Speak Fluent Japanese

Japanese people are thought to be very polite. While there is some truth to that, it’s not exactly the best way to think about how politeness works in Japan.

Put simply, the standards for politeness are high in Japan.

Taking yourself out of the equation and saying that ‘Japanese people’, and entity other than yourself is polite, is a recipe for failure here. The reason for this is that by learning to speak Japanese, you will take on many of the traits of a Japanese person in order to learn the language.

The polite language is based on the words you use for your actions, and words you use for the actions of people you are being polite to. While I might normally use 行く to mean ‘go’, if I was being polite I would use まいる when talking about me going somewhere, and いらっしゃる when talking about someone else going somewhere.

In Japanese textbooks, this is explained as ‘humble’ and ‘honorific’ forms. This conjures up images of reverent samurai warriors bowing to their feudal masters. While this may be the historical origin of the language structure, it simply doesn’t carry the same connotations in spoken Japanese today.

A lot of foreigners have a problem with this. Many Japanese language learners think that they are actually putting themselves beneath another when they use ‘humble’ and ‘honorific’ forms. They let their ego get involved and it really stifles their language ability.

The truth is that ‘humble’ and ‘honorific’ forms are just another part of speech. By not knowing them and how they fit together, you just sound a little silly. While it’s true that not all Japanese people know exactly how to use these forms, educated people tend to have at least a basic grasp of how they work.

On the other hand, if you introduce yourself with polite Japanese, sprinkled with the odd humble/honorific form for good measure, you will leave native speakers with their jaws on the floor. Since some Japanese people have trouble speaking with the correct words in these situation, that a foreigner can do it blows their minds. If you’re looking to impress, you can’t go wrong with this method.

It’s all about choosing the right amount of politeness for the situation. If you’re meeting a new colleague, it makes sense to be more polite than if you were meeting someone in a bar. You do this naturally in English, but you’re going to have to engineer it from the ground up in Japanese. Figuring out the right register for the right situation should be one of your goals once you reach an advanced level.

Along with a command of the fundamentals of grammar and natural a rhythm, having well-calibrated politeness is one of the hallmarks of an advanced to fluent level Japanese speaker. It demonstrates a deep and broad and understanding of the culture. Understand this part of the language and you come very, very close to thinking like a native speaker.

Ideally, you should be able to think in Japanese.

It’s great when you get to the point where your thoughts sometimes occur in Japanese. That’s when you know the hard work has paid off. Take it from someone who’s been known to speak Japanese in his sleep, it doesn’t come easy. There’s a lot of hard work, mistakes and embarrassment before you get to this stage.

The first step to getting their however, is speaking Japanese at a more natural speed. By speaking a little faster than when you first started a number of good things happen.

Firstly, it decreases your ability to translate from English to Japanese. When you first start learning, especially if its without a good instructor, you have no choice but to take a sentence in English, translate it into Japanese and then say that sentence. This is an important skill. But by turning up your talking speed, you don’t have enough time to do this. After a bit of practice, you will start making sentences in Japanese, without thinking about the English before.

Most people speak and listen seamlessly. That is, I don’t need to pause and think before I say a sentence in English, and I don’t need to think hard to understand a sentence either. Our goal is to be able to do that in Japanese. By speaking at a natural pace our speaking and listening skills become more attuned to the natural rhythm of Japanese, without an intermediate English translation.

Finally, it just sounds better. You should slowly mouth out every character when you begin learning Japanese. Once you get to an advanced level, you should rarely need to do this. This is assuming of course that you are speaking Japanese on a regular basis and can hold a five minute, ten minute or hour-long conversation with a native speaker. By imitating native speakers, you should have developed a rhythm and pace with correct stress that sounds natural to a native Japanese speaker.

How To Speed Up Your Japanese

To start speeding your Japanese up, it’s best to do so a little bit at a time. Try to speak without stopping to think about the correct words in English. It will definitely feel unnatural at first. But stick with it and you will eventually feel comfortable at a higher speed of speaking. This is the first step to speaking at a natural speed.

If you find that you’re jumbling up words or characters then you’re going too fast. The goal isn’t to talk at 100kph. Just fast enough to sound natural. In Japanese, different dialects are spoken at different speeds, so when I say a ‘natural speed’ I’m referring to natural speed in Tokyo Dialect (but practicing Kansai-ben is good for you too).

