Random tangent: gyuujuice!? Sounds gross.

Girlfriend! Girlfriend! Girlfriend!

Honestly, I would take the suggestion of many here and join a club. How old are you anyway? I, too, have a hard time being social, and it shows because I'm almost 21 and have no girlfriend! But hey, yeah if I were in your situation I would immediately join a club. Get some valuable social time, meet new people, and learn a skill while you're at it. I'm so jealous of you having a visa until 2012! I'd be taking advantage of that thing like no tomorrow.

SammyB wrote:

mr_hans_moleman wrote:

I have a simple tip, maybe you are doing it already. Do you read out loud? If you don't, then you should start right away. No matter how much you read, if you don't read out loud then it's not going to matter.

I'm interested in this. Can you, or anyone else who knows stuff (looking at you nest0r) explain why this is helpful?

What about if you are reading things out with bad pronounciation and flow? Is it still beneficial?

What types of things should be read out loud..?

People usually suggest 'shadowing' longer passages to develop a sense of flow, using audio+text. My recommendation for SRSing recognition cards has always been read (without audio) while subvocalizing, trying to develop your mental articulatory rehearsal abilities and suchlike in the working memory without reliance on external feedback, and then flipping the card and listening to the audio, activating those semantic and phonetic links in the brain and using/building those associations (that's why the studies use 'reading aloud' and 'naming' as the basis when analyzing areas of activation and interactions of routes to determine the most comprehensive reading models), correcting any subvocal errors and also repeating aloud to develop speaking.

I wouldn't do this as much for non-SRS reading of longer passages because the intensive stuff's already taken care of, but I suppose the shadowing thing would still be good for working on longer and longer areas of 'flow' and parsing, since you can control how long the passages you read/get feedback on are, on the fly. I'd still place most of the emphasis on subvocalization though, with audio as the 'checking tool', if not using the SRS, because I only use it in the SRS for that and for listening/speaking practice. But I think it's most important to develop that 'inner articulator' without reliance on audio you hear/speak yourself in longer and longer bouts of reading.

As suggested in a couple other threads, I have a similar view with listening practice, but in that case my focus is on developing the ability to listen-->subvocalize while continuing to listen (interference/suppression of the phonological loop) in order to develop chunking skills and the establishment of retrieval structures to increase capacity of articulatory rehearsal (because, like i+x, that stuff that discusses quantifiable limits [7 items or something] of working memory isn't proven/legit, per se). That works with the audio as focus because it's listening practice and you won't have the text before you for backlooping of static representations.

Although if you introduce interference by trying to read + subvocalize while listening to something different, I think that's useful too, and sometimes in Anki if audio of a previous card is still playing as I flip+grade another card (recognition/reading text of new card while prev. audio is playing), I think of that as a kind of exercise (helps me feel less frustrated when audio doesn't immediately stop playing... ) Although I can't say I recall that happening recently, so perhaps I'll experiment with that separately now. Kind of an anti-shadowing process with exaggerated lack of synch with audio and text.

Edit: Here's more on listening I wrote before that has references for some of my layperson's appropriation of established jargon: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=69235#p69235

Keep in mind when I speak of subvocalization, I do refer to calling to mind the phonological components silently, but treat them with the models of using distinct routes separate from semantic access, as well as being more of a variation of 'motor' articulation. The ultimate goal remains a robust kind of 'learn the drill, master the drill, dissolve the drill' effect where much of the time, your inner 'voice' is minimal in terms of overt self-representation/phonological recoding.

Last edited by nest0r (2010 March 10, 9:16 pm)

kazeleeとRuiner@
At first I thought you called my gross because of my speach disability. ;__: But then I read the entire post.

HAHAHA~ no no no. 牛 was my first Japanese word and it is a shortended version of a weird experience I had in a convent. (I was visiting.) All the drinks looked inedible, they were just colored water. Everyone called the juices/drinks by color and they teased me into believing that they called milk, "cow juice". (I was pretty young at the time.)

Yeah, it's kinda weird for a name. "Fetish"@ rofl
I guess I should be more carefull with my avatar names.

Last edited by gyuujuice (2010 March 11, 11:46 am)

I give trying to learn Keigo as a suggestion...

ruiner wrote:

gyuujuice wrote:

kazeleeとRuiner@
At first I thought you called my gross because of my speach disability. ;__: But then I read the entire post.

HAHAHA~ no no no. 牛 was my first Japanese word and it is a shortended version of a weird experience I had in a convent. (I was visiting.) All the drinks looked inedible, they were just colored water. Everyone called the juices/drinks by color and they teased me into believing that they called milk, "cow juice". (I was pretty young at the time.)

Yeah, it's kinda weird for a name. "Fetish"@ rofl
I guess I should be more carefull with my avatar names.

What do you think this is, an internet forum? As if we would be so cruel.

At any rate, I only mentioned milk fetish because I had the misfortune of watching the first episode of Seikon no Qwaser, thinking from a quick glance at the picture and synopsis that it was some stylish urban fantasy series. I really ought to have been clued in by the 'uncensored' and from now on, I shall attend more nimbly to genres, especially words such as 'ecchi'.

You may or may not want to avoid Visitor Q, then.

In response to the original post, I can sort of empathise - I'm only on the verge of passing JLPT2, but my spoken Japanese is appaling (though my listening is pretty good). Like, the other day the French language teacher at my school, who converses with the other teachers really naturally in Japanese told me he's still studying for JLPT 4. I can barely get a sentence out because I spend all day speaking and correcting English.

