Hi everyone. I'm very interested in learning Japanese. However, I don't know where I should… - Feed Post by ttvanle
Hi everyone. I'm very interested in learning Japanese. However, I don't know where I should start, whether it's speaking or writing... I'm asking the question because I am using English as second language. When it comes to speaking, I hardly say anything. I always think about the grammar and tenses that I should use, which slow down my speaking process and affects the fluency. When I started learning English, I began with writing and grammar and didn't pay much attention to the pronunciation. Therefore, people hardly understand what I say because of the incorrect pronunciation. I have been familiar with the wrong pronunciation for a long time, so it's so hard to correct every word. I don't want to repeat the same but wrong learning method when learning Japanese. Please give me some advices.
Thanks so much for your reading!!!
Thanks so much for your reading!!!
posted by ttvanle
Comments 1
That is a very sensible way to think about starting a new language.
I've been learning Japanese on-and-off over the last 15 years, but I only really focussed on reading it. I never bothered much with learning to speak Japanese, because I never meet any Japanese people here in the UK. I only wanted to be able to read and listen to Japanese.
I can now read Japanese fairly easiliy. I'm not quite as good at listening though. And, although I haven't had much Practice with writing Japanese, I can write basic Japanese sentences because I can go at my own pace thinking carefully about grammar and tenses and all the other things.
BUT, when I went to Japan for the first time (3 months ago), I had exactly the same problem you mentioned. I could barely say anything at all in Japanese because I hadn't spent any time doing speaking practice. I couldn't speak even simple sentences because you can't stop to think slowly about grammar for every word (unlike how you can when reading). And even though Japanese pronunciation is very simple and straight forward, many of the words I spoke were not understood either when I did try to speak Japanese. I had to think really hard about every sound I was making, and I often pronounced sounds with either too much accent or wrong vowel length.
It seems like Japanese people have more trouble understanding incorrectly pronounced Japanese than when native speakers of English hear incorrectly pronounced English. Native English speakers are probably a lot more used to hearing foreigners speaking their language than Japanese people are, so we're used to having to interpret a wide variety of strange pronunciations.
Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest parts of the language--very regular pronunciation rules--much much easier than English pronunciation. Reading and writing is normally thought to be what makes Japanese a hard language to learn. But if you have a need to be able to speak Japanese, then I definitely suggest finding a good way to Practice this regularly as early on as possible. I don't know if it matters whether you start with speaking or writing though, as both complement the understanding of eachother. ^^