Before you become too advanced, you should focus on speeding up your Japanese for a while. Doing so will help your listening and speaking skills align with natural Japanese. You can speed up easily a little at a time, being careful not to go too fast.

Learning grammar, vocabulary and phrases is a great start. Understanding the structure and getting plenty of speaking practice will bring you far in learning Japanese. You will be an articulate conversationalist in a variety of situations.

Japanese people however, may find our Japanese slightly odd. They won’t know exactly why, but they’ll just know that it’s not a native speaker talking to them.

Of course, being me I had to know why. I had to know what to do in order to get to native level. Since my grammar, vocabulary and usage was on point, it had to be something else. I had to go back to basic pronunciation.

I studied a lot of material on intonation, speed, rhythm, pitch and tone. There’s been enough written on those subjects to cover three or four books of this size. Unfortunately, studying these subjects didn’t help my Japanese much. I knew I needed to make it sound a little more natural, but I wasn’t sure how.

The truth is that pronunciation and rhythm can be so subtle that it’s often counterproductive to study them in depth. Instead, I’ve found the best way (and the way used by many other successful students) is to imitate the vocal patterns of native Japanese speakers.

You’ve got to be careful the way you do this. Copying what people say in the middle of a conversation is not what I’m advising at all. That’s just annoying. Instead, when you hear how a native Japanese person strings a sentence together, try to think about where the pauses are, where the stress is and the intonation they use. As much as possible, try to copy their patterns of speech.

There are a few caveats however. If you are a six-foot tall rugby player, you don’t want to sound like a high-school girl. Likewise if you’re older than thirty, you don’t want to be using Yakuza Japanese. You need to be selective in who you copy. Try to imitate people who you want to sound like.

This is one of the major problems that people with Japanese boyfriends/girlfriends face. Since their main speaking partner is a member of the opposite gender, they end up with overly feminine/masculine speaking patterns. There’s only one solution for this… get more friends!

Show Your Feelings

Having said that, you need to start developing a range of emotional expression in Japanese. In language we express our thoughts and feelings. In order to become truly good at Japanese, you’ll need to pay attention to native speakers when they’re happy, sad, angry, etc.

The reason for this is that it can be difficult to emulate these emotions in Japanese for a language learner. Just imagine someone with a thick Indian or Chinese accent getting upset in English. It’s a little difficult to take seriously. So when we learn Japanese, rather than be laughed at, we want to communicate our feelings sincerely.

As much as possible, you want to be copying the Japanese you hear in real conversation. Unless you have some emotionally unstable Japanese friends or you deliberately go out of your way to upset them, hearing the Japanese they use when they get emotional can be tough. It may be easier to watch a movie instead. A good recommendation for this is Battle Royale. It’s pure trash, but it has simple Japanese that you don’t come across when starting out.

Politeness

You also need command of the full range of casual and formal Japanese. Once you’ve gained command of the dictionary and polite forms, there is whole other world of politeness that awaits you. This is called 敬語, honorific speech. Put simply, the ます form is being courteous, whereas honorific speech is actual politeness.

I’ll cover honorific speech in more detail in another post, but for now you should be aware of it. Whether or not you use honorific speech is something I leave to you. But you need to learn it, otherwise when you go to Japan, you’ll have absolutely no idea what the shop-staff are saying to you anywhere you go.

On the other side of the coin, you need to know the dictionary form and casual or vulgar speech. You need to know a few curses. You need to know that when we talk, we usually use やる instead of する. You could also use くう　instead of 食べる. Whether or not you use these words isn’t relevant. You need to know them to have a well-rounded understanding of Japanese.

Native speakers use both depending on the situations. At this stage, don’t worry too much about when to use what form. For now, just worry about saying the words and phrases you use clearly, and making sense of the Japanese you hear in various situations.

Having one hundred percent accuracy and confidence is your speech is a great goal to strive for. However, to round out your Japanese and sound more natural you need to imitate the speech patterns of native speakers. Listen to how they change their speech depending on the situation, and do your best to emulate it.

After you’ve studied it for a while, Japanese grammar is easy. It has simple rules where you can more or less plug in the right words and make a correct sentence. There are exceptions and you’ll have to figure those out on your own, but once you’ve built an accurate picture in your mind of how it fits together, learning new concepts will be easy and natural.

