I’m currently doing flashcards for kanji and words. Also doing genki textbook lessons with an italki teacher. The practice questions and corrections seem sufficient for learning the grammar and words in the book but it’s pretty much just asking or answering a question. It’s not a conversation that I’m having practice with. Maybe I’ll be able to build upto it later on.
My teacher usually asks me the same basic things every lesson for 15 mins. how are you, what date is it, what did you do yesterday, what are your plans today. Then sometimes asks me can you say this in Japanese? basically getting me to use prior words and grammar point I’ve learnt.
I’m wondering if anyone’s ever learnt Japanese from doing mainly conversation lessons. I had a couple before where the teacher can introduce some new words, grammar and phrases but tries to speak at your level. I’m thinking it may be more fun than what I’m doing if it will work for me.
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My thoughts process is “you’ve gotta learn to walk before you can run”. While I do believe conversation practice is one of the best ways to learn and solidify what you’re learning, It’s hard to hold a conversation when you might not know much grammar or vocab. I’d suggest continuing with the learning you are doing to build more of a foundation, but it may be good to suggest new questions or topics to expand vocab use. It may also be good for you to prep a few questions or topics yourself for your teacher to lean on.
Conversation practice is really useful and important, but where you’re at right now I suspect it might be a bit dull and you might not have as much room for creativity and impulsiveness as you might in a conversation in English. Still, the more off-the-cuff speaking you can do, the better. You’ll fumble a lot, mind will go blank and you’ll forget even the most basic stuff but it’s all part of the process. By no means am I a great conversationalist but I try to get in a bit every week if I can to keep the blade sharp so to speak. Doing that has improved my Japanese significantly. Not just in the sense of getting better at saying things but also listening to the other person and understanding what they’re saying back, then being able to formulate your own response. These structured question-and-answer exercises in textbooks are good and helpful especially when you’re in the early stages but it’s not the same as ‘real’ conversation, it’s predictable and formulaic and eventually you’ll find that you’re focusing on memorising phrases in a set order rather than putting out anything original.
It’s useful if you wanna talk!!!
I started doing it after studying for 2000 hours (I had read about 11 books at that point)
I probably should have started a little earlier. Maybe after…hm maybe after 1500 or so.
It’s fun to talk in Japanese!
I’m currently n3 after a year plus of lessons based off a conversation-focused text book, “Dekiru Nihongo”.
About 4 months in I felt confident enough to ask my teacher to increase the pace, which she was quite happy to do, since it’s probably more exciting for her as well. Basically fewer repetitions, shorter reviews of previous content.
The trade off is that I must do a decent amount of practice on my own in order to retain past content.
Language learning generally goes:
words > sentence fragments > sentences > paragraphs > extended discourse
There’s also movement from self-centered and “here and now” statements to the esoteric and vague as we get better.
Genki can get you to the sentence/paragraph stage, and may be moving from “self-centered here and now” to “things of interest,” so a step or two removed from that.
Your tutor/teacher is trying to coach you into making those steps from “baby Japanese” to “kindergartener Japanese.” Carefully look through Genki for conjunctions, usually in the “other words” section of the vocab list, and try using some of those.
Input before output. In an ideal world, if you find yourself struggling to produce the right words in a conversation then you need more input to internalize the language patterns. Of course you might be required to use the language in daily life before reaching that point but as a student there’s no need to push for it.