How To Speak Conversational Japanese Effectively
The way we speak is based on pronunciation amongst other things. As hard as you try to construct a well thought out sentence in Japanese or another language you normally can’t put yourself across as you hoped. Avoiding this is the key. All languages focus on sounds when spoken. Speaking any language in that particular country means I expect others to speak certain sounds in the right way. Different sounds are spoken in different languages. We have to try and adjust to listening to a sound if we can’t recognise it and if we can’t then we may not understand what is being said.
The Blocks of Pronunciation – Look at two main things when studying pronunciation. Firstly, we must produce that sound and then understand how the sound is heard Over the years saying a sound and understanding how it sounds can decrease. When learning languages such as Japanese we need a bit more help as it’s not easy. Here are some tips on how to learn Japanese. Make sure you know if you are speaking the sound right Attempt to say the letters. How your mouth is working is important. It’s harder to speak any word that you don’t know how it sounds physically.
Sounds seem similar sometimes There are some sounds between Japanese and English that are the same. If you are learning a new language then there English sounds that get compared to words. This is useful for seeing if sounds are the same. So which sounds are pretty hard to say?
Some words are harder to say than others and you should highlight these. Pay more attention to these than others. See how your mouth is working by physically making the sound. Try not to make assumptions that just because something is written with the English alphabet that it should be spoken that way.
Ensure that you read this out loud Read from a course book or another to aid you. This will help you in two ways. Firstly, you get to pronounce letters and words. The second thing is that you can learn how to teach yourself sounds that you will hear and become accustomed to other sounds.
Do I need to be pretty good? This has been discussed for along time. For a lot of us getting by in other languages is good enough. As long as we can speak clearly and simply and people understand what we are saying then we have done well. For many then we have to decide where to from there. On occasion people can get very good at other languages. However, for a lot of us we never reach that height, but there is no reason why we can’t get others to understand us.
If you liked this article and you’re ready to truly master the Japanese language, check out: learn to speak Japanese fluently and Japanese Pod 101.
Related Articles
