Practicing and improving speaking

When learning a language outside of a classroom environment, getting speaking practice can feel like a slightly unintuitive challenge.

Thankfully, there are many ways to practice speaking, and not all of them involve having a native speaker sitting in front of you to do so ^^

Things you can do by yourself

There are lots of ways to improve your speaking when practicing by yourself. Interestingly enough, some of them don't even involve opening your mouth to speak

These are generally sorted by how much effort it takes to do any of the below activities, from least to greatest.

Increase exposure to natural language

The first thing you can do is to get lots of exposure to natural language in appropriate contexts.

To do so, it's a good idea to make sure your learning-focused resource goes over all parts of the language comprehensively, including spoken language and colloquialisms. (NativShark does this.)

You'll also want to get lots of practice in with native materials, too.

The more exposure you get, the more you become familiar with what words you can use where. You'll also become more familiar with what words you can expect to hear in a given situation.

This helps both your speaking and listening abilities, as you'll be subconsciously primed with a pool of situationally relevant words ^^

Think about how to word things

Imagine you're relaxing at home, and you want some water.

How would you say that in Japanese?

How would you ask a person you live with if they could get you some?

Practicing mundane, everyday sentences like the above is a great way to practice pulling Japanese out of your brain, and seeing areas where you might need a bit more practice.

And while you could also say these things out loud, just thinking of how you would phrase them is also fine.

This is because speaking is split up into two parts:

Forming sentences on the fly
Making the right sounds in the right order

If we're just thinking about how we would say things, we're practicing #1 here. We have an idea in our head, and we try to get our brains to produce that idea in Japanese.

The act of forcing Japanese out of our brains is what matters, as far as #1 goes.

However, to practice both #1 and #2 of the above, we can also...

Speak ideas out loud

Speaking out loud (to ourselves or maybe our pets) helps us practice both forming sentences and getting our tongues used to making the right sounds in the right order.

Getting comfortable doing this will take time on a few levels.

Producing natural Japanese sentences takes a lot of effort, especially during the first few years of Japanese study. And following up on that by getting your tongue to make the right sounds in quick succession is also quite the journey.

I (Ty) am very familiar with the feeling of not being able to produce natural Japanese as often as I would like & getting tongue-tied, even now that I'm past 9 years into my studies. I really do mean it when I say it takes time. But thankfully it gets better and better as time goes on, as long as we're consistent in our studies

So try speaking out loud!

Say whatever you feel like. Maybe...

you see a painting you like in your house and want to try to describe it and why you like it
you're thinking about your day and try to turn that into Japanese and speak it aloud
you're reacting in Japanese to a scene in the show you're watching
you're contemplating your existence on this planet in Japanese while vacuuming the carpet
you're playing with your pet and use Japanese when doing so

Anything works ^^

Of course, making our own sentences is great because as we practice it more, we get faster at forming them.

However! It's also a great idea to build a bank of words that you can pull from for a given context, which also helps with production speed a lot. So...

Shadowing

Shadowing is when you get a sentence with audio from a native speaker and try to copy the pronunciation, intonation, and general flow of the sentence.

I like to recommend copying from the sentences in NativShark because they come with context and naturally spoken audio recorded by native speakers of Japanese.

If you want to use audio other than NativShark for this, I caution against audio recorded for textbooks, and audio produced by computers/AI, as they are often not representative of how people speak in everyday life.

There are tons of ways to incorporate this into your studies. You can shadow sentences the first time you see them, during reviews or Dialogues, or in your Review Sets.

When shadowing, feel free to repeat a given sentence however many times you want, while listening to the sentence again between tries.

You may also find it fun/helpful to record yourself (with your phone or such) and compare yourself to the native audio. If you're trying to really nail down your pronunciation and intonation, you'll very likely find a lot of things to work on that you couldn't otherwise find without recording yourself ^^

When practicing with shadowing, just try to aim for small improvements! I'd argue that it's impossible to get it 100% perfect on the first try. But small improvements add up with time and consistency, so it works itself out given enough time ^^

Personally, I like to shadow my reviews when I feel particularly motivated, but I don't do it every day as it takes a lot of time and effort.

