For me, it depends on the topic and the day when it comes to speaking.

esgrove wrote:

I know exactly what you mean. I've lived in Japan for 2 years. For the first few months I was doing RtK1, and while my speaking ability wasn't very high, I consoled myself with the idea that I was going to master the kanji first, and then worry about speaking. After I finished the first book I used anki to learn a lot of sentences and vocabulary. I can read most of what I see day to day on TV and in manga and such, and my ability to listen and understand has improved. However, my speaking is far below my other skills in the language. It goes like this:

writing kanji> reading kanji> listening comprehension> speaking ability

So I shouldnt be surprised that I get fairly regularly patronized about my Japanese. As an example, I went out with a Japanese girl last night. Though we were able to carry on a normal conversation (at least in terms of expressing ideas at a regular pace), I felt like I was somehow handicapped, being unable to express what I really wanted to say, and having to dumb down my ideas. For example, I wanted to say "you shouldn't feel bad about being late, I was content to listen to my ipod while waiting" became the lame (and probably grammatically incorrect) sentence, 「心配するな、IPODを聴くことが好きだから」.

She said to me about my profficiency level "You can speak Japanese okay, but you sound like a textbook and you're very simple.", (this coming from someone who regularly goes to eikaiwa but refuses to speak to me in anything but Japanese all the time). This was a bit of a blow to my self esteem, and as a result of embarrassment caused me to speak even worse. I felt like I didn't know any Japanese at all, but then when we went to see a movie (an American movie with Japanese subtitles), I could read the subtitles at the speed they were presented just fine and completely understand each sentence. I kept thinking "If I can read a conversation in Japanese so easily, why can't I produce sentences with equal efficacy?!"

Anyway, it's frustrating.

Dude.... are you me? You wrote about me and my troubles better than I did.

You guys should be excited at how well you can UNDERSTAND the language given the amount of time you have been studying.  Comprehension is far more important than being able to produce at a native level. 

I mean think of all the people you know who have been studying the same amount of time that can't do either worth a crap.  I think you're simply feeling underwhelmed from a SELF comparative standpoint, not from an average Japanese language learner perspective.  Your comprehension has increased so fast because you have been FOCUSING ON TONS OF COMPREHENSION, while at the same time I bet you still speak better than 90% of Japanese language learners with similar study time under their belt via "traditional" methods.

Just step back for a second and look at the big picture and I'm willing to bet you are both well ahead of the curve.

You just need to practise speaking more, it's that simple.  Contrary to AJATT doctrine, you need to practise speaking to be able to speak, you won't just wake up one morning after inputting the whole time and blurt out a sentence.  The input just makes finding what you want to say a little easier.  You still need to work on speed, pron, patterns, etc. by speaking.  At the very least you should be saying your srs sentences aloud and trying to shadow some simple Japanese speech.

Saizen, I have to ask: When you're reading out loud, how is your accuracy, pronunciation and pace?

Yeah, sentences in my SRS I can snap off without a hitch, but then it's a +1 and material I've seen before. However reading a 1 minute news segment off FNN site is a chore even after listening to it.

Phauna, speaking is not contrary to AJATT. It's speaking practice without feedback that's contrary. If you have something/anything that'll tell you you're saying something wrong then it's ok. However, I agree with you that shadowing, reading out loud from the SRS are great speaking practice. I'll even say read out loud from manga, books and other items. If you can't speak smoothly from written material right in front of you, then you're not going to do the same on the fly.

I guess your speaking abilities aren't really going down, they're just not as high as you expected considering your writing/reading abilities.
So yeah, maybe more dates and less books ?

I came at this from a completely different direction than you guys. I came here to Japan with two years of college Japanese, and then spent a year hanging out with friends in bars, cafes and restaurants for a year - all the while trying very hard to learn Japanese.

What I ended up with is a very high level of speaking ability - I can talk about nearly anything, from politics to culture to philosophy, quite easily - but my keigo, kanji and reading are far, far behind (thus my interest in Heisig, and other formal textbooks).

Really, each ability set is separate from the other. Just because you're good in one doesn't necessarily mean you are good in another.

Therefore, don't take it badly if you find you are weak in one, even if you are strong in another. If you have good reading, writing and listening abilities, I would say you are doing quite well. Speaking is just something that will come later with practice.

You know, I'm not a fan of Pimsleur (slow, boring, don't learn much) but I have to say it's the single best thing I've done so far for my speaking ability.  I would have near zero without it.

It's too bad jpod101 doesn't follow Pimsleur's format and have you repeat things.  I think it would make it worth listening to for me.

Tobberoth wrote:

wccrawford wrote:

You know, I'm not a fan of Pimsleur (slow, boring, don't learn much) but I have to say it's the single best thing I've done so far for my speaking ability.  I would have near zero without it.

It's too bad jpod101 doesn't follow Pimsleur's format and have you repeat things.  I think it would make it worth listening to for me.

Just put the dialogs on your iPod and shadow them. It's MUCH better than pimsleur since it's a lot more natural.

You could try splicing the audio so that you input areas to practice output.

For what it's worth, I've started speaking reviews and have discovered that there was a remarkable improvement in my speaking ability during the time I wasn't speaking. Maybe you need to speak less?

