Matt vs Japan's Guide to Starting Output

hey guys so today I'm gonna be talking about how to start outputting now before I jump in I just wanted to talk a little bit about my experience without putting for a little bit so basically I was a big fan of the age at web site throughout Mike's you know journey learning Japanese and what my impression was from reading the a jet web site was that if you got enough input then you would become able to output naturally and that is true but I kind of extend that out too if you get enough input you'll become completely perfect in your output so if you just get enough input then you'll become able to output basically like a native speaker I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit I did have some sort of understanding that in order to get good at speaking you'd have to practice speaking but I think personally looking back I put too much emphasis on input for too long now if you've only been learning for a couple years then I do recommend putting a huge amount emphasis on input perhaps you know not outputting at all especially in the first couple years but after a certain point you have enough foundation and you'll probably want to start actually doing work to help you improve your output because although you can still get pretty fluent with almost no output practice and that was my experience if you really want to get comfortable speaking Japanese and you really want to kind of actualize your potential when it comes to your output then you're gonna have to put a lot of work into that and what I mean when I say actualize your potential is that for example in my experience I would try to speak Japanese I record myself and listen to it back and I would notice all these problems with my Japanese and these were problems that were very obvious to me very apparent like oh I didn't pronounce that word correctly right there or like oh I said that word to the wrong pitch accent or oh why didn't I say use this expression instead of that expression whatever and so you know when you have so many flaws in your output that you're aware of it really just feels like you're not actualizing your potential because it's like oh I can see what's wrong here I could easily fix it whereas for example if you do actualize your potential you still might have a lot of problems with your output but those are gonna be beyond your perception right you're gonna listen to yourself back and you're not gonna be able to find very much that's wrong with your output you're gonna have to go to natives and get feedback in order to find that out and so basically if you want to get to that point it takes a lot of practice if you don't put a lot of practice into your output then you're gonna have the experience of you know always cringing out your output noticing countless problems with it yet you know not being able to fix it because you haven't actually you know built up any kind of muscle memory in your mouth and kind of mental muscle memory in order to help you be able to speak effortlessly and fluently and things like that and so with that all said I didn't do what I'm about to tell you but I wish that I did and I've been incorporating more and more of what I'm talking about in the last few months and I've found myself making huge progress in my output pretty rapidly and of course the more input you have gotten up till this point the quicker your progress is gonna be when you output because you have so much potential to actualize but I still think from much earlier than what I did it's probably gonna need a start at least doing things that prepare you for output and so that's why in the MIAA overview I put adoptive parent and start shadowing at stage 3 and so you're not actually creating your own output yet at stage 3 but those are things that you do to prepare and I'm going to talk about without more in a second and then in stage 4 continue those things but then you actually start practicing speaking and there are some things that I'm going to talk about to help you with that as well so first of all when you're in stage 3 first what you want to do is adopt a parent and so as far as I know this was cought Simotas idea I'm using the term but he used the idea comes from the fact that people tend to talk like their parents right because in your most you know formative period as an infant you hear your parents speak more than anyone else and that kind of becomes the model that you base your output up on and a lot of times if you you know know someone well and then you meet their parents you noticed like oh that's so funny your dad talks exactly like Eeyore you talked exactly like your dad and so the idea is that you kind of replicate that process intentionally by selecting a native speaker of the target language and trying to get a large amount of your input just from that one person specifically and then you actually can put some conscious effort into you know noticing with all the idiosyncrasies of that person are and trying to mimic those so basically first you want to find a parent now it doesn't actually have to be one parent it can be multiple people you can listen to a few people and then try to kind of combine them I know that Casa moto had two parents right now I have a few people that I use as parents basically and I used to think that it would be best to choose basically like a radio show a host because you know if you do a radio show like first of all a lot of radio show hosts are kind of comedians or at least they're funny so you gotta learn how to be funny from the person they're also obviously gonna be good at talking and you're gonna have lots of input available from them whether they're just speaking sometimes a monologue and sometimes dialogues with other people and so that's one thing you have to consider right is not just hey do you want to speak like this person but also am I gonna be able to get enough samples of this person speaking and so that's still a pretty good option I think if you choose like a comedian who has a radio show then you can go on YouTube you might be able to find you know like hundreds of episodes of this person just pretty much speaking either yeah just monologuing or either you know talking to other celebrities or whatever and that can be a really good sample but recently I've been thinking that youtubers are probably even more ideal than that because it's a lot closer to kind of normal speech like if you can find a youtuber who makes videos where they kind of just talk into the camera you know with no script or anything I think that could be better because first of all you get to really see their face and their facial expression and you know their their body movements and that's actually pretty important I've been realizing and you know it's kind of nice that there's just these little five to ten minute maybe 15 minute segments where you can just say I'm gonna watch one video you know and it's very concentrated it'll just be like them