Speaking (and not dying of embarrassment)

For years I told myself that if I immersed enough, one day I’d just open my mouth and Japanese would come out. Spoiler: it didn’t. Immersion gives you the words and the feel, and it makes speaking way easier. But speaking is its own skill. You get better at it by speaking. Annoying, I know.

When to start

The line I draw is this: talk to yourself early, and talk to people once you can understand basic daily conversation. Talking to yourself means shadowing, narrating your day and thinking in Japanese (chapter 10), and you can start that whenever you want, because it can’t hurt you. You don’t have to wait until you’re perfect. Just until you can follow what the other person says and have something to say back.

The reason I don’t push it from day one is that forcing it early went badly for me. When I was starting out, I downloaded HelloTalk, flocked straight to natives, and Google Translated everything I wanted to say. I couldn’t understand their replies. I didn’t understand my own messages either. I was pasting words I couldn’t read at people who could. And talking a lot before you’ve heard a lot bakes in weird habits.

Here’s my favorite example. I used to work at a Japanese supermarket, and one day the store owner gave my non-employee friends the employee discount at the food court. Cool, I thought. We’re tight like that. The next day my manager, Yamamoto-san, called me into the office and asked if I knew that stealing was bad. Early on I’d picked up a habit of tacking なんです or なんですか onto everything, because longer sentences sounded more fluent to me, so instead of “yes, of course,” what came out was more like “oh, is it?” What should have been a five-minute talk turned into two and a half hours, including a free Japanese lesson. (Yamamoto-san, if you’re reading this, sorry I never came back to work.)

Once you do start talking to people, something nice happens. As SevenStop puts it, when you speak you notice what you can’t say. Then you start noticing how natives say it.

Shadowing

Shadowing is listening to native audio and repeating it right after, copying the rhythm, intonation and pitch as closely as you can, even before you understand every word. I picked one creator whose voice I like, ポッキー, who plays a lot of horror games and is pretty much my language parent at this point, and every so often I sit down for five or ten minutes and repeat after him, looping a sentence or two, sometimes slowed down. Chorusing takes it a step further: record yourself, layer your recording over the native one, and redo it until they line up. Japanese doesn’t come out in one smooth Eminem rap-god flow. There are pauses and beats, and shadowing teaches you where they go.

Pitch accent

Japanese words have a melody. Each mora (roughly each kana) is high or low, and the pattern can change the meaning, so 箸 (chopsticks), 橋 (bridge) and 端 (edge) are all はし. Pitch accent was the other hardest part of Japanese for me, right up there with kanji. Tap through a few words here:

How much should you care? My take is to learn the basic patterns, train your ear, and shadow. You don’t need to memorize the pitch of every word, because come on, that’s a lot of work, but once you know there’s a pattern to listen for, you start hearing it everywhere. Kotu’s minimal pairs test is free, and humbling, and there’s a pitch accent trainer on this site where you can record yourself against native speakers. For the nerds, Praat lets you compare your pitch line with a native clip; the first time I tried it with おはようございます, I jumped way too high and dropped on the よ when it should have stayed flat.

▢ Screenshot neededPraat comparing your おはようございます pitch line with a native speaker’simages/guide/praat-ohayou.png

Six things that keep a conversation going

I’ve spent a lot of hours talking with Japanese people on italki, on Discord and in VRChat, and there are six things I do over and over.

The first is 相槌 (aizuchi), the little reactions you make while the other person talks, like うんうん, へぇ〜 and そうなんだ. In English we’re taught to stay quiet until it’s our turn. In Japanese, silence reads as “I’m not listening.” The second is filler: えーと, あの, なんか. My business classes trained me to cut every “um.” Japanese flips that. Natives use filler constantly to buy time to think. Third is parroting, where you repeat their key word back with a rising tone. If they tell you they ate サーターアンダギー in Okinawa, you go 「サーターアンダギー？」, which shows you understood, gets them to tell you more, and buys you a second.

