I'm sort of wanting to practice output again on lang8, but it feels like my active vocabulary and grammar is so random that it's hard and discouraging. I would think of something to try and say in Japanese, then just have no idea how to say it. So I come up with something I know for sure is wrong, and I just don't like doing that. Even if there are corrections, I want to feel at least a little confident that it's right before submitting something. And the corrections sometimes give a way more complicated way to say it because all they have to go on is a vague, grammatically incorrect sentence. I suppose I could srs those corrections because they'd likely be natural Japanese for what I want to say, but I don't know...feels like a random way of learning.

The only reason I want to practice output is because it sounds very motivating and fun, and I don't think i'll get the right skills from my regular srsing because I enjoy using fiction books, so everything is written style Japanese. Do I just have to include conversational Japanese if I hope to communicate better?

So...how can I practice the right grammar from simple->advanced in some kind of systematic way? Am I asking for a textbook? lol. I can understand a lot of grammar like most of Tae Kim, but it just doesn't go into active. How do I get all of this grammar into active use? Well by practicing it of course but sometimes I just...forget...that the grammar point exists? If anyone understands what I'm saying, any advice?

just do it?

obviously we'd all like to write perfectly from the beginning but that's just not gonna happen. think about every other hobby in life and how you can't be an expert from the beginning. eventually you have to dive in.

if you don't think your japanese is a good enough basis to offer good corrections, write your entry in english too. also think about what you want to write and see if you can put it in simpler terms. instead of searching for that one word that means exactly the same thing in english, you might have to describe it.

if there's a grammar point that you really want to get into "active" use, just borrow an existing sentence that uses it and modify it to fit what you want to say, after a couple times you should get used to it.

Quote:Do I just have to include conversational Japanese if I hope to communicate better?

i took a vacation in Tokyo recently. my written skills are leagues better than my listening/conversation skills and i was easily exposed for it, it was like my written skills didn't matter at all. if you have any hope of really communicating with people then you have to practice it. (if you don't care about socializing, which is also fine, feel free to ignore it.)

here's the ajatt article:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...g-creative

i thinkk you just need more input........

Assuming you subscribe to the AJATT method, it might be a good idea to check out antimoon.com, which is for learners of English but explains much more concisely why a lot of the AJATT techniques can work and how to make them work.

In this particular case, the key is to write really simply.
僕はクリスと申します。仕事は料理です。料理の学校に行ったことがあります。その前にほかの仕事がありました。それはコンピュータです。

I would have a lot of trouble writing the sentence, 'I was a computer programmer before I went to school for my current career in the culinary arts' ... but I can easily get the concept across in a bunch of short sentences.

I wouldn't actually post the above on lang-8, I'd probably write slightly more sophisticated sentences, but only slightly. (And I might take the time to look up the proper way to say 'computer programmer' ... ) I also wouldn't post anything nearly as complex as my English sentence, somewhere in-between.

There's no shame in using the very simplest sentences, however, if that's the best that you can do with any confidence. When you do make a mistake in what you thought was correct, if the sentence is simple, then the correction will be simple to understand. As you practice correct output your confidence will grow and so will the length and sophistication of your sentences.

Not that sentences need to be long and sophisticated, if they did, Hemingway would never have been a famous author.

haven't we already proven that the solution to bad output is not "more input"?

When you want to get better something you need to start doing that something...

So, I fail to see how you can improve output if do more input, that simply doesn't make sense.

SomeCallMeChris's suggestion seems a good one.

ya this is one of the major flaws in the ajatt method, and to be fair it is directly related to Krashen's input hypothesis. I just vented about this earlier in an ajatt forum but Krashen's input hypothesis hypothesizes that with enough input you'll just start outputting, you wont be able to help yourself from outputting. And of course it will be somewhat correct because it is parroting all of your input. Well this is a load of baloney and you can totally learn to read and hear very well while at the same time having a very marginal speaking ability. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and it's a disservice to not make that point clear.

dtcamero Wrote:ya this is one of the major flaws in the ajatt method, and to be fair it is directly related to Krashen's input hypothesis. I just vented about this earlier in an ajatt forum but Krashen's input hypothesis hypothesizes that with enough input you'll just start outputting, you wont be able to help yourself from outputting. And of course it will be somewhat correct because it is parroting all of your input. Well this is a load of baloney and you can totally learn to read and hear very well while at the same time having a very marginal speaking ability. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and it's a disservice to not make that point clear.