Instead, I've found that treating shadowing as a bonus activity works well for me and my studies. Or maybe I'll plan on not doing it on a given day, but end up shadowing 1 or 2 review cards that catch my eye.

Be sure to experiment and adjust based on what works for you

Things you need other people for

Getting lots of speaking practice in by yourself can be great. You can work on the fine details of your speaking, things you might be tripping up on, and you can build the confidence to go out and speak more if you aren't doing so already.

But eventually, we do want to go out and speak to people ^^

But sometimes this is... easier said than done (sorry ).

As a generalization, most of the people you speak to with the goal of improving your Japanese fall into two main categories:

Languages partners and tutors.

Of course, there are more people you might practice with such as a family member, friend, random person you met at a shrine or bar, and so on, but I'm thinking mainly of someone to specifically practice with who is likely to give you feedback each time you do so.

Finding these two categories of people to speak with tends to be one of the more difficult parts of this task, so let's go over that first.

Finding someone to speak with

If you happen to live near a sizable population of Japanese speakers, then you might not struggle too much with finding someone to speak with there ^^

And if you live in Japan, this newsletter on making friends might help get you a friend + language partner pretty fast.

However, a lot of language learners aren't quite this lucky, including me when I started! I had no in-person speaking partners for the first ~4 years of my language journey. So I had to figure out different ways to practice speaking.

Thankfully, there are a lot of options online.

Since NativShark doesn't have an internal solution for finding a tutor or language partner at the moment, here are a few common recommendations from the NativShark Community instead ^^

Language partners

Finding a language partner is nice because you get to interact with a fellow language learner who is learning in the opposite direction that you are, so to speak. In our case, we'd look for a Japanese native speaker who is learning our native language.

This is a fun way to share each other's culture and help each other out along the journey ^^

HelloTalk is a common recommendation for finding a language partner. It's a bit like a mix of Facebook and Twitter, but for language learners.

A positive about this app is that you can easily send and receive corrections on both timeline posts and private messages, which is great ^^

A downside of this app is that many people have likened it to a dating app instead of an app to find a language partner with. I've seen a lot of people say that they constantly get ghosted and are unable to find a consistent partner to practice with.

I've used HelloTalk a lot in the past and have experienced something similar to the above.

An approach I've found helpful to mitigate this negative is to send your messages in both your native language and Japanese, which gives people the opportunity to practice reading the language they want to learn, while also having something to reference in case they're didn't fully understand a piece of Japanese you might've written.

On top of that, I liked to tell potential language partners I was messaging that I wanted them to be strict with corrections (to make them sound as natural as possible), and that I could do the same for them. Then I would follow up by giving them lots of corrections in the best quality I could.

I found one long-term language partner thanks to that, but one was all I needed ^^

Of course, this is a lot of work to maintain, and needing to write the same thing you want to say in two different languages takes a lot of effort and time.

If you feel like this is a bit much, you might want to instead try...

Tutors

Tutors are nice because you can just pay them instead of having to spend a large portion of your study time correcting their language practice

And thanks to that, you can be a bit more "in charge", so to speak, as to what you want to do in a given tutor session.

Many learners in the NativShark Community recommend iTalki. Niko has used it on multiple occasions as well.

If you're using a comprehensive resource like NativShark, then it's likely most helpful to approach most sessions as a kind of "free talk" where you talk about whatever is on your mind or try to practice something you learned /found interesting recently (instead of learning new grammar from them, for example).

A potential downside to tutors (besides that they can get expensive) is that they're used to interacting with learners of the language, so they are more likely to "dumb down" their language in an attempt to make it easier to understand for a learner.

While this is a well-intended gesture, it isn't the most conducive to learning (you can't learn something if you never see it), so I recommend you ask your tutor to avoid using "textbook" language* with you and ask that they speak to you as they would another native speaker.