Getting to this stage, is the tough part. It’s like riding a bike. At first you trip and fall and it feels like you’re not making any progress. Then suddenly you’re riding in a straight line, then turning and eventually riding confidently. It’s just a matter of putting in the time, finding your balance and trusting yourself to make the right decisions.

In this chapter I’ll cover the major problems in the way most people study Japanese, and where to direct your focus so that you get over the toughest parts quickly and painlessly.

Graduating From Polite Japanese

When you start studying Japanese verbs, it’s more than likely you started from the ます form. Here are a few examples of the ます form in action:

行きます   ＝　いきます    ＝　to go (polite)
食べます　＝　たべます　    ＝　to eat (polite)
泳ぎます　＝　およぎます　    ＝　to swim (polite)

These can be a great place to start for verbs. The reason I say that, is that they’re easy to conjugate. That means that you can use them to say you do/don’t/did/didn’t do something without studying much. In technical terms, it is easy to conjugate the negative, past and past negative forms if you know the simple present form. For example:

行きます　    ＝    go
行きません    ＝    don’t go
行きました    ＝    went
行きません　でした    ＝    didn’t go

You can negate a verb or talk about the past just by changing the ending. It’s a simple, clean system without any complication. This gives you a basic range of expression and is a good thing, at least while you’re still getting a taste for the language.

However, as you study more and more, you’re going to need to start using the plain (dictionary) form. The plain form will require a little more mental effort to conjugate and therefore use well, however it’s time well spent. Here are some reasons why:

You won’t make any friends using the polite form. While its customary to use the polite forms on a first meeting, using them for longer than the first few minutes implies that you’re not interested in any kind of relationship with the person you’re speaking to.

Knowing the plain form will make the rest of Japanese grammar easy. Once you crack using the plain form as well as you use the polite form, Japanese grammar will reveal itself to you. This is because the rest of Japanese grammar essentially stems from the plain forms. Learn a new conjugation rule, and you increase your vocabulary by hundreds of words at a time.

You will be able to understand 50% more Japanese. Japanese people do use the polite form on occasion, but the vast majority of the time they use the plain form in free conversation. Getting used to this is tough for learners who start with the polite form, but eventually becomes second nature.

Polite form: Easy, Plain form: Hard

If the plain form is so good for your Japanese, then why don’t you learn it in the most basic introductions to Japanese? Simple. Because it’s not easy to work with (i.e.) conjugate to the past tense. The polite form is way, way easier to conjugate to the past tense, and no one wants to scare you off from learning Japanese. Take a look at these examples of how easy the polite form is to make the past tense from:

泳ぎます　＝　およぎます　＝　swim (polite)
泳ぎました　＝　およぎました　＝　swam (polite)

飲みます　＝　のみます　＝　drink (polite)
飲みました　＝　のみました　＝　drank (polite)

It’s easy. You just change the ending from ます to ました and you’re talking about the past instead. Now take a look at the same examples, only in the plain form:

泳ぐ　＝　およぐ　＝　swim (plain)
泳いだ　＝　およいだ　＝ swam (plain)

飲む　＝　のむ　＝　drink (plain)
飲んだ　＝　のんだ　＝　drank (plain)

So that takes the whole neat clean pattern you learned with the ます form and turns it on its head. Why does swim conjugate one way and drink another? They’re both in the same verb group, but conjugating the past tense is different. For a detailed explanation on how this it’s conjugated, take a look at this page on Tae Kims guide. There are set rules, it’s just a matter of taking your time to learn them, practice them and make them your own.

The rules are of course explained in Situational Function Japanese and neatly summarized on one page in Frommers Grammar guide if you followed my advice and got yourself copies of those books.

It’s effort. Yes, you will have to memorize the construction of the past tense depending on the ending of the verb. Seriously, get over this. It will literally take thirty minutes plus a couple of review sessions to understand this and make it work for you. I put this off for so long and it damaged my Japanese immensely, not to mention wasted a whole load of time.

Once you’ve got this down, learning the negative form is easy. If you get these two points down, you have command of the plain form and are ready to walk all over the rest of Japanese grammar.

