I'm interested in this too. I figure when I get around to practicing speaking, I'll follow advice like Fluent in 3 Months has.

I was confident in listening and reading when I got to Japan. First arrived had a brief moment where I couldn't understand the most basic sentences due to being shocked at real Japanese directed at me. Got over that and got better at listening and reading but the speaking side is still lackluster. I use the most basic sentences structures to get my point across and lack depth or any degree of natural Japanese. So yeah to me now speaking is my number one priority but I keep doing the method that got me good at reading at listening because it's easy for me

Maybe you can pick an idea or two from this

I have no theory. I can only tell you what I did to get to a speaking level that matches my N2.

I had studied for 6 semesters in college, and didn't like to speak there, because I never felt like I knew what I was talking about. I hated the pair exercises. So much silence as we struggled to find something to say with out limited vocabs.

Real life happened, and I stopped studying for 3 years. I restarted in 2007. I had been casually studying until last summer, when I took the N2, when I realized that my speaking was *still* terrible, mostly because I just didn't feel comfortable with it.

I was pretty good at listening-- I've been listening to Japanese TV on a daily basis for a few years now, and I have fewer and fewer problems with that. I also listen to podcasts regularly, so I have a rough idea of what "good" Japanese is supposed to sound like-- but I still couldn't string together sentences.

So I took 3 months off, and went to Japan. Since I was a freelancer, it was do-able. Yeah, I know, not everyone can do that. Time is money, and the yen is strong these days. I had a little of both, and the place I went to made it somewhat affordable.

I went to the Yamasa Institute in Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture, and studied my butt off. 5 hours or so of regular class time plus 1 hour of Business Japanese a day, plus, hey-- I was in Okazaki, so I pretty much *had* to use Japanese. And I had homework, too, so I was studying 2-3 hours a night on top of that. Generally, outside of calling friends/family back home, it was Japanese 23/7.

Going to the hospital twice *really* boosted my Japanese ability as well.

The teachers at Yamasa all generally refuse to speak English, even if they're very good at it, which I found very cool. No matter what you say, they'll reply in Japanese, and usually remind you to talk to them in Japanese.

Since the other students came from all over the world, Japanese was the best language to use for communication. I had friends from Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and other places as well, and I generally only spoke to them in Japanese.

One time I met some guys from Turkey in the campus bar, and we had a nice conversation-- in Japanese, because they didn't speak English, and I don't speak Turkish. It was like one of those sci-fi mangas where the whole world speaks Japanese. Made me chuckle a bit to myself.

My most favorite class ever at Yamasa was a class we had in the Biz Japanese class on "How to say nothing." In other words, filler words. Everyone said I was scary good at that. (Probably because I watch a lot of TV.) I'm *still* not sure how to take that. XD

The biggest challenge for me was when I got back to the U.S. After a month of resting, I realized that my hard-fought ability was starting to leave me FAST, so I set up a network of people locally and over the internet to talk with on a regular basis to keep my level up.

One of my 書道 teachers teaches the class only in Japanese, which is awesome. I meet up with a local Japanese person who came back recently after being in Japan for 20 years or so, and we have fun talking about all kinds of stuff. (Sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese. Gotta be fair about it.) And I use Skype a few times a week to work with one of my old teachers on my Business Japanese. That *really* helps a lot.

Also, a non-human-interaction thing I do-- I read a large chunk of my Anki cards out loud, if I'm reviewing at home. It's good practice. I've been told by many people that I don't have much of an accent, and that makes me kind of happy... but it's one of those 日本語が上手ですね things... they may just be being polite.... but I have heard some terribad accents before, so I'm hoping it's not just politeness. XD

I'm not sure if I believe the "silent period" stuff or not. After going through what I've gone through I feel like it's a good thing to break out of that as soon as you have a basic grasp of the language, and just keep beating your head against it. Also, using the words you're studying in a conversation *feels* like a great way to help flip them over into active vocab. *Shrug* I'm not a scientist, so who knows?

tl,dr: if you want to get better at speaking, then speak. speak a lot. then speak some more.

Last edited by rich_f (2012 October 27, 7:34 am)

Hello, this is my first post on these forums.

I lived in Japan for 5 years (4 of which spent as the only English-speaker at a Japanese company), so I'm very confident in my speaking ability.

I had studied Japanese like crazy before going to Japan, so my reading was pretty good when I got here. I also had a high degree of exposure to Japanese in my university years (girlfriend was Japanese, roommate was Japanese exchange student, watched lots of anime). But even so, when I did actually get to Japan it was hard to keep pace with the speed of real Japanese. Sentence length and grammar complexity also gave me problems.

Even after I passed JLPT N1 and started working at a Japanese company, I still had to ask native speakers to slow down a lot for about 6 months.

From my experience, I would offer the following suggestions:

1. Try repeating some grammatically complex sentences to build your speaking "stamina". It's good if you have a native speaker example so you can try to match it as closely as possible, but use an out-in-the-wild Japanese audio clip (like from a TV show or something), not a mechanical audio clip like from a study CD.

Speed is probably the biggest hindrance to intermediate learners', and repetition is great for speed training. The more you do it, the more your brain will start to process things like 行きたくて仕方がない as a single unit rather than a verb plus such-and-such sounds/grammar.

2. Watch Japanese TV if you can. TV programs and game shows usually have a lot of sub-text (so much that you could almost call it subtitles), which really helps. This exercise probably sounds like listening practice (and it is), but it's still important for speaking because it's training the speed at which your brain can process Japanese, just like my 1st suggestion.

However, I do believe that (like so many other things) becoming a fluent speaker/listener in Japanese is something that takes a lot of time. There's not really any shortcut.

Hope this helps!