So I wanted to practice conversation but there are almost no japanese speaking people around here.

So I wanted to try finding someone online to talk too, but it feels so odd and uncomfortable.

Not that there is anything wrong with them..but the whole proces feels really of to me .

Sure I learn allot but I dunno maybe I suck at making contacts I cannot really see in person. On top of that how close as we can get they are still strangers I have never seen before or known before.

Has anyone tried getitng contacts with japanese over the Internet?
How did that go ?

Hey! The best thing you do is go to lang-8.com and write entries, find correctors that have similiar interests. I made great experiences like that and found someone who is decades older than I am, however, is such a nice and open person I can tell anything to!!! Try it

I decided to try and make friends through a different channel rather then the classic lang-8 style of language exchange. I decided to play a game I had played a few times before, but this time to do it on a Japanese server. On my game profile I put up a little note saying something like "I'm studying Japanese and so want to make Japanese friends, feel free to message me". I felt really weird putting that there, but it did mean that I got a few messages from people interested to talk to me (and helped to prevent people attacking my account ).

The main way I connected with people though was by talking to people in the alliance that I had joined. It was pretty hard considering my vocab consisted of nothing relating to war and strategies. However, for some reason the in-game chat stopped working and so a few people decided to use skype to communicate. Through skype I started talking to two people fairly regularly. They both seemed really nice but one guy was slightly creepy, used pretty complex grammar and never really fixed or helped me with my Japanese (It wasn't very good at that point).

The other guy though I kept talking to a couple times a month for maybe 8 months or more before I went to Japan. (This was all typed chat btw). I had never seen his picture or heard his voice until right before I went to Japan when he called me and I only heard his voice for a few seconds because I freaked out and couldn't remember how to say anything in Japanese ^.^"

After being in Japan for 3 months though I asked him if he wanted to meet up, and we did meet up in Tokyo. It was fairly awkward and considering my lack of speaking ability it was kind of hard to talk. However, we did still have fun. I continued talking to him via chat when I was back in Australia, and last month met him for a second time when I came back to Japan. This time was a lot less awkward and was heaps of fun. I now have a very good friend.

I definitely recommend trying to make friends via the internet, but maybe try a different approach like I did. (I played a game called travian). That way you have something to talk about in the beginning. Also hope that the people you find have similar interests so that they stay interesting to talk to.
Stay away from creeps

頑張ってね

P.S. sorry for such a long post ^^

Purrlsta Wrote:I decided to try and make friends through a different channel rather then the classic lang-8 style of language exchange. I decided to play a game I had played a few times before, but this time to do it on a Japanese server. On my game profile I put up a little note saying something like "I'm studying Japanese and so want to make Japanese friends, feel free to message me". I felt really weird putting that there, but it did mean that I got a few messages from people interested to talk to me (and helped to prevent people attacking my account ).

A great idea! And a great story, thanks for sharing it! lang-8 isn't for me either. So I decided to approach it similarly to you, involving games to get some output, 囲碁 mainly, and personal blogs. So I don't have to hope to find someone having the same interests or something in common to build upon. I tried irc, once, too. Though its difficult to connect to the Japanese servers, and the time difference has to be taken into consideration also. Austria and Japan is 7+, not so bad as between Austria and my beloved Kiwis. So, whatever helps to get in touch, in a way that feels comfortable, I guess.

How many people have you talked to? Language exchange offers some good ice-breakers, but it doesn't mean you have anything in common. I've made maybe 5 friends - three of which I've met - after talking to at least a couple of hundred people. A lot of the time you'll realise it's not really working after the initial 'why are you studying Japanese?' type conversation trail. Some people I can talk to for a while on Skype and then the conversations kind of dry up.

You can't force relationships with people, so you just have to play the odds. If you're going through slow e-mail or bulletin board processes to eventually get to Skype, I can understand why you'd be frustrated. Try using Shared Talk instead. You can talk to people one-off with the voice or text chat there, and if the convo goes well, you can exchange Skype details. Remember you're after language exchange; long-term friendship is a big bonus that happens sometimes.

That Video game idea sounds great, looking based on interest might work.


Anyways Javizy: My problem is not '"it takes too long'' but I do not feel so comfortable doing it. Especially when they are girls , it creates this unwanted man-woman tension.

But on a period of maybe like 3 months since I started looking for contacts .
I talked to like maybe 15 people and some of them I added on skype. My frustration isn't that it takes to long. Meeting Japanese people online is much easier than you would think. And some of them are really nice and I can connect to them very easy.

But its the concept of making online friends that I find so awkward.

Doctorhabib Wrote:Especially when they are girls , it creates this unwanted man-woman tension.

