The title.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why on earth these people stress so hard to "nOt SpEaK uNtiL N3+" …like wtf?
Yeah, lemme go ahead and toss a"すみません、私の日本語は下手です。” at every single person I come across and then go silent.
What's the reasoning behind this? Especially already being here… personally find it a VERY good learning experience to be corrected by natives when attempting to converse and tbh, it feels like one of the best "tools" there is.
by burnbabyburn694200
26 comments
I think they are assuming you won’t be in Japan for a while.
I’m a believer in just speaking a lot from the beginning, but it seems like there’s a lot of benefit from getting a good feel for the language first.
Their reasoning is it locks you into bad sentence structures and bad pronunciations since you’ll need to learn to undo things you’ve gotten used to.
Kind of like learning to play a guitar hendrix style vs buying a left handed guitar.
On the whole though, if your living in Japan or have Japanese friends you wanna communicate with I’d say that you should ignore the wait advice and just start talking. I’d agree that friends will do wonders to help you, more than you’d benefit from waiting
Don’t speak until you’re fluent? How do they think fluency happens? It gets airdropped by the language fairy after you pass a certain (written) test? 🧚♀️
Influencers like to say provocative things. Don’t take their advice as being the “only” way. Speaking and being corrected is a valuable exercise anywhere along the path to learning.
On the whole I agree with this concept. The more active listening you do (both figuratively and literally) the greater your feel for the language, there is truly no rush to speaking.
The exception is if you have contact with native speakers. Speaking to native speakers remains the superior way to learn any language. It’s simply not something that most people have access to to a significant degree when they are learning.
It’s based on the science of second language acquisition, specifically based on the ideas of Stephen Krashen. Having massive amounts of input first makes it so you are less likely to develop bad habits that can be hard to get rid of later in your journey.
It’s just good advice, especially for people who don’t necessarily have to interact with the target language, but your case is obviously different. I’d still advice you to get more passive immersion than active speaking on a day to day basis if possible.
Most of this is advice for it you want to “sound native”
If you rly do want that then the advice makes sense. You’ll develop bad speaking habits early on because you don’t understand the natural speaking patterns/grammar of Japanese people.
I personally don’t mind sounding like an American who learned Japanese as a second language since I’m an American who learned Japanese as a second language so I rly don’t care
If you are not in the right environment (most people are outside of Japan) – you might develop incorrect speech patterns as a beginner.
One idea is that speaking too early on well give you a worse accent than if you start speaking once you’ve developed a pretty decent foundation of the language. At least that’s what most believers of this claim.
Efficiency wise, you’ll have an easier time learning to speak if you already understand whoever you’re talking to, as well as being able to formulate sentences without thinking too hard about it. Someone who starts speaking from the get go with little prior knowledge will struggle to understand, struggle to formulate sentences, and struggle to speak. Someone who’s already developed an understanding will still struggle with speaking in particular, but everything else will be a bit easier and the process of finally learning to speak could be a little more enjoyable.
A popular example is how children will receive a whole bunch of “input” before they ever “output”
Everyone learns differently though, and what’s important is you enjoy the journey. If you’d prefer to speak early on there’s nothing wrong with it!
Speaking a language you don’t understand can be incredibly stressful and anxiety inducing for a lot of people. They worry about making mistakes and coming across as rude or ignorant, which is possible.
For example, in my first lesson with a tutor, I meant to ask her if she had any hobbies. Instead, I asked her if she had any sisters, which made me sound kind of creepy and seemed to put her off. It was pretty embarrassing.
I think the advice to avoid speaking until later on is to ease some of that anxiety. They’ll still make mistakes, but probably less embarrassing ones.
Not like you will be able to talk much anyways, if you are on N5, N4. I havent take any test, but I did some N5 drills passing all of them, and I am currently in Japan and I can barely exchange more than 2, 3 sentences with locals.
Go for it if it helps you, but dont expect much.
I started learning Japanese when I got a job as an English teacher in Japan. My students were mostly kindergartners but you better believe I was trying to talk to them right away. The sentences/words I tried out on my kids stuck in my head way better than the ones I didn’t. As I got better, I would translate the simple phrases we were learning in English into Japanese for them so we could better talk about what they are and how to use them. That was really helpful early on, for me and for them.
I think part of this is actually rooted in the superiority compley that is quite prominent among Japanese learners. Everyone wanting to be right and going “Actually the grammer should go like this…” or “Actually this vocab X is better than vocab y in this sentence…” because otherwise their egos are hurt.
Speaking at the early stages of the learning process might be risky because of the chance of developing bad habits for wrongly structured sentences and such stuff. But at some point speaking is just necessary for further improving your language skills and waiting with it until N3 and above sounds way too late for it.