Actually I disagree; I self studied to reasonable fluency without ever really practising output that much. Japanese babies don't learn how to speak Japanese by practicing speaking it and making mistakes and being corrected, they learn how to speak Japanese by hearing Japanese being spoken around them all day, every day. The same applies, to a lesser extent perhaps, to L2 acquisition I think. Hearing (and crucially, understanding) the same things over and over again (should) result in you being able to reproduce them.

fakewookie Wrote:Japanese babies don't learn how to speak Japanese by practicing speaking it and making mistakes and being corrected

When my son is trying to say something (he is outputting) and gets it wrong I correct him. Then I ask him to say the same phrase again but this time in a correct way. I can't imagine how he would improve his output if he wasn't corrected.

(Actually, I can, but what are the chances of my son hearing the phrase that he mispronounces said by a competent speaker and my son realising that what he was saying was incorrect?)

fakewookie Wrote:Actually I disagree; I self studied to reasonable fluency without ever really practising output that much. Japanese babies don't learn how to speak Japanese by practicing speaking it and making mistakes and being corrected, they learn how to speak Japanese by hearing Japanese being spoken around them all day, every day. The same applies, to a lesser extent perhaps, to L2 acquisition I think. Hearing (and crucially, understanding) the same things over and over again (should) result in you being able to reproduce them.

What Inny Jan said. Babies/children make mistakes when speaking their native language and get corrected all the time. Whether they would self-correct through enough exposure or not is unknown but I remember my neice around the age of maybe 8 or 9 saying things like "drawed" and "throwed" which seems a bit old to still be making those mistakes but nobody ever seemed to bother correcting her so I think she never really realized it was wrong.

dtcamero Wrote:ya this is one of the major flaws in the ajatt method, and to be fair it is directly related to Krashen's input hypothesis. I just vented about this earlier in an ajatt forum but Krashen's input hypothesis hypothesizes that with enough input you'll just start outputting, you wont be able to help yourself from outputting. And of course it will be somewhat correct because it is parroting all of your input. Well this is a load of baloney and you can totally learn to read and hear very well while at the same time having a very marginal speaking ability. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and it's a disservice to not make that point clear.

I have to wonder, though, has anyone gone a *really* long time without forcing output? Like 2+ years? If so, what were the results? I'm considering trying this myself since I'm at around 8 months since I started and have yet to speak to someone in Japanese. I have no necessity to speak any time soon, either, since I probably won't be going to Japan for quite a while. I'm not avoiding output, but I'm not seeking it out, either. Also, I'm at the point now where I can easily follow and enjoy drama, anime, 実況 vieos etc. in raw Japanese, so I'm quite content with just enjoying the input for the time being. And with the amount of media available, I don't see myself getting bored any time soon.

onelove,

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=8928

??

Onelove_yo Wrote:I have to wonder, though, has anyone gone a *really* long time without forcing output? Like 2+ years? If so, what were the results?

Yes, non-existent production ability. And i did force output, just nowhere near enough.

two things:
I think people are forgetting one very important component of krashen's theory, namely that the input has to be comprehensible: "Language acquisition occurs when messages are understood".
If you spend all your time listening to things that are completely incomprehensible to you without also taking the necessary steps to make it comprehensible, and burn out on AJATT, then perhaps you'll end up questioning the theory.

Your output ability is less than your ability to understand in your native language too. Be honest with yourself. Is your comprehension half as good as a native? A quarter as good?
Why then should it surprise you if your speaking leaves something to be desired?

thistime Wrote:

fakewookie Wrote:Actually I disagree; I self studied to reasonable fluency without ever really practising output that much. Japanese babies don't learn how to speak Japanese by practicing speaking it and making mistakes and being corrected, they learn how to speak Japanese by hearing Japanese being spoken around them all day, every day. The same applies, to a lesser extent perhaps, to L2 acquisition I think. Hearing (and crucially, understanding) the same things over and over again (should) result in you being able to reproduce them.

What Inny Jan said. Babies/children make mistakes when speaking their native language and get corrected all the time. Whether they would self-correct through enough exposure or not is unknown but I remember my neice around the age of maybe 8 or 9 saying things like "drawed" and "throwed" which seems a bit old to still be making those mistakes but nobody ever seemed to bother correcting her so I think she never really realized it was wrong.

Sure, but that doesn't contradict what I said. Kids learn how to speak their native language fluently not via practice, but via hearing it constantly. That is why we can all speak our respective native languages. You pick it up naturally, not via some concerted effort to learn it as a baby.

fakewookie Wrote:Sure, but that doesn't contradict what I said. Kids learn how to speak their native language fluently not via practice, but via hearing it constantly. That is why we can all speak our respective native languages. You pick it up naturally, not via some concerted effort to learn it as a baby.

