I realized recently that I was having a lot of anxiety during my iTalki lessons because I was messing things up and feel like I should be farther along after 2 years of study. I feel sort of embarassed that I'm still messing up and forgetting even basic things like "ita koto ga arimasu".
To be honest in the beginning I took a university course that just drilled grammar and did a number of other things, like avoiding kanji, that definitely made things harder/slowed me down. It took me a while to learn how to learn and now I feel like I'm learning more natural Japanese.
However, I still feel sort of embarassed because its like "You've been doing this for 2 years, you should be better than this." I don't know how to shake this mindset. It makes me not want to have speaking lessons at all.
Any advice or perspective on this would be appreciated. Thank you.
by investoroma
22 comments
I’m kinda in the same boat, but don’t be too hard on yourself. 2 years really isn’t a lot for learning a language and you still have so much more to learn. Instead of worrying about how “little” (you know more than you think) you have learned be glad you’ve figured out new ways to improve your language skills. Remember it’s a marathon, not a race.
This just comes down to expectations. Re-evaluate what you expect from yourself and you won’t feel this way. You need to expect you will mistakes and embrace it as part of the learning process, there’s no shame in “being bad at something” if your goal is to become good at it over time.
Counting by years isn’t the way to do it too. You should instead count by hours as this is the only reasonable metric to measure where you might be at. Someone stating 2 years might involve them studying 5 minutes a day over 2 years which is 60 hours in total. That goes without saying it doesn’t amount to much when the average expectancy for CotoAcademy for N1 passers is 3,900 hours. At 1 hour a day, that takes over 10 years to reach.
Output is usually weaker than input. Keep trying.
This is why people should be starting iTalki (or other speaking practice) in the first month. Language is for communication. If you can’t do that everything else is a waste of time.
HA. No, 2 years is nothing, stop bashing yourself and これからも頑張って！
I deal with this sometimes with my students and people who come to my conversation Meetup group. I’m not sure what your lessons are like, but if they’re just freeform conversations, you’re basically improvising everything—which is super hard. For an English speaker learning Japanese, two years really isn’t much time. Most university classes don’t focus on making students conversational, either.
What’s worked well for me lately is having my students work on scripted speeches. They’ll talk about their daily routine or introduce themselves in 7 to 10 sentences that I translate for them. They practice it until they’ve memorized it, and we focus on pronunciation and grammar. This way, they speak without mistakes or using English fillers like “Umm,” and their pronunciation and flow improve a lot. Interestingly, once they do this, their listening skills and understanding of new grammar get much easier. I recommend trying it out!
Oh, and if you’re still using Romaji, drop it completely. It’ll mess up your pronunciation, make listening harder, and slow down your reading and writing forever. Stick to ひらがな and カタカナ for now, and don’t stress about kanji for a while.
So your ability to speak naturally is going to be a by product of how much you “know” Japanese. This doesn’t mean grammar rules, so to speak.
Think of it this way. Let’s say there is something you are very knowledgeable about. If you see another person speak on this topic, you’d be able to finish their sentences(to some degree), wouldn’t you?
Being able to speak Japanese naturally works much in the same way. You need to be SO familiar with the language, that you can predict with high accuracy what the next word or sequence of words could possibly be. The ONLY way to get good at this is to READ/WATCH/LISTEN to countless hours of Japanese so that your brain starts to intuitively build these connections.
So the advice? This is a long journey and the more time you spend reading/watching/listening to Japanese, the faster you’ll improve. I saw this equation from virtuallynative:
L2-(L1 x 5)>0
L1= Time Spent with Native Language
L2= Time Spent with Target Language
5=last five years
In other words, you need to spend 5 times as much with Japanese as you do English over the last 5 years. How accurate is this? No way to ever tell, but I like the idea.
On a side note “2 years” doesn’t mean much. If you’re consuming Japanese 8 hours a day, 2 years is a long time. If you’re studying grammar once a week in a University class, 2 years is not very long at all.
