Rapidly Spoken Japanese

[reboundstudent]

はじめまして！私の名前はMichelle,でもMartyよんでください。

Hi everybody! First time posting.

A little background quickly: I am an American doing the JET program since about the end of July (so going on 2-3 months.) I was a Japanese minor in college, but my listening comprehension is dreadful, and my speaking is halted and usually filled with bad particles.

Which is a big reason I came to japanesepod101, of course.

My situation is, I speak and understand only a bare minimum of Japanese. But it seems whenever most Japanese people talk to me, they speak pretty rapidly and with advanced vocabulary. Whenver I try to speak back, they either ignore that I just said anything, or just kind of stare at me.

(Ex: speaking with my junior high school students, if they do not know the English word for something, like "sleep," I'll throw out the dictionary form, 「寝る.」 They just stare at me as if I'd just spoken French.)

Has anyone else ever found themselves in this situation? How do you respond? As a last ditch effort, I switch to English and body language, but that really doesn't give me the speaking practice I need with Japanese... yet when I speak it, the Japanese people around me seem totally unable to comprehend what I'm saying.

Is it me, or is this a average-ish reaction?

[Javizy]

How did you learn pronunciation originally? What do you currently do to continue to improve it? What sort of listening practice have you done up until now? Hard to say definitively, but judging by the reactions you describe, it sounds to me like you've got some serious accent issues. I think a lot of people do, but since pronunciation isn't really considered one of the difficult points of Japanese, it seems to get overlooked.

If you don't know this stuff already, then let's get it out of the way... Syllables in Japanese aren't as complicated as in English. You can think of them as a unit of time, each one equal to the next, or even more simply, each hiragana character represents one syllable. This includes so-called long vowels.

Take おおきい, for example, the long vowel おお should be the same length as any other two syllables, like きく, あく, ばか, etc. There's a little quirk with these though: おう should be treated as おお and えい should be treated as ええ. So the word 欧米(おうべい) is actually pronounced おおべえ. A few more:

法定(ほうてい) > ほおてえ
平明(へいめい) > へえめえ
少々(しょうしょう) > しょおしょお
お伺う(うかがう) > おおかがう

Since ん、ら、り、る、れ、ろ have no English equivalents, you should pay special attention to them, and make sure you pronounce them like Japanese natives do (record yourself if you have to). Try to up the amount of listening you do as much as possible, and you'll be able to tell when your accent sounds good, and when it doesn't, since you'll soon develop a strong sense of what Japanese should sound like.

Pick up one of these books, and start shadowing for at least 10 minutes a day as soon as possible, and you will notice improvements in your pronunciation, intonation, pitch, listening comprehension, and ability to fluidly reproduce the material that you shadow Japanese Conversation Training andShadowing.

You'll probably notice improvements in a matter of weeks. I've used these techniques for over half a year, and the first time I ever spoke to a Japanese person was about 6 weeks ago, and she could understand just about every word. In fact, even a bunch of conversations later, I can only recall a couple of times when she asked me to repeat anything. So there's no reason it can't work for you, too. 頑張ってくださ~い!

[KikoSoujirou]

that would be japanese students. typical behavior in my experience. I taught for a year or so at some private juku schools. If your not fluent in japanese it'll seem like things are going a mile a minute over your head. I've also gotten the cold stare and looks from my students, even though I knew I was spot on with my japanese.
just make sure your in the right as far as context and such. I'm not sure how far your japanese ability is but, for instance if some people are talking about how nice the weather is and a foreigner comes over and just says oh yeah! weather ^-^, I wouldn't really know how to respond to that either.
get the ball rolling by learning basic commands and questions. that way your subjects are kind of forced to interact. show that you have an interest.
for example. while I was teaching, i picked up how to tell my students to write stuff on the board. this was helpful, but sometimes if students didn't want to do this they would pretend to ignore me or start talking over my head in order to get out of it. remain firm, don't let them control the class, but be sure to appeal to their interests as well. Throughout my classes i would ask them how to say certain words that they knew in english, in japanese for me. then I would repeat it. Sometimes i would repeat it wrong in kind of a funny way, just playing with japanese, that way they would correct me, I would learn the proper pronounciation and it would kind of make the class a bit more relaxed. be careful not to do that too much though because then you will have the class thinking you can't possibly comprehend anything, haha.

