How to improve my Japanese speaking skills?
Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, a phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is a topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals. Little is known of the language’s prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), the Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) included changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language and the first appearance of European loanwords.
The best way a learner could learn to speak a language is through the conversing it repeatedly.
Engage with a Native Speaker
You could engage in conversations with a native Japanese speaker in and around your neighbourhood; by volunteering for Japanese community service; going shopping in Japanese grocery stores – where you’d be forced to read the Japanese labels off the items and speak to the other Japanese customers and outlet staff, if you’re lucky, you may be able to find a conversation partner right in the shop!
Use online reaources
If none of these options is available around you then I suggest you look for conversation partners online. You could look for a native Japanese speaker through sites such as Hello talk Tandem, conversation partners, language partners and italki.
Study with immersion
The entire idea is to basically create an environment of immersion, by surrounding yourself with Japanese speakers.
Improve your listening
Listen to as many relevant audio resources; you find online, so as to be able to improve your listening skills. Watch Japanese movies with English subtitles and English movies with Japanese subtitles, try the shadowing technique where learners repeat the dialogues of the Japanese speakers, so as to learn the Japanese accent, get introduced to the pitch and tone of the Japanese language, all in order and at the same time. This would also help you train your ears, to the Japanese language which you will be able to identify from when many languages are being spoken together.
Listen Carefully
Learn through as many audiobooks, you can get hold of. Listen to the audio clips multiple times to be able to make sense of what you are receiving, intuitively following it with a reading of the transcript and then listening to the audio again to be able to assess and correct your listening. Remember we cannot speak what we cannot listen to properly! Therefore only when your listening is strong, would you be able to speak the language. Use a lot of online resources and tools such as Memrise, Anki, Japanese podcast online, news and many more that will help you catapult yourself from being a slow learner to a fast learner.
Finally,
Japanese belongs to the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. It is an East Asian language spoken by approximately 128 million people, a majority of whom live in Japan, where it is the national language. While there are many dialects and accents in Japan, experts agree that the largely monolingual status that exists here is very unusual. While there are many dialects and accents in Japan, experts agree that the largely monolingual status that exists here is very unusual. Japanese’s relationship to other languages, such as Korean, is debatable. Most countries have many major languages that are commonly spoken within their territories.
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