*"Textbook" language is language that is full of grammar, words, and cadence or speaking speeds that are unlikely to be used in a non-academic environment. It might be fair to call it the opposite of "everyday" language, though there's a lot of nuance lost in that statement. More information about the different types of language here.

FAQ

When should I start speaking?

Honestly, whenever you feel like it ^^

You can start practicing with shadowing and making your own sentences quite early on, say, even from day 1 or week 1 of your studies.

As far as having a conversation, getting a language partner, or signing up for a tutor, there isn't an "exact" spot to start doing this, per se. It depends on many factors.

Often, the biggest factor is simply how comfortable/willing you are to attempt to speak to someone in Japanese.

Personally, I didn't start seriously making sentences until about a 1 and a half into my studies (if I remember correctly, haha). But once I got into it, I wished I had started far sooner than that.

Additionally, of the Japanese learners I've interacted with who have started speaking at so many various stages in their studies, nearly all of them also tell me they wish they started speaking sooner.

The ones who don't say that are the ones who don't care about speaking in the first place and are learning just to consume Japanese media.

There is one exception to this, but I address that in the next FAQ question!

I heard you should avoid speaking early to prevent bad habits from forming. Is this true?

Not really. I've mainly noticed this advice from people who have an extreme amount of time to dedicate to learning Japanese and can make content out of it on YouTube and such.

If you also have an extreme amount of time to study Japanese with and perhaps also make content out of it, then maybe it's a strategy you might want to try.

But for the average person (that's me! and probably you reading this as well), this isn't something we need to worry about.

You can just notice any "bad habits" you might have and try to fix them later down the road, if that's what you want to do.

However, it's hard to define what a bad habit is. That will vary widely based on a learner's specific goals.

Often when I see this sentiment, it's usually in reference to making sure you have a "perfect" or "native" pitch accent, and that speaking early causes you to cement an "unnatural" pitch accent, which causes you to have an accent when you speak Japanese.

If you ask me, this idea often overlooks three key points.

First, a native speaker can sound like a lot of different things, and native speakers from different regions will vary in their intonation, word choices, grammar choices, and pitch accent.

Second, it overlooks how natural phrasing is a vastly more important tool to being understood by other speakers compared to things like pitch accent, as long as you have a baseline level of pronunciation down.

Third, you can correct any unwanted habits by recording yourself and listening to yourself a lot, if you want to do that. Sure some things might take a bit of effort to correct, but that's just part of the journey.

Anyway, this advice seems to come from a love of Japanese and a desire to be as good as we can possibly be in it.

I think that's a beautiful sentiment ^^

But doing things like intentionally not speaking for the first X number of years puts a huge amount of expectations on ourselves to achieve "perfection" (for lack of a better word, the definition is really muddy).

In this approach, there's no room for necessary error & forgiving yourself when you make mistakes, which are essential parts of the learning process. Instead, those expectations are much more likely to lead most of us to burn out and quit our studies altogether, rather than to this "perfection".

And that's a bummer, if you ask me.

You're not in danger of "cementing anything irreversible" here. The language-learning journey never ends and that's part of the fun

As a personal example of why this isn't much of a big deal:

I pronounced お as "o" in English for the first 4 years of my studies. (They're different but I had no idea, haha.)

I had passed the JLPT N1 and still had this "bad habit". But one time I was talking to some friends and they pointed it out to me, I worked a bit to fix it and now it's gone.

Maybe you've already solved that habit, or maybe you're just learning that it's different now.

A learner who doesn't care about anything past a baseline level of pronunciation might argue that this isn't a "bad habit", and that it doesn't matter.

Alternatively, a learner who wants "native" pronunciation might hate to learn they've been doing this for years. But they can just keep an eye out for it going forward and fix it once they realize it, like I did ^^

Either way, there's always going to be something else to improve upon. But so many things come out in the wash when you study and keep trying to improve for long enough.

Just keep showing up! It's all part of the journey.

📚

A full answer requires a lot of nuance, so check out this article for more details:

Sounding more natural when speaking Japanese

Also, remember that learning takes time!

There is no passing or failing when learning