The fact is that as soon as babies can say out loud basic words, they will. And they will continue to do so constantly afterwards, as one's gotta practice this newly acquired skill after all. Kids practice constantly, they cease to be passive learners as soon as they can utter something that resembles "mommy".

As far as learning second language goes, at least we learned English through production rather than comprehension. It didn't really matter whether you could understand what "dog" meant, more important was to be able to translate the Finnish word into English and write essays about your Summer holiday. Of course there was also reading/listening comprehension tasks but production was more important.

Really makes me wonder whether Core's kanji compound>meaning method is optimal. Instead of me trying to reproduce the meaning in Japanese.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:The fact is that as soon as babies can say out loud basic words, they will. And they will continue to do so constantly afterwards, as one's gotta practice this newly acquired skill after all. Kids practice constantly, they cease to be passive learners as soon as they can utter something that resembles "mommy".

that's true


how many kids go on a silent period and then start speaking perfectly? none that i know. they just don't shut up!

I'll share my speaking experience just recently actually (yestarday) but right now I have to get ready for a closing shift.

While kids do start speaking as soon as possible, that's also after quite a long period of passive exposure, a year or so. They then continue practicing output constantly, but it also takes them 12-20 years to become entirely fluent in the language (the longer time frame generally coming from speaking a dialect at home and textbook language in the classroom, slowing down acquisition of both). If you don't think it takes that long, listen into some local teenagers and the oddities (even for your local dialect) in their speech.

Of course they're -comprehensible- by 5 years old, but then, so is any dedicated learner as a foreign language, the mistakes they make are just different.

In any case, whether they are explicitly corrected or not, the blank look of incomprehension and the nod of understanding provide implicit feedback from the time they start speaking on whether or not the message is getting through. Practical questions and requests and the results that ensue provide more concrete feedback, still without anyone saying 'You should say X in that situation because of Y grammar rule, otherwise your sentence is ambiguous.'

It's -obvious- a sentence meant the wrong thing or was ambiguous when you end up with the wrong result because of listener misinterpretation.

From the start of kindergarten, though, speech is formally corrected in the classroom - by the teacher. Even if each student is only given a minor correction once ever week or two, that still means that all the students -hear- several corrections a day - and of course, teachers should have excellent speaking skills to provide as a 'correct model' for students to self-compare against. (I don't think anyone at the pre-K level ever corrects anything that isn't related to hitting and sharing... but maybe language is even taught in some way at that level.)

The above doesn't mean that children who don't go to school don't learn to speak - it just means they learn to speak exactly like their local dialect, which may or may not bear much resemblance to the nation's 'standard' language.

Of course, since being taken in by a Japanese family (or whatever target language) and living with them and attending local schools for a decade or more is an unreasonable learning strategy, I don't think anyone is going to actually learn the way a child does.


In short, the fact that kids start output right away doesn't show that it's the optimal learning strategy for an L2, and also, it's clearly not true that kids learn from absorption alone and without feedback.

Just do it?

I've just recently gone back to doing lang-8 after being gone for two years. I am in a simmilar situation, grammar,comprehension around N4, with some N3 stuff, but my output is just awful. With reviews and new cards I do anywhere from 100-150 cards a day all which make perfect sense to me, but the output just isn't there. To recitfy this I've decided on two things. One is going back to lang-8 and making entries a few times a week, even if I have to look up vocab or pull out a grammar reference, I reason the more I do this, the less I will need look things up. Two I have purchased a book called: Shadowing: Let's speak Japanese, which I'm using to help with spoken output.

leonl Wrote:With reviews and new cards I do anywhere from 100-150 cards a day all which make perfect sense to me, but the output just isn't there. To recitfy this I've decided on two things. One is going back to lang-8 and making entries a few times a week, even if I have to look up vocab or pull out a grammar reference, I reason the more I do this, the less I will need look things up. Two I have purchased a book called: Shadowing: Let's speak Japanese, which I'm using to help with spoken output.

Are those production cards? Using those might help outside lang-8.

nadiatims Wrote:two things:
I think people are forgetting one very important component of krashen's theory, namely that the input has to be comprehensible: "Language acquisition occurs when messages are understood".
If you spend all your time listening to things that are completely incomprehensible to you without also taking the necessary steps to make it comprehensible, and burn out on AJATT, then perhaps you'll end up questioning the theory.

