掲示板 Forums - how can i make speaking japanese feel more natural?

みんな、こんにちは。hello, everyone, and thank you for listening to my question.

i am a native english speaker, and have trouble speaking japanese in a way that feels natural. i am generally a quiet person (the speaking skill is the least important for me personally) and began my journey to focus on reading and listening, but my lack of speaking ability has started to bother me. it makes me feel less confident in my japanese skills overall.

i feel as if i pause too often, use stress as it's used in english (so it is improper in japanese), and forget pitch accents. when i am speaking, i tend to get very nervous and worried about making a mistake.

if you have advice for how to speak japanese more naturally, please share it here. i'm especially seeking out the advice of people who focus primarily on speaking, but i will welcome advice from anyone. i also welcome advice from how to make any parts of japanese more natural, such as understanding, reading, and writing.

ありがとう。thank you.

watch tutorials and listen to anime

1. I feel that you can *completely* ignore pitch accents at your level. The chance that a pitch accent is going to make your speaking hard to understand is slim to none. Pitch seems really important when you are looking at words in isolation, but in even simple sentences, the context makes it *pretty* clear what you're talking about. To give an English example - these two words have the same accent/stress, but has anyone ever said board and you thought they said bored? Probably not. Pitch accents can push someone from the "sounds good, but something is ever so slightly off" to "just like a native speaker", but that comes so much later.

2. Give yourself a little thought experiment - for the next day or two, look at all the conversation that you're part of or you can see - whether its in real life, on discord, twitter, in a game, or whatever. Try and pay attention to just how many mistakes people make when speaking their own native language, or use sentence fragments, etc. Spoiler: it's a TON.

3. There's actually not too many times when "correct" language should be your #1 priority: formal situations (business, tests), and...that's about it. The rest of the time, language is good enough if the other person understands what you're saying. And even then, it's not like you have to belt out a perfect sentence on our first try. I was a a teacher for many years, and I lost track of the number of times I'd try to explain something to a student, fail, try again, reword what I said, and then three or four times in, finally get it across. As long as the other person is still willing to listen to you (and they usually are), then you can make mistakes, go off track, and keep trying until you get it!

The goal of language is not to be correct. It's to get information, feelings, etc. across to someone else. Accuracy can help with that, but it's not required.

Looking up the lyrics to a song and singing along can help with remembering and perfecting pronunciation. It helps me a lot!

i am sorry maybee i got the wrong one but it says that the episodes are all less than a minute

1. Boost your own confidence within your native language first

2. Join different activities, find friends, just anything social

3. Join our discord server - for EU - Friday, Saturday, Sunday (Speaking, listening, reading)

4. Accept my friend request 🤣🤣🤣

5. Don't bother about accent untill you are comfortable enough, lessen the pressure by doing it easy, short and sweet

6. ENJOY with all what you do! Say to yourself - I CAN DO THIS, I AM DOING GREAT

Don't bother about other people, I am sure that every person is unique and sweet inside, think about yourself first and then you can approach people with ease because you accomplished so much in your psychology. It is not all about language - language is just a tool.

Listen to anime and music, you can also look for japanese conversation examples and mimic the pronunciation, at least that's something that helped me a lot, hope that helps you too!