Fourth is bridging, changing topics politely with そういえば, ちなみに or 話変わるけど, instead of jumping from the thing they’re passionate about straight to “do you like sushi?” Fifth, rare or old-school words: dropping one at the right moment gets a laugh, and asking 「何かレアな日本語、教えてください！」 works even better. (There’s a time and a place. I once called someone ボンキュッボン in VRChat. Luckily it was a dude, and apparently nobody says it anymore anyway.) And sixth is what I call gesture maxing: be a little funny and take the filter off. You’re a foreigner speaking Japanese, so lean into it, and when you make mistakes people say it back the right way, which is free corrections.

Social anxiety, in two languages

This one’s personal. Talking to strangers is hard for me in English, and adding a language I’m still learning used to make it a total disaster. The usual advice is “just do it scared.” Nobody ever explains why that works. My version is to ask myself whether I’d do it if I were the most confident person in the world. If the answer is yes, I go do it, terrified. My fight-or-flight kicks in, I hate awkward silence, so I fill it, and it almost always works out.

You will embarrass yourself. Everyone does. Here are a few of mine (tap them to see what I actually said):

The thing that helped me most is remembering that in Japan, you’ll probably never see that person again. The ramen guy isn’t posting about me. (Maybe he is. I haven’t seen it.) When you were a toddler you made hilarious grammar mistakes, and your parents filmed them because they were cute. It’s the same deal. Every mistake turns into either a correction or a funny story, usually both, unless you let your ego take it to heart.

The other thing is not being too calculated. I went through a phase of watching social-skills gurus and got so analytical that I came off snarky and people were visibly uncomfortable. I care more about having a good conversation than a native-sounding one. Two people trying to vibe. No math required. I’d rather connect with someone in imperfect Japanese than have a flawless, forgettable conversation where all they remember is that my grammar was pretty good.

Where to actually practice

A tutor on italki is the most straightforward option: one-on-one, pay per lesson, and you pick a teacher by price, style and even dialect. I book lessons after my day job, and a teacher who isn’t afraid to correct you is huge. (italki has sponsored my videos before, and I still use it.) For something free, Ohana (Ohanashi) runs online exchanges every weekend: you’re usually paired one-on-one with a list of easy topics, fifteen minutes in Japanese and fifteen in English, with staff around the whole time. I went in nervous after a month of not speaking Japanese, and my partner was super nice. It’s run by a language school, which is how it stays free. If you’d like a more structured start, the school behind it, Ohanasi, gives you a free one-on-one online lesson with a Japanese teacher, at any level. (Ohanasi sponsors my channel, and that’s my link.)

Through English–Japanese exchange servers on Discord I have two or three Japanese friends I call every week or so. Most cities have Japanese meetups too, and VRChat has Japanese worlds full of people happy to chat, where the anonymity takes a lot of the pressure off. AI chatbots are fine for explanations and practice when there’s no human around, just don’t get over-reliant on them, because they cater to you and won’t push you the way real people do.

One warning about exchange apps, from my worst language exchange ever. Early on, someone on HelloTalk with a profile picture of a woman in her twenties asked to call, and the voice on the call sounded about seventy. The next morning I had sixty messages asking why I was ignoring her, and on the second call she wanted to know what state I lived in and what my ideal woman was, so I blocked her. A few days later my other exchange partners told me she’d used HelloTalk’s paid features to find them and was messaging them about me, and I deleted the app that night. No shade to HelloTalk, plenty of people use it fine, but some people treat exchange apps like dating apps. Keep personal details to yourself until you trust someone, block early, and once you click with someone, move to an app you both use, like LINE or Instagram. That’s how I kept three of the friends I’d made, and I even met one of them in person.

Real conversations don’t have subtitles

Studying alone and talking in real time feel completely different. Nobody pauses for you. No subtitles. On my last trip I signed rental car paperwork in Japanese, called our cottage to say we’d be late (and bowed at the phone), and said yes to a street interview just to see how I’d do under pressure. Watching the footage back while editing, I kept catching things I said wrong or too impolitely, which stings a little. But catching your own mistakes a few months later means you’ve grown. If you haven’t talked to anyone yet, pick one spot from this section and book it this week. Fifteen minutes is plenty.