There are lots of websites that allow you to find a 'talking buddy' and use Skype to chat. You could try lang-8 and on one hand you can output (in writing) whatever you feel like 'saying', on the other hand there are lots of people there wanting to actually talk to somebody, so you could find some friends there too.

For me personally, when I was studying Japanese in uni, every week we had this Japanese/English/Mandarin 交流会 that was held twice a week during the evening. So basically you'd go there and make friends, talk to people in desired target language. It was really popular, later they also added a mini Korean 交流会 at the same place, so it was really great for making lots of different friends. And this was in Shanghai (people in Shanghai, 交流会 is every tue and thursday @ SISU uni, main fountain area, usually starts around 20:00, sunday mornings in Luxun Park, wednesdays evenings @ Fudan uni), and everyday there would be some 交流会 at some uni, so I'd sometimes go with friends to other uni's 交流会. You kinda have to put yourself out there and brave yourself. Yes it's awkward in the beginning and you stutter and struggle trying to hold yourself together getting past that 初めまして、「enter-own-name」です、よろしくお願いします. But the biggest boost was having lots of Japanese friends, so I'd plan as many days a week to hang out with my Japanese friends to improve speaking (also just to hang out with them you know, partying and stuff). Because they're your friends, you don't feel awkward, you can say what you want, ask what you want, it's relaxed etc. etc. (not recommended for learning 敬語 'n stuff). You make 1 friend first, and get introduced to another friend and then that one introduces other more friends and before you know it, you phone has Japanese ppl ばかり in it! You probably have to throw a party or two, but it's definitely worth it.

And also note anything down that you'd pick up that's new to you, yes write it down

Last edited by Musashi (2009 October 09, 7:38 pm)

Maybe instead of trying to learn every sentence from the spreadsheet, you can just pick and choose the ones that you don't know and work on those.

This whole business of devouring pre-made sentence packs confounds me... pick and choose

sethg wrote:

This whole business of devouring pre-made sentence packs confounds me... pick and choose

or even better, take sentence patterns, add a dash of nouns and verbs turning them into something you would like to say and study those.

Last edited by brianobush (2009 October 09, 10:35 pm)

brianobush wrote:

mezbup wrote:

I checked out JSPEC. I can't turn the xls. into an Anki deck. Does anyone have the Anki they can send me? It looks like a good resource.

I have the sentences from this book - an excellent buy by the way. They can be found: http://kd7yhr.org/bushbo/jpn_sentences.txt and tagged with jspxx where xx is the chapter they are sourced from. The sentences are derived from a xls spreadsheet and put into a format anki can handle (and escaped, etc). However, as always please purchase the text to support such wonderful works.

Hey thanks a bunch, I built a great JSPEC deck out of that once I figured out what tweaks I needed to make to get it working.

samesong wrote:

You won't like my answer, but this is my experience in being able to sound somewhat natural (Ive been in Japan for 3 years, and have studied Japanese since 2002)

Being able to sound natural just comes from lots and lots of exposure and conscious listening.. I mean listening to lots and lots of conversations, both that include you and ones that you just observe. There simply is no shortcutting this.

Every time you hear a new construction, just make a mental "note" inside your head, thinking "okay, in this situation, it is said this way".  Over time, you will accumulate so many natural ways of saying things in their correct context, that you will start to sound natural.　

The reason Japanese is considered so difficult is because you can't simply carry over words and expressions you hear in English and spit out the Japanese equivalent.

This is key: the more you pay attention to what is being said, the more natural you will start to sound. This includes all the minor nuances, including particle usage, word choice, intonation, etc.

Let me try to make my explanation a bit less abstract with an example.

I just shaved my head recently, and I received a message from my friend:

「これから寒い天気になるってゆうのに・・・」

Loose translation: "Ya know it's gonna start getting cold now.."

A few years ago, I would have thought this sentence was a GOLDMINE. Some things that would have ran through my head:

-Okay, she used これから instead of 今から、 which is what I would have said, because 今から is closer to what you would say in English.
-Ah, it's interesting how she said 寒い天気になる instead of 天気がさむくなる. I guess you can say both.
-Interesting! I guess saying ゆう instead of いう is more colloquial in writing. After all it is pronounced ゆう in speech
-Ah, I guess she is emphasizing that is general knowledge / everybody is talking about how it's gonna start getting cold by attaching ってゆう。
-So adding のに is a way of telling me it's a bit strange to be shaving my head right before winter! I know のに means "even though" in English, but I think it has a bit of a different nuance in this situation.


TLDR: Listen a LOT, process it in your head, file it mentally, and try to use that same pattern in a similar situation when it arises.

This is good solid advice. I noticed there's a couple of things that I've wanted to know how to say then when i've come across it i've had a eureka moment and really payed attention to how its used and know how to spit it back out.

Just one quick thing: many of the non-native speakers of Japanese I know have some kind of verbal habits they start to over-rely on, like saying たとえば at the start of every sentence. Tape-record yourself in conversation, maybe, but catch yourself out at this somehow before it turns into a habit!

IceCream wrote:

mm, how can you distinguish between bad habits and normal ones? People also have regular speaking patterns and language use in their own language i think...

This is actually one of the more difficult aspects of learning to speak naturally. Not only do you have to make a conscious effort to listen to others' conversations, but you have to monitor your own speech.

If you find yourself using phrases often that you don't hear native speakers use, you should tone down using that phrase, or substitute it with something more natural. If you have the guts to do what Fillanzea recommended, definitely try to record and listen to yourself. And if you have huge giant balls forged of titanium steel from Mt. Doom, record yourself, play it in front of a native, and get some constructive criticism!