Years are meaningless a measurement. How many hours have you done?
One person might only do 1 hour a week, someone else 4 hours a day.
When I studied alone I did 5 years of 5-6 hours a week. The last two years I studied 10 hours per day. You shouldn’t be counting like that.
Plus, the teachers know that non-asians take far longer – especially in the beginning.
I studied with a Japanese girl who is reading a book about psychology in English, but can’t understand a word I say in English nor say anything herself.
Man, you’ve only studied Japanese for 2 years… At the 2 years mark, I couldn’t speak a lick of English, you know? Even 2 decades of learning wasn’t enough to speak fluently, whatever that means…
If you didn’t know, even kids who have been learning their mother tongue from birth take a decade to master certain finer part of grammar. Not sure if this makes you feel better or worse, but learning a language is tough, and it’s another fact of life you gotta face. Please don’t be fooled by youtube conmen selling their perfect courses and best learning methods that get you fluency in like a few years. It’s impossible.
I recently was on a business trip in Japan and while I was there, I met up with a friend who speaks pretty good Japanese and he kind of got me to loosen up with speaking since I was so concerned about it not being perfect and people judging me for it. Basically, he said that like with anything else, it takes practice and you’re going to get it wrong, but people appreciate you even putting in the effort to learn Japanese in the first place. And, whenever you get something wrong, you just make a mental note of it and work on getting it right in the future and finally to where you don’t even have to think about it anymore. Reading, writing, and listening are so different from speaking too, so it’s going to take some time to get that down. It’s already impressive you can do the first three, and you’re really close to getting all of them. Learning Japanese shouldn’t ever make you extremely anxious, so that’s why it’s good to sometimes take a deep breath when you’re nervous and remind yourself that it’s okay to not be perfect. It sounds silly, but a small affirmation like that can help you loosen up. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll feel.
So don’t beat yourself up! You’re probably overall better than I am at Japanese, and I guess the thing going for me is that I was forced to speak Japanese while living there in the past, so I can make myself coherent, but I’m nowhere near perfect. But, it just takes practice and if I can still get my point across and have conversations, then that’s good enough for me in the moment. Hope that helps!
I’ve studied for 10 years (~5000 hours), passed the N1, and still often feel stupid when I’m talking. It’s just kind of part of the game. 5,000 hours seems like a lot, but that’s (conservatively speaking) the amount of input a typical two year old might have.
Language is an endless thing; it’s hard to accept that, but the good news is that you’ll likely find you can more than meet your needs/goals with much, much less than fluency.
I feel like as a general rule (which I often have to remind myself) that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing this. Sometimes you’ll learn a specific grammar piece in 2 days and for someone else it’s 2 months and vice versa. Don’t compare yourself to others or to an expectation you keep holding of yourself, look back and say “I’m better than before?” If the answer is yes you’re good.
I’m in the same boat; about 2 years of study. A few observations:
Reading, writing, listening, and speaking (especially extemporaneous production) are four separate skills. At least that’s how I see it. A lot of us two year students have done the first three to some extent and speaking…hardly at all. Have you really been speaking for 2 years?
We have to start speaking somewhere. The only thing is to find a non-judgemental environment and start talking.
And be comfortable making mistakes. Trevor Noah once said (on a YouTube video I found) that you have to be like a two-year-old: Just open your mouth and talk even though you will make mistakes.
I’m the same way, I get nervous and freeze up. It’s even worse when I have to answer an open-ended question and I’d have a hard time picking a response in my native English. I also need to shut up my English internal dialogue, and figure out how to relax myself, because Japanese is hard when I’m nervous. I might meditate more.
People really underestimate the muscle memory aspect of speaking.
One of the reasons I stress getting Japanese subtitled movies (not cartoons) and speaking along with them repeatedly is you need to make your body do things without having to only focus on that.