After my first Japanese lesson, I thought I had conquered it. I was saying whole Japanese words, a few curses and occasionally I strung a sentence together. I was enjoying it because I was able to communicate. It was highly caffeinated, dancing-monkey communication, but still communication.

Fast forward to my next Japanese lesson and I hated the language. It didn’t make any sense. There were always exceptions to the rule. The character system was superfluous. I was bored to tears with learning vocabulary. I had completely lost interest over the course of one week.

Just like your ability, your motivation for learning Japanese will wax and wane. Sometimes you’ll feel ultra-confident, chopsticks-in-hand, ready for anything. Other times you’ll feel disillusioned and depressed. You’ll feel like you’ve been wasting your time as there’s always so much more to learn.

This fluctuation is entirely natural, and a part of learning any new skill.

You will have times when you’ll want to give up. You may have been through a string of frustrating situations where you were misunderstood. You might feel anxious about some grammar or new language that you tried to understand but had difficulty with. For times like this, the only advice I have is to stick with it. Learn whatever it is you’ve been putting off. Be ready for that sticky situation next time. Take it slowly if you have to. The lower the lows, the higher the highs after them.

Other times, you’ll feel so confident that you won’t worry about picking up a textbook or studying vocab. You’ll speak the language like it was second nature to you. Words, sentences and interesting conversation will come naturally in Japanese that is crisp and understandable. My only advice for times like this are, enjoy the ride.

Throughout learning Japanese you will constantly be fluctuating somewhere between these two states. This is not a bad thing. It is the natural cycle of learning. When you start learning you go out, make mistakes and then correct them and speak better. Then you make more mistakes and get knocked back down again, correct yourself and speak better. This cycle will not stop.

The most important thing while studying Japanese is that you enjoy yourself. Here are a couple of ways to do just that:

Check Your Ego At The Door
You’re going to make mistakes, and a lot of them. The more mistakes you make, the better you get. But it’s important not to get too down on yourself when this happens. Have your screw-ups, laugh them off, then keep going.

Read ‘Making Out In Japanese’
‘Making Out In Japanese’ is a phrase-book with a difference. If you’ve been studying Japanese for more than a few years you’ve probably read this already. It is packed with slang, curse words and innuendo that will liven up any conversation you use it in.

There are many other examples of phrasebooks that show you the lighter side of Japanese. The following is a small list that I have read myself, but there are countless others:

Listen & Learn: 101 Japanese Idioms (Paperback)
Dirty Japanese: Everyday slang from ‘What’s up?’ to ‘F*** Off!’
Outrageous Japanese: Slang, Curses & Epithets

Get A Japanese Boyfriend/Girlfriend
This is one of the most effective ways of learning the language. Romantic relationships are complicated enough even when you speak the same language. Throw in a language barrier and it’s a veritable three ring circus. You’ve got to be strict with yourself and only use Japanese, even when the going gets tough.

Start a new Japanese Hobby
You may have started karate or flower arranging, but it may be losing its appeal at this stage. Sometimes it can be interesting to mix things up and find new people to speak to with new interests. While I encourage you to stick with your hobbies, trying something new with the opportunity to speak Japanese might be just what you need to kickstart your motivation.

Remember that no one is forcing you to do anything. But if you’ve made the decision to learn Japanese, you will have ups and downs. There are a few ways of coping with the bad times, and I’ve outlined some of them in this chapter. The best advice I can give you is to never give up and have as much fun as you can.

After you’ve studied Japanese for a while and start speaking it regularly, you will feel confident. This is a good thing. If you get to that stage then you’ve achieved what you set out to do. You’re a fluent Japanese speaker.

However, this feeling doesn’t tend to last all that long. After the next time you get knocked back down and have a session where you’re almost completely misunderstood, you begin to question yourself again. This is a good thing too and forces you to stay on your toes.

Now that you’re speaking regularly, remember that you are miles ahead of the majority of other speakers. You’re doing good and you know it. But, to go from an OK Japanese speaker to someone who has a truly proficient and versatile command of the language, you’ll have to be a little strict with yourself when it comes to correcting grammar.

When we speak, we all make mistakes in grammar, even in English. In English it’s not that big a deal. As long as the listener can understand what you’re saying, most people aren’t too picky.