if you're already beyond the simple things, try questioning yourself when talking with people, like if you start talking about rice cakes, you might have a conversation like

oh yeah I love mochi(rice cakes) er...mochi? mochi? er...those sticky chewy rice things, mochi right? or oh yeah, I know what that is , thats.........er thats...... and have them fill in the blank for you even though you know the word sometimes.
this causes them to engage you into conversation, makes it seem like you know what your talking about but just need a little nudge, not completely out of the loop.

it also could be they're just plain ignoring you because they are shy about their own lack of english ability, even if you are speaking with them in japanese. I've run into that as well and had to tell people not to worry about speaking english since i understand japanese..... it's just kind of weird like that.

please do post back on how things go and let us know. ^_^ best of luck

~KikoSoujirou

[lazer85]

Well unless your native level fluent, a large portion of Japanese people will always assume you don't know how to say what you want to say and sometimes they will just be bracing themselves for english instead of listening to you.

You can avoid this a little bit by fitting into the culture in ways such as dressing with a more typical japanese style, using japanese body language and having a vast knowledge of popular culture but in the end some people will always do this.

After hearing me use a few difficult idioms properly in complex sentances, one Japanese coworker asked me if I knew what ganbatte meant.



Also, any kind of typical english way of speaking (regardless of country) gives you a pretty aweful accent in Japanese, much worse than an italian accent for example. Pay attention to your pronunciation. Don't overpronounce, a mumbled sumimasen sounds a lot more native than a strongly emphasized SU-MI-MA-SE-N.

[reboundstudent]

You can avoid this a little bit by fitting into the culture in ways such as dressing with a more typical japanese style, using japanese body language and having a vast knowledge of popular culture but in the end some people will always do this.

So, no colors then?

I still haven't absorbed the "Japanese" style of dress. My teachers dress in a completely different way than people my age I see, and while very fashionable, I don't think calf-high pleather high heel boots would be very welcome in a middle school environment. (Plus I have these things called "hips." So many cute skirts, and yet so impossible to wear correctly...)

It seems like trends for women are either 1) business suit 2) middle aged dress-long skirts, low heels, jackets on top of blouses or 3) "dress in the dark with as many layers as possible!"

Do you have any suggestions on a more typical Japanese style, or some body language I should try?

[lazer85]

You can avoid this a little bit by fitting into the culture in ways such as dressing with a more typical japanese style, using japanese body language and having a vast knowledge of popular culture but in the end some people will always do this.

So, no colors then?

I still haven't absorbed the "Japanese" style of dress. My teachers dress in a completely different way than people my age I see, and while very fashionable, I don't think calf-high pleather high heel boots would be very welcome in a middle school environment. (Plus I have these things called "hips." So many cute skirts, and yet so impossible to wear correctly...)

It seems like trends for women are either 1) business suit 2) middle aged dress-long skirts, low heels, jackets on top of blouses or 3) "dress in the dark with as many layers as possible!"

Do you have any suggestions on a more typical Japanese style, or some body language I should try?

Well I don't really think you have to dress exactly like Japanese people; it just makes them less likely to assume you don't speak Japanese. For someone who likes what they wear, I think its worth being stereotyped. I just happen to like the way Japanese don't label a lot of stuff as 'gay' the way they might in the west, such as funky hats and bright colors. I can also wear a tie with casual clothing without feeling like I'm making some kind of statement. This doesn't do a thing for me at work but when I get changed after work or when I meet my friends or coworkers on the weekend it does.

As far as body language goes, I've always been really worried about unfairly disturbing people, ESPECIALLY people serving me or doing something nice for me so my body language kind of lends itself to japanese body language which in general shows more hesitance to any obstruction. Just be quick to bow and get used to the small head nod bow and overuse it, any time anyone does the slightest thing for you. If there is a chance you are doign anything the slightest bit rude, act a little sorry. Just a little sorry.