A quick example of something I used to say that was not natural sounding: In English, we say "the same day", so I thought saying "同じ日” was okay. I noticed that people say 当日 (当日）　instead, so I started using that phrase in place of what I was saying before.

ocircle wrote:

I've always been under the understanding that for studying any language, it's most important to know a lot of vocab, and then the grammar or idioms and what not.

There is some merit to that idea (and it's the idea that a number of textbooks are based on), but the problem is that the worse your grammar and idioms are, the more your chance is of saying something wrong or incomprehensible, even if you know the vocab.

Being able to say "me water want" is more important than "Uh... the subject goes... uhh... verb after object... right... uhh... agh!" when you want a cup of water.

At a very basic level this might be true, but you're limited in what you can say by just throwing words together without a very good grammatical understanding.

I guess what I want to say is over time and through exposure to what is "proper," you'll learn to talk like the natives I did it with English. Echolalia is fantastic!

This doesn't work for everyone.  I lived in Japan for 2 years and spoke and listened to Japanese constantly since few people I worked with knew English, and I didn't learn to talk like the natives.  After I came back and started studying grammar again, I found out there was a huge amount I didn't know.

children are lucky as basically nothing is expected of them and they can talk as much incomprehensible babel as they want and its considered cute. As adults we don't really have this luxury (which is a shame) so it's kind of a catch 22. We don't really have all the time in world to understand lots and lots before we try to spit much back out, still fail and have a parent there to parrot back the correct response. So some study of grammar is what is needed to fill this gap IMO.

Does anyone find it mildly frustrated yet good at the same time when you're trying to speak and you say something and its 90% right except for one thing and you get a correction and on it and you're like OH OF COURSE! Silly me! Cos sometimes I feel like an idiot but It also just improved me a little bit. Haha... either way it's mega fun to try communicating in a foreign language.

mezbup wrote:

children are lucky as basically nothing is expected of them and they can talk as much incomprehensible babel as they want and its considered cute. As adults we don't really have this luxury

On the other hand, kids are cruel little things that will tease you so severely that you either want to say it right or say nothing at all. I think this is why I spent so much time watching Tv and reading whatever books that were to my level when I lived in Korea. They have a +90% literacy rate there, so by 3rd or 4th grade, kids are already broken up into little cliques and having long elaborate debates about who's pulled who's hair or whether or not some kid is going to live up to a senseless bet (something like: I dare you to drink the entire class milk (that's like 40 kid cartons) and I'll do your homework for the next 3 days.)

Also, your parents will only answer so many questions before giving you the "what? you don't even know that? I'm busy, for crying out loud. I have a life of my own!" attitude lol.

でしょう~
Anyway, by the time my parents were tired of how many millions of questions I had, I had made a few friends who were genuinely curious about life "overseas" to whom I could ask all the nit-picky questions about the Korean language who then, in turn (in middle school) asked me a lot of questions about the English language and life in the states. Fun times.

Last edited by ocircle (2009 October 13, 8:43 pm)

furrykef wrote:

brianobush wrote:

or even better, take sentence patterns, add a dash of nouns and verbs turning them into something you would like to say and study those.

If you mean taking pre-made sentences and making your own substitutions, be careful as this can be dangerous. You might make a mistake and never notice until years later. Suppose you have a sentence with the phrase 熱いスープ and for whatever reason you change it to 熱い水. You put this into your flash cards and after a few repetitions over maybe a year, it's firmly implanted in your brain. Then you find out that there's no such thing as 熱い水. Oops.

Granted, pitfalls that bad are probably pretty rare, but they do exist!

I think this is one of the biggest problems a lot of Japanese learns are suffering from. It does seem that learners tend to be so gullible that translations in their dictionaries and textbooks are always good approximations when they're not.

A lot of learners ignore collocation, context, difference in culture and other important factors, and overgeneralize what they have learned from textbooks. It also seems to me that they have a bad habit of overgeneralizing grammar rules only to produce funny, unnatural sentences.

I know these habits are extremely hard to break, and if you're a beginner, practically there is no other way to produce their own sentences. But I think someone must tell them that what they have learned are not very good when it comes to production. The sentences you produce should ideally come from what you've learned from native stuff.

furrykef wrote:

Nukemarine wrote:

About sentence packs. Calling them that is a misnomer. Each pack is for a purpose: vocabulary or grammar or sentence patterns. They are a tool no more than kanji via RTK. I wouldn't even count them for the "10,000 sentences" you'll need for AJATT. Those sentences should come from natural native conversations via dramas, movies, manga, books, anime, etc.

That's silly. A sentence is a sentence, no matter where it comes from. Granted, you do need to have multiple sources (of multiple types) to cover all the bases. For instance, learning the Core 2000 and Core 6000 at smart.fm isn't going to teach you the style of speech used in anime and manga, but it will still put you a long way towards understanding them because, ultimately, words are words. For example, the smart.fm sentence 宇宙人は存在すると思いますか？ could have come from any context.

Do you think you would be able to speak like a native speaker if there were a magical device that installs on your brain a hypothetical sentence pack that contains all the grammar points and vocabulary an average native speaker has? I don't think you would because you need to learn language register, context, and other subtleties through exposure to native material. As you just pointed out in your post with 熱い水, it's the contexts, collocations, and other subtleties that are really important to sound like a native speaker.

Apparently the 10,000 sentences Katzumoto is talking about are all from real native material, so they're richer in context and whatnot while pre-made sentence packs are very poor in this regard. As Nukemarine said, each pack is for a purpose, so they should be better in one regard. But they're not that great when it comes to the essential to achieve native fluency.

I think 10,000 is kind of an arbitrary number, but it's supposed to be a rough guesstimate of the number of sentences you need to learn the essential that can only be learned from exposure. I think "sentence pack" is sort of a misnomer in the sense that they don't teach you the most important things the sentence mining method places emphasis on.

Does Nukumarine's post still sound silly to you?