One of the few isolated languages in the world, the Japanese language ranked 13th in the world’s most spoken languages with over 126 million mother-tongue speakers, based on data published by Statista in 2021 out of over 7000 languages worldwide.
Language isolation wrt language means “a language that is unrelated to any other language. A natural language, absolutely without a demonstrable genealogical (or genetic) relationship or one that hasn’t any proof to have evolved from a common ancestor of any other language.
Let’s now see why you can understand the language of Japanese but can’t seem to speak it well.
While learning a language, an individual is expected to master the four major skills required in order to achieve proficiency in every language. These four skills are listening skills, reading skills, writing skills and speaking skills. Basically, achieving fluency in all four of the skills will equate to achieving proficiency in the language itself. With that said, many individuals tend to neglect a specific skill either due to fear or underestimating that skill itself. Now, considering the fact that you seem to understand the language of Japanese well but can’t seem to speak it, it simply means that you have not practised your speaking skills adequately.
If you seem to understand the language well enough, or read it or even write it, but just can’t seem to speak it, then that just means that you did not either pay enough attention to the speaking skills of Japanese or simply were scared of practising it. Do not worry, as speaking skills tend to give everybody a tough time in every language. Japanese is no exception. If anything as notorious as Japanese is for being the toughest language, the speaking skills are obviously going to be much tougher to master when compared to any other language around the globe. In fact, there are many ways that you can still practice your speaking skills and eventually achieve fluency in even this skill. For starters, you must have collected a decent amount of resources in order to practise your reading and writing skills.
You also must have paid close attention to what people speak to you and any other methodology that you must have utilised to practise your listening skills. This essentially means that you have a good grasp on the basic grammar, sentence formation, vocabulary and pronunciation of the language. You simply need to utilise all of these different aspects while speaking Japanese. Before you converse with others, you can practise it by holding a conversation with yourself. You can try to talk about different topics and with different levels of vocabulary used. Furthermore, you can also practise your speaking skills while practising your reading skills. That is, just simply read aloud instead of reading in your mind. Speaking skills are extremely practical in nature and in order to practise them you just have to utilise them in real life. They are not as tough to master once you get a hang of them.
Finally,
While Japanese uses characters from the Chinese script, it is not related in any way to the Chinese language. Being an honorific language like many other South Eastern Languages, the corresponding Japanese grammar contains three different levels of formality. In Japanese, verbs are conjugated differently depending on if you speak in casual, polite or formal situations.