In Japanese on the other hand, we don’t have the natural feel for what ‘correct’ Japanese sounds like. In the same way, Japanese people (who don’t speak English) aren’t used to our speaking patterns, and will have difficulty understanding us if our grammar isn’t on point.

The vast majority of the time, when we make a mistake with Japanese grammar, we know it. We’re just lazy and can’t be bothered to say a whole sentence again to fix one little grammar mistake. While that may seem like a good idea, it’s absolutely toxic for your Japanese.

The reason I say that is that if you let that one mistake go, then you’ll let yourself make that mistake over and over, until it becomes one of your ‘strange gaijin speaking patterns’. That incorrect Japanese will stay with you for life.

Alternatively, if you were to go back and fix it, a lot of good things happen at the same time. One, saying a sentence all over again just to fix it is a pain in the ass, and you’ll think hard before letting it happen again. Two, you correct that mistake, and it’s likely that after correcting it once you won’t make the same mistake again. Three, you get used to correcting your mistakes, meaning you’ll carry this habit on to fix all of your other mistakes too.

Understand that knowing how grammar works is a lot different to actually being able to use it. Studying out of a textbook is important, but actually testing out new grammar with the Japanese you already know in the real world is the only way to learn how to use it.

To this end, I recommend you go out and speak freely. Don’t think too hard before making a sentence. Try out new grammar. Don’t ever correct yourself before you’ve said anything, only afterwards. If you make a mistake, go back and fix it.

You know hiragana and you’ve got a few phrases down. You can introduce yourself, talk about where you’re from and exchange pleasantries. Congratulations. You can now hold a one minute conversation in Japanese.

After that one minute however, things start going downhill. The Japanese person, intially impressed by your command of the language tries to make conversation, but you just don’t have the vocabulary to understand what he is saying.

The most important thing is that you don’t give up.

This is a crucial stage in your language study. If you give up every time you come accross a word you don’t understand, you won’t achieve fluency. You need to train yourself to keep going, even when your vocabulary doesn’t quite allow it.

Follow these steps to get out of situations where you don’t understand:

Step 1: Take A Guess At The Meaning

At this stage, when you’re just starting out, the fact of the matter is you won’t understand 90% of conversation in Japanese at a natural pace. You’re going to have to get by with 10% that you do understand.

Because of this, conversations will rely on a lot of guesswork. Always make some kind of guess as to the meaning of whats being said. This will be a habit that will serve you well as you study Japanese.

At first, you will suck at it. There will be times where you’ll completely misunderstand what’s being said. But over the long term, you will get better at guessing. Soon, you will be able to guess the meaning of whats being said most of the time.

If you couldn’t guess the meaning then, or tried but realised you were mistaken…

Step 2: Ask The Person To Repeat Themselves

This gives you a second shot at guessing the meaning. You can say this easily like this:

Kanji:        も一度言って下さい
Kana:        も  いちど  いって  ください
Romaji:        mo ichido itte kudasai

If you’re still having no luck, you can…

Step 3: Ask The Person To Repeat In Easy Japanese

This gives you yet another shot at guessing the meaning, with a simpler sentance to deal with. You can ask like this:

Kanji:         簡単な日本語で言って下さい
Kana:        かんたんな  にほんご  で  いって  ください
Romaji:        kantanna nihongo de itte kudasai

If you’re still having trouble, and only as a last ditch attempt to revive the conversation…

Step 4: Ask The Person To Explain In English

If they speak English and this works, then make sure you don’t get drawn into a conversation in English. Flip back to Japanese as soon as possible.

Kanji:        英語で何ですか？
Kana:        えいご  で  なん  ですか？
Romaji:        eigo de nan desu ka?

If you get to this point, and you STILL don’t understand whats being said, it’s time to…

Step 5: Change The Subject

By this time, you’ve probably stopped caring. It would be better for your fluency to just change the subject to a topic that you’re more capable of talking about.

If you followed these steps and gave it your best there’s no shame in defeat. As long as you tried to continue and didn’t give up at the first sign of trouble, you’re gold.

The point of this post is to instill in you the habit of putting up a fight before deciding you don’t understand whats being said. If you follow these steps consistently, you will pick up new language and develop into an articulate conversationalist.

Accuracy and Fluency manifest in how you study and speak Japanese. If you find yourself lost for words all too often, you need to spend more quality speaking time. If you see that others find your Japanese difficult to understand, you need to spend more time with the textbooks.