How can I make things comprehensible? I guess things like Read Real Japanese are comprehensible input, but it's a little boring to listen to that all the time, and I don't think that's really input once you've reviewed and understand it, then it's just review without the chance of picking up new words, new contexts, etc. What are some other ways to get some comprehensible input? Children shows and books? The problem is the things I want to do in Japanese aren't that comprehensible. Do you just spend focused time with comprehensible input, and not buy into the need for incomprehensible input? Wait, what exactly is comprehensible? Picking out enough phrases to understand what's going on or is a few words every minute enough?

kudokupo Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:two things:
I think people are forgetting one very important component of krashen's theory, namely that the input has to be comprehensible: "Language acquisition occurs when messages are understood".
If you spend all your time listening to things that are completely incomprehensible to you without also taking the necessary steps to make it comprehensible, and burn out on AJATT, then perhaps you'll end up questioning the theory.

How can I make things comprehensible? I guess things like Read Real Japanese are comprehensible input, but it's a little boring to listen to that all the time, and I don't think that's really input once you've reviewed and understand it, then it's just review without the chance of picking up new words, new contexts, etc. What are some other ways to get some comprehensible input? Children shows and books? The problem is the things I want to do in Japanese aren't that comprehensible. Do you just spend focused time with comprehensible input, and not buy into the need for incomprehensible input? Wait, what exactly is comprehensible? Picking out enough phrases to understand what's going on or is a few words every minute enough?

This is exactly the same doubt I have.

Put any kid on a tangent and they'll just talk. The girl I worked with a few years ago's son used to come to the shop every friday afternoon after school, he'd be about 5-6 and as soon as I told him I liked the pokemon games too, he followed me everywhere. I maybe understood about 20% of what he said to me, but just by nodding and saying yeah. and throwing an opinion about something so it looks like engaging them, kids will go on, and on, and on.. they certainly do plenty of speaking practice given the opportunity.

The difference is kids haven't learned social habits yet, so they'll just talk to anyone and everything about anything. As adults we don't have that luxury, and we don't like to be embarrassed about our mistakes, so we have a tendency to be passive. I can't talk worth a damn, but my listening comprehension (conversationally) is ok. So most of my Japanese friends will just speak to me in Japanese without dumbing anything down for me, my responses are a little more restricted by my speaking ability, but I can fumble a conversation about most stuff (even if it does involve more arm flapping than I wish it did.)

They are not the same skill, not by any stretch of the imagination. Or at least, for me they are not.

kudokupo Wrote:How can I make things comprehensible? ... I don't think that's really input once you've reviewed and understand it, then it's just review.... Wait, what exactly is comprehensible?

Comprehensible input is, as I recall, (for input-theory purposes) knowing about 90% of the words and grammar being used. Of course, that's the threshold for learning without bothering to look things up and study them properly, it's not the threshold for 'useful practice'.

Anyway if you only know 85% of the words in a work, you will still get many individual sentences that are 'comprehensible'. If you only know 50% of the words in a work, there will still be comprehensible sentences here and there, if the work holds your attention in other ways.

Besides which, it's all an unproven hypothesis on language learning anyway, so for practical purposes I take 'comprehensible input' as 'there are many sentences that I can understand'.

I think it's only pure review to go through the same material if you already know 100% of the grammar and vocabulary in it; of course, it cannot provide new illumination if you've already been through it carefully with a dictionary in hand and grammar study in mind, but it can keep patterns fresh in your mind.

I think reviewing the same material is pretty much essential to bridge the gap from learning materials to real native materials, because you can study the vocabulary that you didn't have originally and then rewatch.

I reread and replay Reading Real Japanese every once in awhile, and have Japanese subtitles for a few shows that I rewatch, which in addition to being a crutch to increase comprehension, is a source of accurate vocabulary. I get quickly tired of playing the same clip over as I try to catch a rapidly spoken word, so it's nice to just check the line in the subtitles. The accurate vocabulary can be looked up, SRSed, wordlisted, whatever, so that when I revisit the work my comprehension is higher still.

Mostly, of course, I prefer new material, but I think rewatching/listening/reading is excellent practice. Only with something you enjoy revisiting of course, otherwise it's just drudgery and you'll skim right past everything and absorb nothing, because you think you already know it all and aren't at all engaged.

Oh, and NHK2 has many shows that are relatively simple to follow, and NHK2 can be watched for free on the NTKTV client. And of course the 高校講座 lectures are simply up on the website.