How to Practice Speaking Japanese

Summary: A common question I get is: “How should I practice speaking?” My recommendation: Do not create separate output flashcards, but try casual shadowing while doing the listening cards. If you want to put more focus on speaking, follow Jeff Brown’s method.

First of all, I want to clarify that my own speaking skills aren’t perfect, because I rarely practice conversations. However, I can get along in daily life and reached this level entirely without talking to someone. Shadowing is what I did most of the time (besides talking to myself :D) and I developed a habit that I like to call sloppy shadowing.

Sloppy Shadowing

Shadowing means to revoice or recite given content and is a common tool in language learning. By sloppy shadowing, I mean that you should not apply any perfectionism here: You do not have to repeat a full sentence, words or parts of the sentence are just fine. This perfectly aligns with my general recommendation of keeping the learning curve flat and is the complement to the always praised “comprehensible input”: Casual, easy output that does not overwhelm you and is quick and easy to practice. Sloppy shadowing has four stages and is ideally done while practicing listening comprehension:

  1. Repeat words: Begin by shadowing individual words from a given sentence.
  2. Move to sentence parts: Once comfortable, start shadowing parts of sentences. Try different parts, you will over time get a good feeling for what works.
  3. Full sentences: Shadow complete sentences.
  4. Memorize and shadow full scripts: When you’ve been able to shadow full sentences for a while, you can try full scripts. Don’t do this too early and remember that parts of this are fine! A good source are the video recommendations, the transcriptions can help you with this. Also note, that “memorize” does not mean long-term memorization.

I found that shadowing not only helps tremendously with speaking, but also somehow made listening comprehension easier for me. Stick to the following rules:

  1. I think output is the hardest part of language learning, so do not feel frustrated if it does not work right away.
  2. No perfectionism, you do not need to be able to repeat a full sentence. Parts are just fine, the rest will come if you keep practicing.
  3. If something is too hard to shadow, don’t do it. You’ll find something easier soon.
  4. Never use only text, always use something with audio and carefully pay attention to the correct pronunciation. It is easy to form bad habits, but my experience is that they wear off over time. So don’t worry about this too much.
  5. Do not shadow everything you encounter. Stick to what you like.
  6. It’s ok to forget sentences, you will still move forward. Shadowing is not long-term memorization and the real skill of understanding / speaking a language is beyond memorization.
  7. A good time to shadow something when doing flashcards is when the meaning of the card is tied to the card’s image or the first words of the audio. When you remember the meaning just from looking at the card’s image or listening to the first word, try to voice fragments of the sentence.
  8. Instead of repeating a large part once, it is better to repeat a smaller and easier part multiple times. Especially if the larger part is too hard.
  9. You will not improve overnight, it will take long to become fluent.
  10. For longer audio, transcriptions help, but make sure to listen to the audio first. I liked to highlight sentences with a marker pen.

Jeffery Brown’s Method

If shadowing is not enough for you and you want more output early, then check out what Jeff Brown (professor for linguistics) did to learn Arabic. All details are in this excellent, 1 hour YouTube-video, so I do not want to go into detail here. Just two key points to consider:

  1. Many in the language learning community discourage early output, fearing that it could lead to manifestation of mistakes. I somewhat agree with this and recommend delaying output. However, Jeff impressively demonstrates that early output can be effective. The key in my opinion is to maintain a mindset of continuous improvement and the will to get rid of possible mistakes.
  2. You need the right partner or teacher for this. I never tried learning like this for various reasons, but what I would do: Write down exactly what Jeff did in this video and deduce rules for your tandem partner – beyond the scope of this article though.