from the library, and no live conversation to speak of. One day when my Japanese friend was visiting we spent an hour with this girl, and my friend later volunteered that the girl's speaking was almost perfect. This probably wouldn't work for everybody, but it sure worked for her.

@Ice Cream:
I've found the thing that helps me most with speaking is sentence patterns. They provide structure for grammar and vocabulary. Even when I can come up with (most of) the grammar and vocabulary I need to form a sentence, it's hard to organize it all on the fly. But if I can plug them into a familiar sentence pattern, I feel more confident about speaking, and can overcome my self-consciousness enough to speak.

I've been using Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication by Taeko Kamiya for a reference on an as-needed basis, but I've recently started studying it systematically, once I realized how useful the patterns were. The book is basic, but that's the nature of sentence patterns. Most of the patterns illustrate grammar points that are familiar to me, but aren't yet ingrained in my subconscious, and don't spring spontaneously from my lips when needed.

The book is well organized, has excellent fonts (important to me), and clear, concise explanations. Most patterns have a head sentence, three example sentences, and three practice sentences with answers. The sentences are short, but not lame, and seem like they'd be good card/drill material.

I understand your wanting to find ready-made drills but I don't know if workbook drills are going to help you much if you're trying to avoid textbook Japanese and looking for something beyond the basics (although it doesn't hurt to review/test yourself on the basics). Do you have access to a decent bookstore where you could browse a lot of different textbooks and their workbooks? And have you searched Anki for possible ready-made decks?

EDIT: The free JSL audio might be worth checking out. I haven't liked the books myself because besides the idiosyncratic romaji, and the outdated language, they're kind of...brutal. But they do seem the most serious of all the textbook series, and I've heard that they continue to a more advanced level than other textbooks.

The Living Language audio looks interesting, but for study purposes I think the Voices from Japan (White Rabbit) is probably better because it appears to be dialogues, i.e. conversations, whereas LL is monologues.

English phrase translation: IMO, no, because it's translation, and you want to be thinking in Japanese. I think it would be better to expose yourself to people speaking colloquially and pick up on how they use what's basically interjections. A while back I made an effort to kind of collect these, but then I slacked off. (Two that come to mind are そおうそおうそおう and うるさい.) Modern dramas and movies are great for this, as is hanging around Japanese speakers, when available.

The other thing that's really helped me is RL written conversation, i.e., emailing with a close friend in Japan. We talk about business, the surf, our dogs, natural disasters (unfortunately), daily life. When I read or write sentences that are relevant and meaningful to my life I retain the sentence elements (grammar, vocab, structure) WAY better than I ever do with made-up sentences. Maybe you know someone that you could do this with?

Javizy Wrote:Is anyone an introvert on the Internet?

Yes me, I'm not particularly introvert in 'real life' but talking to randoms on the internet just doesn't do it for me :/ tried it again just now on shared talk and was not much fun at all. I guess in real life I don't go round talking to random people I don't have anything in common with...

How do you know you don't share anything in common?

By the time you find out whether you do or not, you've had a conversation - boom, there's your Japanese practise!