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Reading Out Loud to Practice Speaking — 8 Comments

  1. Haha… when playing visual novels or similar games, all the characters are voiced except for my own, so I read my character’s parts out loud. It makes the games extra fun~

  2. There is also an issue that if you speak too much in the beginning when your Japanese is still improving, you reinforce errors that go uncorrected.

    I don’t really agree with this. I mean, yeah, you might get used to using the wrong grammar, but if you just speak enough and listen to other people you’ll notice your own mistakes, won’t you?
    Also – even if using slightly incorrect grammar is the concession you have to make to be able to converse somewhat quickly and naturally, isn’t it still worth it?

    I’d love to hear your your thoughts on this.

    • The older school of thought is speak from day 1. The newer school of thought is input before output. The reason why I favor the latter is that you often don’t notice your mistakes. And when you do, they take a long time to fix. You save a lot of overall time by preventing them from ever happening.

      And while input before output takes longer to actually speak, when you do finally speak, you will sound a good deal better than the speak from day 1 person.

      Of course this all depends on personality of the learner. Some people just love to speak and can’t wait and are willing to take a few negatives.

      • I see your point. Personally I’m mostly picking up Japanese by talking to a bunch of online friends, which, sure, it may very well be one of the worst ways to learn, but I love doing it. I do vocabulary/kanji flashcards whenever I have nothing else to do – toilet, train, before sleeping, etc.

        Anyway, thanks for the response. Love the site.

  3. I always read Japanese aloud. It didn’t start off as a conscious thing, I was just reading like a child, but makes it more fun when you don’t properly understand. I try to do impressions of Naruto characters while reading Naruto. And I do impressions of Sazazaki Mami from Scandal because I think her voice is cool. I never study Japanese silently. And if I can’t sleep before going to bed, I get up and give myself a pep-talk in Japanese about how hard I’m going to work to get better. Oh, and I sing along to Jpop.

    This doesn’t mean I can hold a proper conversations – the height of my conversational practice has been one-line insult matches or cute Japanese school-girl impressions with my half-Japanese friend – but it’s great pronunciation practice.

    • Hey, you gotta start somewhere. Talking to yourself eventually turns into talking to someone else. It sounds like you have a great routine there.

      • Thank you. Yes, never underestimate the power of talking to yourself. Even if it’s something in English, saying it aloud really helps you to think more deeply about it. For example, if you have an idea for a creative project, just trying to explain aloud how you’re going to do it as soon as you think of it can highlight the flaws in your plan, and force you to think about the solution right away.

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