Not at all! My best friend is in her 30s or so, I think, and man, we have talked about intimate things she would not even tell her best friends out there! It depends on the person you contact really or get in touch and on yourself, how much you want to lay bare..

Tori-kun Wrote:

Doctorhabib Wrote:Especially when they are girls , it creates this unwanted man-woman tension.

Not at all! My best friend is in her 30s or so, I think, and man, we have talked about intimate things she would not even tell her best friends out there! It depends on the person you contact really or get in touch and on yourself, how much you want to lay bare..

I totally agree with Tori-kun.

Although I'm a girl most of my best friends are guys. There's only man-woman tension if you let there be.

Purrlsta Wrote:

Tori-kun Wrote:

Doctorhabib Wrote:Especially when they are girls , it creates this unwanted man-woman tension.

Not at all! My best friend is in her 30s or so, I think, and man, we have talked about intimate things she would not even tell her best friends out there! It depends on the person you contact really or get in touch and on yourself, how much you want to lay bare..

I totally agree with Tori-kun.

Although I'm a girl most of my best friends are guys. There's only man-woman tension if you let there be.

Thirded. One of my absolute best mates is a girl and while we`ve had our moments of sexual tension I feel that it`s only made us better friends in the long run. It`s extremely possible to have that male-female friendship without any trouble though. I think that style of thinking is very 1950s.

the problem i had with finding online friends is that it gets boring because all you can do is talk and not really create experiences. also a lot of the japanese people tend to repeat the same topics and shift if to making it impersonal instead of personal.

(i also find it easier to talk to girls in japanese. if you're self-conscious like me, you can chalk up any screwups and misunderstandings to the language barrier.)

kainzero Wrote:the problem i had with finding online friends is that it gets boring because all you can do is talk and not really create experiences. also a lot of the japanese people tend to repeat the same topics and shift if to making it impersonal instead of personal.

In order to deal with the first point there, I say just don't talk to them very often. If I make a new good friend I often find that we both want to talk to each other everyday or so because we're finding the other person super interesting. I get bored of chatting to people over the internet super fast though cause you run out of things to talk about, so if I want to keep talking to someone over the long term I know I can only talk to them a few times a month (which I suppose isn't very good if you're looking for a language partner).

With your second point, isn't that true for lots of people? Sure, some people spill out their guts over the internet because of the sense of detachment, but many others keep talking about impersonal things for a long time before they feel comfortable with the other person. You could be right though, maybe Japanese people in general are more wary of talking about personal things? I don't know. (Thinking about it now, at the beginning it seemed as though my friend thought I had an ulterior motive if I asked him what he had done that day O.o But now I can ask him anything )

well, i'm a person of action and not really a chatty person. with RL friends it's the same thing, aside from some troll comments here and there on facebook it's usually "yo, let's go do something." never was really someone to just talk.

as for the second point, i'm not saying that people should be so personal and reveal their sex lives and how many partners they've had in your first conversation. it's more like when you talk to them you get the explanations of stuff you've heard a thousand times before regarding some facet of japanese culture, like whatever holiday is going on at the time.

Hello, all. First post here. I have a similar feeling. I'd like to speak to a native speaker to practice, but I feel I don't know enough Japanese yet to make any such communication meaningful. At what point is one ready to make a Japanese contact, and how does such communication typically start? Making a contact who is not already fluent in English just seems useless to me. But I'm also afraid that talking to someone fluent in English would make English a crutch against any need to push my limits, and end up stalling my progress.

Who has made a Japanese contact? At what point in your learning did you make it, and how much communication was just "How do I say this?" And "Could you correct this?" How much of the communication was a learning experience with the language, and how much was awkward conversation?

I feel like such a contact could be useful for me, but I have lots of reservations about trying it myself.

It can be very hard to meet Japanese people online if your Japanese skills aren't already quite good, because you can't surf Japanese websites until you're able to read and write, and at that point, you probably don't need any help making Japanese friends.

Mixi (the Japanese version of Facebook) is great, but you need a Japanese phone number and again, you need to be able to read Japanese-- there is no English version.

Since I couldn't find a good site to make Japanese friends online, I decided to make one, Oh My Japan (https://ohmyjapan.com). My site has both an English and a Japanese language version, which allows people who aren't yet fluent in one of the two languages to still use the site comfortably. It also allows members to search for any combination of friendship, language exchange, teachers/students, and romance. This way, people can be clear about what they're looking for and expectations can be set "up front."

It's also free. If you complete your profile, you can start conversations with up to two new people per week (this limit is necessary to keep certain bad men from harassing all the women on the site).

Please consider my site if you're looking for Japanese friends online.

[Zgarbas]

please don't necro ancient threads over random online grudges.
Also, if you want to warn people about a service I would suggest you use evidence rather than insults.
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