Very few people even think about their speech in their native language, and often do not even need to think to speak.
The only way you are going to get there in Japanese is to repeatedly speak, at native pace, and in appropriate situations exactly what Japanese people would say. To literally exactly copy what native say, when they say it. If you are in a Japanese workplace, then you can do this by seeing native handle a situation, and making exactly the same noises they do when you are in the same situation. And when that same situation comes up, shadow them to make sure you are getting it right.
It literally does not matter if you understand the noises coming out of your mouth. It only matters if the people you are speaking to understand the noises coming out of your mouth.
It requires a fair amount of ‘death of the ego’ to do this, to make noises you do not understand, for the benefit of other people. But that’s the point: when you speak, it is for them, not you.
Its completely usual to be incompetent at speech (and 聞き取り）when you have not had to rely on it. Back when I had to hire Japanese speakers to handle customers, I always stressed that pace (in your own speech) and appropriate reaction (to their speech) is way more important than time spent studying, for verbal interaction with people you meet cold. People with four year degrees in Japanese literature could end up being less useful than Filipino guys who learned on the fly, and never studied Japanese at all. Because the Filipino guys spent every second of their study focusing on the reaction of the other person, and wasted little time trying to say what they want to say.
You teach them the noises they need to make, and when they need to make them, and they are good.
Bluntly speaking, it does not matter to *anyone* what *YOU* want to say.
Repeating this: *It does not matter what you want to say.*
It matters what they expect you to say, or they simply cannot make sense of the noises coming out of your mouth.
When we listen to native speech (native to us, in any language) spoken by native speakers, we actually only hear 60-80% of the noises they make, and reconstruct the rest out of our experience and expectation. If you are not speaking in ways Japanese speakers expect, then it does not matter if your pronunciation is exact, they are going to have trouble following you.
Switch the perspective, you have not been practicing speaking regularly for two years. Did two years of class in university and went to Japan after, trust me I made plenty of mistakes and did not understand a ton of stuff. But when you use if daily, it get more natural.
Yes you might forget basic stuff because e
You are under a different setting and experience different kind of stress and even the basic stuff does not come naturally just because you do not have enough experience.
I’m approaching N3 but my speaking is N5 at best… output is something I’ll have to focus on too.
That’s so messed up that certain teachers throw comments at you like that. I hope you find a better teacher who will encourage you rather than degrade you. Most people can’t converse in a new language after just two years of study.
How I look at it is that initial studying creates little “knowledge islands” in your head that you build up in a vacuum. This is like when you drill new vocabulary with flash cards, even if you never randomly recall it, the knowledge will bury itself somewhere in the back of your mind (or in this allegory, an isolated island with no connection to the rest of your Japanese knowledge).
Practical use of your skills helps build the bridges between them, and you will know when a bridge has been built every time you have that “aha” moment. You saw that word you thought you would never see in the real world, and now that word is suddenly more natually part of your working knowledge.
Now consider the same for all I just said but for speaking. They’re not completely divorced skills, as a heightened book knowledge will definitely speed up working communication skills. The opposite works too, if you spent more time learning vocally and went to study the book knowledge later (but this is honestly probably an extremely rare scenario for Japanese learners, not many people randomly get stranded in Japan…)
3 years later I’m still forgetting ita kota ga arimasu! I’m just pleased with myself for sticking this out and continuing slowly. I look back at my notes from the first year and I couldn’t remember things I find really simple now so I know, with time, I’ll remember lots more. I get anxious during my italki lessons too but I tell my teacher and she says don’t worry, this is what studying is all about!
Why are Japanese learners so obsessed with data, millstones other stuff?
Always this “I learn xy hours”, “I have xy of kanji in ma deck”, “is my progress enough if I doing xy?”
Don’t think too much about the process of learning and actual do the learning. And don’t compare with others. We are not in school anymore.
Forgetting things is part of the learning process. Repetition is everything. Just keep showing up.