~J

Saizen, yeah, it's the uncorrected speech practice that'll give bad habits. Like it or not, unless your friend corrects your mistakes, then talking to her will go uncorrected. You'll use the wrong word and she'll let you as she understands what you mean. It's the: Nod, nod, vigorous nod as comprehension of what you're slowly saying begins to make sense to her. Your mind sees that you're saying something right so it keeps at it.

Not bad in small doses, very bad if it's the ONLY feedback you ever get.

Compare that to reading out loud or shadowing. You're still speaking (not creatively though). There, you have the immediate correction.

Here's some tips:

Newscasts from FNN. Read the transcript out loud, then play it to see how you did, read it out load again.

subs2srs: Use a script editor, go through a show's subtitle file you like and merge long speeches into one. The subs2srs then creates a flashcard that aren't one line but ten lines or more long. Practice speaking with these. I think it's better if you read it out loud first, then it plays the audio.

Do the above, but do it for long conversations. Try to mimic the conversation tones. Heck, later have the mute button ready where you're trying to reply to one side of the conversation at the same pace. Actor one speaks, mute while you reply, unmute to hear Actor one again. Longer conversations again can work.

I've been toying with how I'll use subs2srs, but they seem best as a shadowing tool for me. I didn't even think about editing the timing lines for longer conversations till just now. However, it sounds logical.

If you can speak smoothly under controlled situations (first words, then by sentences, then by paragraphs, then by pages), I can't see why it becomes a jump to speak smoothly in the creative situations.

(I can't think of a good way of saying this without sounding really negative... so, please read this knowing that I mean this as a suggestion as to why people may not give much credit to your Japanese abilities...)

While I was living in Japan, I found that people were generally VERY unforgiving when it came to pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation of Japanese words spoken by foreigners. Japanese dialects were all tolerated and understood by native speakers without much trouble. However, if I said something with the slightest bit of accent, people wouldn't be able to understand what I was saying. At all.

1) Most foreigners in Japan don't speak Japanese, and those that do don't speak it really well. Japanese people tend to assume that your pronunciation and accent dictate your level of grammar and vocabulary fluency (as in the development of children), even though we all recognize that these things are not related in second language learners. If you speak with a rather pronounced accent, and you try to use really complicated words like "quantum disentanglement" or something like that in conversation, people will assume that there is no way that you could have said "quantum disentanglement" because you can barely say "Hello my name is Joe" without making a mistake. This is unfortunate, but I think it stems from the fact that few Japanese people regularly deal with foreigners on a regular basis, and the culture is not used to the idea that people can have a hideous accent (not that yours is, necessarily) and still be completely competent.

In my life, and I assume most of us from developed nations have similar experiences, I have been exposed to non-native English speakers for a very long time, and I am used to having to take a few moments to adjust myself to a particular person's spoken idiosyncrasies - the words that they use as a crutch, the "I'm thinking" noises that they make (instead of "uh", say), the odd way that they pronounce some words even though other words with similar sounds are pronounced properly, all of that stuff. I'm *used* to it, so I assume that they mean the words that they say, instead of thinking that I misheard them (though, occasionally, I have to ask for a word to be spoken a few times before I process it correctly). Japanese people are not used to this, so they just assume that you meant something other than what you said and ask you to repeat yourself (if they know you well enough), or try to guess at what you meant as the rest of your sentence comes out (that progressive head-nodding thing that someone else mentioned).

2) Also, large groups of newbie foreigners try to pull the "make everything sound like katakana English" thing, so Japanese people sometimes assume that you're trying to use non-standard Japanese words with them. That's our fault for not biyatchslapping the foreigners that we see trying to katakana all their unknown words.

3) There were a few phone calls that I held with people at NHK or the phone company or wherever, and if I spoke with my decently good accent and at my regular speed of talking (which is very near, if not actually as fast as native speakers speaking) it didn't matter how many times I told them, "I'm sorry, but I'm a foreigner, and I don't understand that word, can you say that differently?" or "My Japanese is very poor. Can you please speak more slowly?" (in Japanese, obviously), they just seemed confused. I asked a Japanese friend about this and she suggested that I fake a crappy accent so that the person on the other end of the phone assumed I was barely functional in Japanese. I thought that was an odd thing to suggest, but I tried it and it totally worked. If you want people to speak slowly to you and use simple grammar and vocabulary, speak like someone who is reading romaji phonetically as if it were English.


My point here is that you might take some time to really really work on your pronunciation and rhythm, and when that matches your vocabulary/grammar level, people should give you due credit. I don't know you or anything about your accent, but I would suggest that you ask a close Japanese friend if they could be frank with you about the way that you *sound* when you speak, and if they mention anything about an accent (or, hell, just outright ask them if you have a noticeable accent) then that means you need to spend some effort improving it. If you were to pick up a phone at school or work (or, just a place where the person placing the call is likely to assume there are only Japanese people), would the native speaker on the other end think you were Japanese or foreign, based on a few sentences? (For example, let's say someone calls the phone and asks for your boss, who isn't there. Could you apologize for the inconvenience and take a message for them without sounding like a foreigner? Something quick and simple like that...)

Again, I really don't want to sound like I'm accusing you of having a poor accent, but I do want to say that I had a lot of interesting experiences with Japanese people being ruthlessly unforgiving when it came to matters of accent and rhythm.

-ang