Are there any free sites where you can get matched with Japanese speakers or people studying… - Feed Post by Slade
Are there any free sites where you can get matched with Japanese speakers or people studying Japanese? I am currently taking elementary Japanese 101 in college, and we use Genki 1 second edition as our textbook. There are only ~7 of us in the class total, and that number is dropping next semester. Everyone keeps to themselves outside of class and I would like a way to practice speaking, because just reading the dialog's in the book aloud and making up sentences to myself only gets you so far, especially when you have an exam next week. Talking to yourself and talking to someone else is a whole new situation, especially for someone who gets nervous talking to others anyhow. Any pointers?
posted by Slade
Comments 8
GoVoluble.com has great language exchanges. It's often text based though because that's what people choose. For beginners, I'd recommend doing a lot of journal entries too. Conversation practice can feel super slow and introduced if your vocabulary isn't really strong yet.
Lang-8 ( http://lang-8.com/ ) is a language exchange site with a huge number of Japanese speakers who are studying English. The primary activity there is writing journal entries in the language you are learning, and having them corrected and commented on sentence by sentence by native speakers of that language, but people there do also make arrangements to get together via skype and other similar services to talk with each other.
See, that is my problem. Writing is easy to me, I have memorized all the kanji and proper stroke order for any words I currently know and can form sentances easy when writing. The issue is speaking because it is kind of "on the spot" and I get nervous and have trouble thinking of the sentances to say. When people are called on in class, I can think of the answers in my head usually before they actually say it. But my turn comes around and I draw blanks.- Thank you for the advice anyhow, I will try them out.
I know it is hard to change, but you have to. Are you afraid of making mistakes? Do it a lot, you probably won't do the same mistake anymore. I was so once and it wasn't easy to change, sometimes it still gets me. Yet I make a lot of mistakes people compliment me for learning by myself.- (I am talking about English, I forgot to type it)
- GoVoluble and Speaky (gospeaky.com) still give opportunities for live chat. You just have to message people and set it up first on Speaky. On GoVoluble, you can post a language exchange offer for video chat and see if anyone picks it up.
- @Darwo Yea, its the fear of making mistakes that gets me. Then the fear makes me actually make them or makes it hard to speak. Ill keep trying my hardest though, thanks for the advice.
@OwlPrincess Ok, I will try those and hope for the best. Thanks
