掲示板 Forums - How do you deal with no one wanting to speak Japanese?
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Top > 会話 / General discussion > Japan, にほん, 日本
One big problem I noticed as a learner of Japanese in Japan is either many people will only use English at you no matter how good your Japanese is or many people will dumb down their Japanese a lot. It's gotten to the point where once I was speaking Keigo with a hotel manager and he was using plain form mixed with English with me. It felt very awkward.
Is there a way you guys know how to cope with this?
I got this all the time! How I dealt with it depended on the situation. When the person was someone I'd have to deal with more (for instance, when I got a new supervisor), I would be polite but blunt and just say something like 日本語の方がいい. When it was someone like in the situation you described, I might say something like 気を楽にして、日本語に続きましょう or something like that. The only time I can think of that I didn't insist on them using Japanese was when I was being interviewed on TV by this guy who thought it was funny to try and speak to me in English - annoying, but what can you do?
When that happens to me, I tell them that I'm from Venezuela and that I don't get English as well as Japanese. For instance, 私はベネズエラから来たから英語で話すことができない、でもスペイン語と日本語がいいよ。it always works. They immediately switch to Japanese since most of them don't speak Spanish.
The sad thing is most of the time I tell them I'm from Spain and I don't speak English in Japanese and most of the time they still refuse to speak Japanese and they'll just talk in slower English. It's like AHHHHHHHH.
But next time I'll try your advice and add in the Spanish or Japanese is fine. Hopefully that will change things.(・∀・)