I have a rock-solid method for learning Japanese. Its simple, easy and anyone can do it:

1. Learn Hiragana, with correct pronunciation
2. Learn Grammar and Vocabulary with a set of lessons
3. Speak Japanese In Real Conversations

The first part, you only need to do once. With two or three reviews when you feel like you’re forgetting, you should have a rudimentary grasp of the pronunciation and characters.

The second two parts however, aren’t as simple as that. There is a vast amount of grammar to learn, and an even larger amount of vocabulary. The truth is, in some form or another, you will always be cycling back and forth between points 2 and 3.

For me, and many other people who have the ability to learn Japanese naturally, we don’t need to consciously focus on lessons. For example, I might hear a grammar point I’m not familiar with from a friend and ask him what it means (lesson). I might make some examples and ask if they’re correct. Then I use it whenever I need to (conversation). This is the example of the cycle at work on a smaller scale.

On a larger scale, you might spend one hour per week studying Japanese. Your lesson this week might be learning how to express desire (Verb〜たい). Then, next time you have a speaking opportunity, you use it in the conversation. This cycle may seem extremely simple, but it is the one common process among everyone I know who speaks fluent Japanese.

Be careful never to get backlogged with grammar or vocabulary. You need to be using everything you learn in your lessons in free conversation, otherwise it will just fade from memory. Going over the same chapter to review may help, but is face-numbingly boring. It’s much more efficient, and effective to just use the new language in free conversation and have it committed to memory forever.

On the other hand, your command of the language doesn’t have to be perfect before you start using it. Real conversation experience will hammer out the mistakes naturally. You should progress through any learning program at a steady pace and go back to review if you feel unconfident about a particular point. Never go slowly because you feel you need to get everything right. Keep the pace going, keep practicing and plugging the holes when they appear.

To sum up, study the language, practice the language, wash, rinse, repeat. This cycle will never end as long as you’re learning Japanese. The only way to improve is to move back and forth between studying and real life conversations.

While this cycle may seem simple, there are a few bumps along the road specific to Japanese that you’ll need to be aware of. There are also a few shortcuts that can accelerate your learning. In this blog I’ll be showing you what to avoid and what to strive for in your continued study of Japanese.

It’s all well and good me telling you to speak… but what exactly are you going to say?

There are two ways to go about this. You could study Japanese lessons, and then get into speaking situations and hope that the right words come up at the right time. This is a very hardcore way of doing things, and I don’t knock it. However it’s not really an efficient way to learn, especially if you don’t live in Japan.

On the other hand, you could go in prepared. You don’t need to write down everything you say in advance, just have some plan of what words will come out of your mouth in certain situations.

Common Situations

There’s no way you can know what these situations are in advance. However, some patterns will emerge in your conversations with Japanese people. Here are a few situations that regularly come up when you start out learning Japanese:

Compliments on your Japanese. You get points for trying. Even if your Japanese is trash and you know it, you will be praised.

Can you eat natto/sashimi? Japanese people think that foreigners can’t eat fermented soya beans or raw fish. They like to ask this question often.

Have you been to Japan? Why do you like Japan? Do you like Japanese food/culture/movies/women/stationary/assorted pop culture nuggets? Japanese people, naturally, like to talk about all things Japan.

It can be tiring to go through the same questions and answers every time you meet someone new. It gets boring after the hundredth time or so.

However, hidden here is a veritable goldmine of learning opportunity. Since you’re going to be asked exactly the same questions, you can prepare for them. Having stock answers to stock questions is what you do in English anyway. It’s natural to have your own stories to tell, and you should do the same in Japanese.

Again, this will get boring, at which time you have the ability to change things up. For example, when complimented on my Japanese, I went through a series of stock responses before I stopped thinking about it:

Japanese person: 日本語が上手ですね。- Your Japanese is really good!
Me: どうも　ありがとう　ございます。　- Thank you very much (ultra polite), or
Me: そう思いたいけど。- I like to think so (a little cocky), or
Me: こちらこそ、日本語が上手ですね。 - Your Japanese is pretty good to! (cocky to the point of asshole ☺ ), or
Me: そんな　こと　ない　です。　- No, no. Not at all. (humble)

I actively thought about these, made them up and used them in conversation. In doing so, I had a little fun, and got a lot of practice using different vocabulary and grammar.