Anyway, here are some of the things that I've been trying/intend to try/have heard are good:

Shadowing, as has been mentioned already.

Trying to find a helpful Skype conversation partner - have you checked out lang-8? Perhaps you could find someone on there who would be up for exchanging English/Japanese Skype calls.

Watching TV. I LOVE Japanese TV, for all the quiz shows and shows about eating. And there's a load of Japanese subtitles to help you.

Listening to things on repeat. At the moment I'm going through Ghibli's Omoide Poro Poro, just listening to it over and over on the way to work or while out running (I ripped the audio to mp3 and stuck it on my ipod). It's a pretty good choice for me because a lot of it is told from a kid's perspective so a lot of the language is very simple, but I went through the Japanese subs first (linked to from AJATT) and put anything I didn't understand into Anki and now I can understand even the complicated bits. I did the same with the Ten Nights of Dreams and In a Grove audiobooks, and next I intend to do Grave of the Fireflies. I figure that once I've assimilated enough Japanese in this sort of 'controlled environment' my brain will be able to make sense of real-life sounds too.

Resisting... urge... to discuss psychology + drugs...

@IceCream - Agreed, it's always something to consider, but I do think it requires deep consideration--I don't know about the UK, but in some places, it's the first panacea people reach for--pop a pill and your problems are over. Personally I'd recommend it 9 times out of 10, for the short-term as part of a more CBT-style* long-term program, over anything remotely religious or spiritual. But I'm a heathen and in general I wouldn't recommend anything, because to me everyone's crazy.

Speaking of suicide, this is interesting: http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/japwor/v21 … 0-150.html - How is suicide different in Japan?

In full: http://www.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/cirje/resear … 8cf557.pdf

*Dear fetishists, when I say CBT I mean Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, not **** & *** *******. Though I suppose they needn't be mutually exclusive.

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 11, 10:40 pm)

nest0r wrote:

Dankoochoo wrote:

I give trying to learn Keigo as a suggestion...

I agree, bodyguarding seems to be a popular job in the media. Especially well-spoken butler-bodyguards.

What, no love for my little joke here? C'mon people, this is some top quality punning!! Be impressed at my knowledge of basic vocabulary and anime trope reference.

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 12, 12:05 am)

I just want to say to Koyota, quit being so hard on yourself ! You passed JLPT1, you should try and feel good about that rather than immediately getting anxious about the next step ! What percentage of people who start learning japanese actually make it to the level you are now ! Admittedly maybe your speech isn't as fluid as you would like, and there are other things you need to improve on, but you've obviously got a decent understanding of the language, with just a few areas that need fine tuning.

My advice is
1. Work on tackling your social anxiety. I highly recommend the books by David Burns, such as "Feeling Good", and when "Panic Attacks". 
2. You need to get out there and interact with people, don't worry if you make mistakes, or stuff up, it is part of the learning process. Again it comes back to not being too hard on yourself, and looking at life as a learning experience.
3. If you are able to work part-time see if you can get a job. Obviously you don't want to take on some crap job, but maybe you can find something that doesn't pay well, but will at least give you the chance to use Japanese. Alternatively there may be some volunteer work you can do. In any event if something doesn't work, don't let it get you down, just view it as an experiment that didn't work, and now it is time to try the next experiment.

Other people have also given you excellent suggestions, good luck.

kame3 wrote:

Taurus wrote:

In response to the original post, I can sort of empathise - I'm only on the verge of passing JLPT2, but my spoken Japanese is appaling (though my listening is pretty good). Like, the other day the French language teacher at my school, who converses with the other teachers really naturally in Japanese told me he's still studying for JLPT 4. I can barely get a sentence out because I spend all day speaking and correcting English.

Perhaps, native English speakers (I'm guessing you are since you teach it) have more problems with spoken Japanese, since more often than not it is their first second language. For most non-native English, they already passed the hurdle of speaking a second language with English, so perhaps they have less problems.
Furthermore, the reason he's studying for JLPT4 could well be that his Kanji knowledge is bad. I know enough people who can speak Japanese very good (imho), but just do not have any (or scarce) Kanji knowledge. But perhaps that is not the case here.

Yes I find this scenario very interesting. While in Japan I met a lot of people from various places such as Brazil, Peru, India, Nepal etc who could speak Japanese pretty damn well. But they were still learning kanji or in some cases could hardly even read kana. Talking with them they told me the were able to get fluent pretty quickly, in some cases only a year or so, but it took them a lot longer to learn kanji. I was kind of curious how they did it, but they didn't seem to have any special method, other than listening, speaking, jotting down notes and looking stuff up in the dictionary. Obviously spoken japanese is something that in some cases people can pick up pretty easily without much actual formal study.

However I wasn't able to achieve the same thing ! Despite living in Japan for 2 years I can't speak the language worth a damn !

Mormon missionaries also seem to manage to master some reasonable spoken fluency in only a year. They told me that they don't really study kanji at all. I asked them what their secrets were, but they told me the intensive mormon language school which they attend before heading off overseas doesn't really "teach" stuff. It is more like, you are going to japan in a month, memorize this before tomorrow. After arriving in Japan they are paired up with a more experienced guy who helps the newbie learn the ropes.