Well, this is based on the assumption that you’re not in a situation where speaking is necessary for survival. If you’re in Japan, of course, you have to speak, it’s something that can’t be helped.
now, if you’re in a country where you can avoid speaking and you truly care about sounding as close to a native speaker as possible, then you should actively avoid speaking opportunities and focus solely on listening. Once you understand really well and have developed a strong intuition for how the language works, only then should you start speaking.
Shadowing is an excellent method of speaking practice that requires no correction. You’re not worrying about the words, sentence structure, grammar, anything. Just *speaking.*
I think people get bogged down in doing everything at once and forget that using native spoken passages to practice speaking is so useful. Everything else is done *for* you so you can focus on the speaking part.
Personally I use audiobooks to shadow for speaking practice. I read along with the book also.
It is amazing how much you pick up from shadowing native written content. Including sentence structure, intonation, grammar patterns, natural speaking, colloquialisms and idioms. It’s also super fun when you pick a topic you’re genuinely interested in.
And all you need is hiragana and katakana to get started. Plenty of books have furigana if you like to follow along (like me) and audiobooks can be slowed to .5 speed. Super useful.
It’s 「私は日本語が下手」 BTW. 「私の日本語は下手」, a direct translation from English, conveys a wrong nuance that some specific words of yours have been taken note of, mocked, and in the worst case made fun of by others who are in contrast good at the language.
—
As for the topic, speak whatever, whenever and however you can. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You can even mix languages up and people will understand you.
As a private Japanese teacher with over 10 years of experience and someone who has learned multiple languages, I’ve noticed a clear trend when it comes to students prioritizing output over input in the early stages of language learning.
Some of my students insist on speaking only Japanese during our lessons at the N5 and N4 levels. Ironically, these students often end up with the weakest Japanese skills. They tend to make frequent mistakes, fail to grasp nuanced differences in language usage, and develop poor pronunciation habits that are difficult to correct later.
In my professional opinion, focusing on input—listening, reading, and internalizing correct language patterns—is far more important during the early stages of learning. This helps build a solid foundation for understanding how the language works. It’s also crucial to spend time learning the subtle nuances of Japanese, as they play a key role in communication and cultural understanding.
That’s not to say beginners should never attempt to speak. However, practicing output without sufficient input can lead to ingrained errors that are challenging to fix down the line. Think of it like building a house: if the foundation isn’t strong, the entire structure becomes unstable.
So, while it’s natural to want to start speaking right away, especially when living in Japan, balance is key. Prioritize quality input, actively listen, and observe how natives use the language in different contexts. Then, when you’re ready to speak, you’ll have a much stronger command of the language to draw from.
Plus it doesn’t take that long to get to the N3 level, if you study diligently every day you can easily pass the N4 within one year and start your N3 studies during year 2.
Kindly ignore those people.
Who is saying this? We spoke Japanese on day 1 when I did my intro class years ago
There are some people who might say that you should avoid outputting completely until you are really good at understanding the language. But I would say that most people who promote a more input-focused learning strategy are more moderate when it comes to this. It’s more along the lines of “you can if you already live in the country or absolutely want to, but it’s (a) not necessary and (b) not really that helpful when you are a complete beginner.” I think it’s also, in part, a backlash to the push to speak from day one that is often promoted. I personally hate speaking as a beginner as it is not fun to not be able to say what you want to, and only stresses me out. Not to mention the fact that it is a pain in the ass to actually find someone to help you with it (if you don’t live in the country).
The general reasoning for not focusing on output first is that languages are complicated and you, as a beginner, have zero knowledge of how the language is supposed to sound. Basically, you are just making things up as you go, from a mix of the few things you have already learned as well as some assumptions you make based on your native language. Getting corrected at that stage is often so much information that you can hardly remember it, and if the native you are speaking with were to *REALLY* correct what you are saying, they would probably have to remake every sentence from the ground up to make it sound natural.
Yes, some people might stress that you will end up internalizing the mistakes you are making, but I think thats only a concern if you never get more input or never get corrected. Overall, I feel its more that it’s just not necessary and maybe not the most productive thing you can do as a beginner.
The advice I’ve seen is to not speak at least for the first couple months to put your focus on becoming familiar with the sound system of the language. Different languages have different sound systems, and as you develop your native language, you learn to ignore anything that’s not necessary to distinguishing words in that language. That makes it really hard to hear the difference between sounds that are meaningfully distinct in your target language, but not your own, as well as recognizing the actual sounds in that language rather than defaulting to an approximation from your native language’s sound set.
