After more than two years of study and taking JLPT exams, I’ve noticed something uncomfortable. I still don’t write or speak well.
Among the many flaws in my Japanese, one issue stands out: 語尾 (word endings).
I started mapping my progress using something like the Johari Window, where the idea is to see what’s known and unknown to both myself and others.
In the first stage, I was not knowing what I didn’t know. For a long time, I focused on awareness—learning verb patterns, adjective endings, and various conjugations. Slowly, I became less afraid to use them. Even when I made obvious, messy mistakes, at least native speakers could understand what I meant.
Now I’m in the second stage: knowing what I don’t know. Native speakers can grasp what I’m trying to say, both in writing and conversation. The problem is that I can’t tell what’s off about my endings. I say something, and it sounds “Japanese enough,” but the phrasing feels slightly wrong or awkward. I’m using expressions that no native would.
So my question is: how do you polish out 語尾 mistakes when you’ve already internalized some of the wrong ones? How do you retrain your ear and fix these subtle, patterned errors that linger after N2 or so?
The other bucket I’m struggling with is reading. When I read books or news, I often copy out the phrases or sentences I can’t parse and check the translations. After reading the translation, I realize that I should have been able to understand it. The grammar wasn’t impossible, and the vocabulary wasn’t new. But I split the sentence wrong. I chunked the elements incorrectly, especially around verbs.
That’s the other question I’m wrestling with: how do you fix parsing errors when the structure itself is what confuses you? Translating helps in the short term, but it doesn’t change the fact that my brain still divides the sentence in the wrong places the next time I see a similar one.
These two areas—語尾 mistakes in output and chunking errors in reading—feel like the bottlenecks holding me back from real fluency. I’m trying to figure out how others overcame this stage.
by neworleans-