Talking About Yourself

The other standard is your introduction. I have three or four stock introductions I use for myself now, depending on the formality of the situation and whatever goals I might have with the interaction (e.g. Making friends, blowing someone off, impressing someone etc). For when you start out, a nice clean intro in the polite form is good enough.

はじめまして。「Your name in katakana」です。　よろしく　おねがいします。

This should be OK for your first conversation, but eventually you want to build it up and add more detail. Where you’re from, what you do, how old you are etc. These are all covered in any introductory textbook and should be used in real conversations as soon as possible.

Asking Questions

Another key conversation skill is to ask questions and listen. This is not only a normal part of speaking, it’s also the only way you’re going to get any real listening practice. Good questions to ask are the regular ones you would in any conversation in English.

The only difference is, you can afford to be a little more forward (ask questions like “how old are you?”, “where do you live”?) than you might be in English. It’s practice for you, and the Japanese speaker will just think it’s because you’re a ‘crazy gaijin’ (get used to that).

Though you may not understand the answer you get, it’s quite possible that you’ll understand one or two words. You can turn those words into a question by just adding ですか at the end. You can get into some long conversations  using this technique alone.

In this post I talked about some common situations that come up in Japanese conversation and how you can prepare for them. Ideally, you would need no preparation at all, but until you get to that stage, having reliable stock phrases that are ready to go when you need them is a great tool for conversation. The underlying benefit is that you’re beginning to get a feel for how to create correct Japanese, something you will eventually be able to to naturally.

The idea of pouring over pages of vocabulary strikes terror into the hearts of all but the nerdiest of the nerdy. I don’t like studying that way, and I know for a fact that it doesn’t help your motivation. Building vocabulary should be a natural, fun process that you shouldn’t have to think too hard about. After you have the basics of pronunciation and grammar down, a larger vocabulary should build automatically.

While you should be following a study course and learning all the vocabulary there, learning vocabulary mid-conversation is also an important skill. Learning by wrote memorization can be very useful for your Japanese. If you go on to learn kanji characters, you will eventually have to resort to memorization as a study technique. For now, building vocabulary this way will frustrate you. Mainly because you won’t have enough speaking experience to know what to learn, and how to test it out.

In this post, I will show you a useful way to build your vocabulary naturally. The goal is not to learn the exact meaning of the word in English. Instead, the goal should be to practice its usage in Japanese. Also, in this post I want to introduce the idea that multiple, conflicting explanations of new language are good for you.

The Key To Learning New Vocab

It all boils down to this:

Whenever you hear or learn a new word, use it in free conversation straight away.

Writing a word down five times and chanting it’s meaning will make teach you that word for five minutes. Using the word in a real conversation will make it a part of your vocabulary for life. Preferably you’ll want to use it three or four times, but once is plenty. By having used it once, in a natural speaking situation, your brain will automatically tick this word as being usable in conversation.

There is a difference between knowing and experiencing. You may know exactly how to write the kanji of a word and exactly how to pronounce it. But if you’re not actually using the word, it counts for nothing.

99% of the time, you will make a mistake with the usage. You can check this by asking this question immediately after using the new language:

この　にほんご　は　あっていますか？
Is this Japanese correct?

And you will be told the correct usage for that word. Simple.

Confusing Explanations

At times, you will be confused when learning new vocabulary. Your dictionary will give you one meaning, your textbook another and your Japanese friends will tell you something completely different.

The truth is that the meaning and scope of words isn’t fixed. They change from one dictionary, textbook or person to the next. Looking for a definitive answer to the question “What does  さむい  mean?” will not help you.

The best way to deal with this problem is to understand this; All The Definitions Are Correct. You don’t need only one definition for a word.

As long as you have a general understanding of new vocabulary, you’re gold. You don’t need to be able to write a dictionary entry on it. If you can use a new word, you know it. In time, experience will hammer out the details.

Learning vocabulary by copying out of the dictionary is boring and useless. The only way to cement new language into your mind is to use it in a natural conversation. You don’t need to understand a word exactly in order to ‘know’ it. With these concepts in mind, you’re ready to build your vocabulary through study (when you want to) and everyday conversation.