All in all, it’s an approach focused on building a solid foundation that can be built upon rather than rushing to build as fast as possible only to have to go back later to do the difficult work of fixing it or accept that it’ll always be flawed. I think it’s the kind of approach that tries to combat the difficulty older learners have with language learning by trying to be more purposeful about acquisition. I think something else to keep in mind is that feedback from native speakers is always going to be limited. They’re going to let you make a hundred mistakes without letting you know anything was wrong. Especially for a complete beginner who makes too many mistakes to count, even someone who really wants to help you out is still going to prioritize correcting certain things and avoid criticizing every little mistake.
All that said, at the end of the day it’s your language journey and you choose what you want to do and prioritize. If you just want to be able to communicate (especially since you’re living in Japan and have an immediate need to do so), then it might not matter if your pronunciation is off and your language is a bit awkward. It’s not a competition and your language use should suit your needs, y’know? Also, just by living there, you’re already getting more input than you’re outputting. For people elsewhere, they need to make an effort to listen to Japanese or else they’ll spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to speak without much input to reference.
Basically, that input stage is about starting a reference library that you can use to draw connections and compare your language use to, hence why there’s so much emphasis on having beginners build that library before trying to run off “writing their own books,” so to speak.
Ive never had a language instructor say this to me before. There was always encouragement to practice speaking so I find that a bit odd. I often heard things like: mistakes are how you learn, so don’t be afraid to try. You get better by doing, so keep trying. etc.
My (Japanese) husband told me that but mainly because it was difficult to converse with me so it frustrated him. So he said to just speak in English. lmao. But never a teacher.
All the practice in the world can’t replace the real thing. I didn’t feel ready to speak but I made some language exchange friends when living in Japan and went to bars a lot to talk to the locals. At first barely I understood barely anything, but eventually started picking up more words and phrases that are used naturally. Textbook Japanese did on occasion get “話は硬くない?” From some people.
Long story short, go out there and practice speaking in whatever way you can.
I literally don’t know. If someone whose learning my native language and aren’t fluent talk to me, I literally wouldn’t care if they mess up.
Since they’re not fluent, it’s expected for them to not know everything.
I’d actually say speaking to people boost your confidence and they might even be able to help you tbh.
In my experience, people who start speaking from the beginning have terrible accents and are really understand. After over 2000 hrs of person, you’ll naturally have better grasp of the sounds and intonation.
I mean you can start speaking whenever you want, no one is really stopping you from doing so. It’s just that speaking won’t really advance your language skills other than speaking, which is why compared to the other parts of learning it is quite inefficient. When reading for example you will improve at reading, grammar comprehension, vocab, build up language intuition etc. (same for listening) but when speaking you can only improve at speaking (and even then I would argue there is not much too improve when you don’t have a framework for how the language is supposed to sound, you need a goal post that you try to hit, this is how improvement happens, if your new to the language there is no such goal post yet).
Also, it’s just easier to build good habits the first time then to correct bad habits. I have a huge issue with the pitch accent of certain words, like I tend to pronounce 言う as い↓う instead of the correct い↑う because I said it so many times it became kind of ingrained, same with こと where I tend to say it as こ↓と instead of こと↓ (though that one has gotten better as of late). This is all due to some speaking output I’ve done, and frankly I am glad I always kept speaking at a minimum as my accent would be much much worse if I hadn’t.
It’s not just accent though, you can also internalize incorrect grammar (this one will stand out a lot), for example some leaners even after years of study will say something like 凄いだ, which is completely incorrect and stands out.
>What’s the reasoning behind this? Especially already being here… personally find it a VERY good learning experience to be corrected by natives when attempting to converse and tbh, it feels like one of the best “tools” there is.
The problem in skill accusition is (specifically in [Deliberate practice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice)) that you need to subconciously realize you made a mistake and then actively try and correct for it, this is how improvements happen, just having another one tell you that your wrong isn’t remotely the same thing, it’s like trying to correct a blind person drawing something, yeah his drawing might get a little better sure but it won’t ever turn out really good. If you however already have a framework of how the language is supposed to sound, you can indeed just speak and realize yourself how off you are and correct for it (everyone who has a good accent pretty much has done some form of this).
Also, and this is perhaps even the more important part, natives will not correct all your mistakes, they only correct the ones that stand out a lot and even than, most natives don’t have any linguistic training, they most of the times can’t even put into words why the thing you said wrong is wrong and often make up a bs reason to justify it, becuase the only reason they know it’s wrong is because of their intuition tells them so. (So natives are a great tool to know if something sounds natural or not, or if something sounds right or not, **but** as soon as you seek an explanation you are entering dangerous territory)