Sounding more natural when speaking

This article is specifically about speaking naturally and examines a few techniques to achieve this up close.

If you're looking to improve your speaking ability overall, you might find this article more helpful to start with:

Practicing and improving speaking

Many factors contribute to sounding natural when speaking Japanese.

However, the most important factor tends to be expressing yourself naturally while using vocabulary appropriate for the situation.

Studying natural Japanese that is presented with context and naturally spoken audio is one of the best ways to improve this skill. It's also helpful to spend extra study time shadowing (listening to and repeating) natural audio.

What is speaking naturally?

I know when I (Ty) hear the phrase “speaking naturally”, it’s 99.99% of the time followed by a discussion on pitch accent* and how to learn that.

*Pitch accent is how your voice(pitch) moves up and down when speaking Japanese. This is different from English, which has a stress accent that affects the volume(stress) of your voice instead of the pitch.

While pitch accent is certainly a part of sounding more natural, there is something that is often left out of the conversation that likely contributes more to naturalness than pitch accent studies do:

Natural Phrasing

Think about someone you know who speaks English as a second language and is highly proficient.

Maybe they’ve lived surrounded by English for a long time and all of their ideas are very well-expressed, and the way they phrase them is very natural. There’s no weirdness to their grammar, and they even use slang when appropriate.

Now, stop and think about their accent.

If they’re strong enough of a speaker, you might not have deeply considered their accent before, beyond briefly noticing that it isn’t the same as yours.

Because they have natural phrasing, communication flows smoothly.

It's often only when a confusing sentence comes out and breaks this flow do you stop and remember they aren't a native speaker, and have some sort of accent different than yours.

Natural phrasing is the key to sounding more natural.

Pitch accent and pronunciation

We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t focus on your heart’s content on pitch accent and pronunciation. These can help increase how natural you sound as well. In fact, we do cover these topics throughout NativShark.

But to give my own experience, I recently met someone who has lived in Japan for 14 years and his Japanese was awesome.

Even though I think my pitch accent was “more natural” than his, he had me beat in naturally phrasing his ideas. Because of this, he was able to communicate more effectively with the Japanese people around us.

And because he was more easily and readily understood, I would argue that his Japanese was more natural than mine.

Anyway, now that we know the key factors to help us speak more naturally…

How do I speak more naturally?

There are plenty of methods. The widest method is “get more exposure to natural Japanese in context”.

The more you understand, the more you'll be able to produce. So the first step is ensuring that you have exposure to this language.

NativShark has you covered with this aspect, but it will always be a good thing to dive into native materials and find speaking partners to help this along as well. We do advise caution regarding study resources such as textbooks, however, as sentences are often unnatural and without context.

A more narrow method could be shadowing (listening, repeating, and trying to copy the audio) in NativShark.

Because the sentence comes from NativShark, you will know what context the sentence is natural in, and our native speakers are instructed to say it how they would in real life. So you have the natural phrasing, the pitch accent, and the pronunciation in there in one nice bundle.

You can shadow however often you feel like doing so. If you have extra study time, maybe go through a few Dialogues and just try to copy them.

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Adding Dialogues you like to Review Sets might make them easier to revisit.

If you find yourself struggling to copy the speed, intonation, pronunciation, or anything else that the speaker is saying, I find it very helpful to get my phone out, record myself*, and listen back. It helps me more easily recognize where I’m going wrong and where I can start to adjust.

*Recording makes a surprising amount of difference so I recommend trying it at least once. That said, I do find recording myself to be a lot of mental energy, so I try not to overdo it to ensure I'm always looking forward to my studies and don't burn out.

If you don’t feel like recording and trying to copy, that’s okay too.

Being exposed to natural Japanese will help you either way so feel free to mix and match, and keep in mind that all of this will come with time, consistency, and a bit of attention and awareness mixed in every now and then.