How to Speak Japanese Naturally

have to speak Japanese naturally number one copy the exact phrase the native speakers use what does it mean natural the answer is frequency collocation and context if a phrase is something that many native speakers would say in a given situation it means natural if it's something the most native speakers will never say in a given situation it means unnatural let's use textbooks for examples of unnatural phrases because that's just so many Genki teaches you this phrase these sentences are grammatically correct and understandable but they don't sound very natural because they are not something that native speakers would say in this kind of situation for example if somebody asks us as have you eaten breakfast we would say something like I haven't eaten breakfast because I was busy there's many other possibilities but the Genki version isn't one and the real life versions are perfectly grammatically correct and polite so you wouldn't be in trouble using them but another way of coming up with unnatural phrases is translating English sentences directly into Japanese for example a lot of English speakers say this phrase do you speak English again this is grammatically correct and it makes sense except that native speakers wouldn't say that I think the most common phrase would be egosaveremaska do you speak English you know the difference well we tend to use shaberu instead of hanasu in this context but hanaseka is also fine it doesn't sound very unnatural but did you notice that we use the potential former instead of the plain massive form shaverimasu so if I translate directly into English it will be something like can you speak English do you know what's going on here well because in English you say do you speak English instead of can you speak English English speakers tend to say hanashimaska instead of but in Japanese we would say can you speak English instead of do you speak English so it will be shaver and interestingly many Japanese people say can you speak English when they speak English because that's how we phrase this in Japanese so this is one way of ending up sounding unnatural we are asking the exact same question but Japanese and English has different ways of phrasing it so if you want to sound natural you have to copy the exact phrases that native speakers use and how do you learn those phrases well from authentic materials and real life conversations so you can watch Netflix shows YouTube videos reading books or just having conversations with Native Japanese speakers now some people insist that you can learn a natural textbook Japanese first and then move on to real life Japanese but this doesn't quite work very well in many cases because if you predominantly get input from textbook Japanese as a beginner textbook Japanese will end up sounding natural to you even if it doesn't to native speakers so you continue using textbook phrases because they sound Perfectly Natural to you which by the way isn't necessarily wrong because sounding natural isn't always the most important thing when it comes to communication I like talking about natural Japanese because I'm simply passionate about teaching you real life Japanese and this is an important point because forgetting and natural phrases isn't always easy and it applies to other languages there's even a study with Japanese students who learn English they found out unnatural textbook English sounds natural to Japanese students even if it doesn't to native speakers and they say this effect May persist even after they stop learning English from sex books and this also applies to my English there are many textbook phrases I kept using until somebody pointed out why do you use that because I don't hear people actually say it and I was like that's right I don't actually hear people say this I just kept saying it because I learned it from textbooks I guess so it can be quite challenging to get rid of unnatural phrases that you're using naturally I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying it's usually not that easy I wish I'd learned natural English from the start it would have saved me a lot of time but back then it was very difficult because we didn't have YouTube or Netflix but you do now so get your input from authentic materials and if you already have textbooks you don't have to throw them away you can use them for grammar explanations and learn some valve infections for example just be sure to get your examples from native content there's plenty online and if you want to learn Japanese with me I will teach you the kind of natural real life Japanese that real life Japanese people use and I will explain grammar using natural examples so click the link and subscribe to my email group Japanese with Utah and my next tip is use double quotation marks to search for exact phrases for example on Google if you use double quotation marks you can search for exact phrases and you can have a very good idea of how those phrases are used or not used in Native content it's not perfect but it can be quite useful now let's try this phrase can you ride a bike Maria this phrase is grammatically correct and understandable again it's very unlikely the native speakers say this in real life to ask somebody if they know how to ride a bike let me search for this phrase on Google so the top result is a question from a non-native speaker the second one is a random Facebook page the third one is actually an English textbook this one is a dictionary it's interesting so we tend to use this phrase to translate an English sentence can you ride a bicycle into Japanese it actually makes sense because when we teach Japanese they tend to teach something that's easy to understand for English speakers their sentences often sound like they are translated from English so the thing about Google is you don't have a lot of conversational examples because they tend to be written Japanese so you can use something like Twitter or should I say x let's just say Twitter be sure to click latest and you can see there aren't many examples so this one is on April 25th and the next one is 2022 March 2022 and 2021. so on Twitter this is a very infrequent phrase so let me try what I think is a much more common version of this by the way this is in the context of natural conversation between native speakers like we are talking and I want to ask you if you know how to ride a bike I think most native speakers would say let me search for this you see lots of examples and there's many examples August 1st July 31st July 29th there's actually two examples on July 29th July 22nd and July 10th so this phrase is much more common as expected and let me try Google again see all of the pages are native contents uh this is a message board which is more conversational this is Yahoo answers so somewhat conversational or multiple examples from Yahoo answers another message board this is a hotel website huh it's a Blog listening conversational Japanese this is an article uh okay this is actually a survey question so it's perfectly fine to use it in survey question and this is a perfectly polite expression you can use with strangers people who are older than you because you're using muscle but if I'm writing an article I would probably insert a particle here and write so on websites you can actually find a lot of examples with the particle or on Twitter let me try the version with me on Twitter August 3rd July 26th yeah the the examples are quite sparse you can see there are some bolts tweeting the exact same tweets and in hindsight in conversation if we really want to use a particle I think what is a bit more common and you can see that on Twitter it's a bit more common than me so if you use Google and Twitter you can have a pretty good idea of if native speakers use some phrases and when they do in what situations I often do this in English to check if my phrases are natural so you can do it too in Japanese oh I also do it in Japanese to confirm if my native intuition is correct or not because you know I'm just one person and I can be wrong but of course you have to learn some Japanese before start doing this so if you want to learn Japanese with me I will teach you the kind of natural Japanese the real life Japanese people today actually speak because as you can see textbooks teach you a lot of unnatural phrases so click the link and subscribe to my email group Japanese with Utah

Channel: That Japanese Man Yuta

Views: 57,021

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Id: Su69_Se5iFM

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023