talking for 15 minutes straight whereas even with the radio shows you know it's like they have commercials or they might like take breaks for songs and and they might have like little corners and things and kind of gimmicks and stuff and so I've been using youtubers recently and I really found that that works really well for me and basically some things to think about when you're choosing a parent is like obviously you want them to be the same gender as you because men and women speak very differently in Japanese and so if you're a guy and you want to sound like a guy then you should choose a guy to be your parent you also want to choose someone that's at least within the same age as you I'd say within a 10 year range either way because depending on what how old you are that also changes how you speak and your style of speech and your inflection and things like that at least in Japanese and then also just kind of someone who matches your personality a little bit or at least what you resonate with right someone who you could see like feel kind of like oh yeah I'd want to talk like that and I received the question before like should you choose someone who kind of seems similar to your personality in your native language and to that I'd say not necessarily because you know everyone kind of expresses themselves differently in each language and you might have a sort of different personality at least on the surface in Japanese or your you know your l2 then your native language so instead of what is similar to you I would just think more in terms of what would you like to speak like you know well what do you resonate with in Japanese or your target language and so you want to choose some parents if you choose a youtuber or whatever like get as much content from them as you can there's ways that you can just download entire YouTube channels so like I downloaded the entire YouTube channels of all the people that I want to use as parents and I would say try to listen to them like half the time for your immersion that make listening to your parent half of all your emergen and then the other half you know just the kind of stuff you're doing before either just because you enjoy it or because it's helping you broaden out what you can understand so yeah so try to listen to your parent as much as you can active and passive especially passive because you know you're trying to pick up all their habits consciously and unconsciously and so basically by the time you're doing this you should be at the point where whoever you chose as your parent you can understand virtually everything they say pretty easily because I mean if you're still having trouble with understanding at least with the kind of stuff that you're using as a parent then you're probably not even ready to be thinking about this yet so first just are listening to your parent all the time try to notice their idiosyncrasies and things like that like oh he uses this word a lot or oh when he's thinking he says and a lot but he doesn't say like on all of that much or like whatever things like that and so that's what the parent the other thing you want to do is shadow and so you know basically what that is is you are gonna listening to input in the language and then in real time you're gonna be repeating it back out and you're trying to match the inflection as much as possible and so I'm gonna make another video later when I go more in detail into how to shadow on how I shadow because even like a physical level it can be pretty difficult to get a set up where you can clearly hear your voice and the voice you're listening to because that's kind of the idea with shadowing right is like you're hearing a language that you're trying to and then you're mimicking it in real-time and if there's any discrepancies between the two you can naturally notice those and then you'll be able to correct that right but it turns out to be pretty difficult to find a setup that really allows you to do this because if you make the input loud enough that you can hear it clearly then it kind of drones out your own voice but if you turn it down enough that you can hear your own voice well no you can't hear that the input well enough to really mimic it so I have some ideas with regards to that I'm gonna talk about but what I would do is at first don't actually start with your parents start with audio books because audio books are in a way the easiest thing to shadow because you know the voice actors that read the audio books enunciate very clearly and there's kind of a nice even pace it's not too fast and it's not too slow and it's very consistent right if you're trying to use an anime then there might be long chunks of time where there's almost no dialogue or there might be two people going back and forth and that's kind of awkward to try to mimic right with an audio book it's mostly just a monologue I mean there's conversations as well you know but a lot of time it's just a continuous monologue and I think that makes it more ideal for practicing shadowing and at first you're not gonna be able to keep up at all you know you're only gonna get a few words per sentence but as you get better keeping up becomes easier and easier and then once you find that keeping up isn't a problem well now you can actually start paying attention to how close is my voice to the voice I'm listening to and so that might take you a while but what I recommend doing is 20 minutes every day and I'm gonna talk about this more in a little bit but I kind of have a routine a kind of like output training routine and I would recommend kind of starting as well so once you get more advanced or in stage at 3:00 right you're gonna be relying on the s or s less than you were before and so you can spend less time on the SRS and then more time doing these kind of activities and so I always recommend doing the SRS in the morning because then you know it's gonna going to happen and that's when you are the most fresh and so I recommend kind of also shadowing in the morning and so like what I do is I would wake up and then meditate and then I was shadow for 20 minutes and then I would do reps and so that's what I recommend is just do it for 20 minutes you know it's not that much but it builds up over time right because that's an hour every three days and so before you know it you'll find that you've shadowed whole audiobooks right and so try to get to that point like I said a second ago where you can repeat out what you're listening to in a real time without that much struggle and I also just note that when you're doing the shadowing you don't want to be using any sort of script you don't want to be looking at subtitles or anything it's all your ears you're old you're just listening and then you're repeating back in a real-time and it's okay if you miss stuff you just want to keep going and I would try to use something new every time I wouldn't try to counter the same thing over and over because then you start to remember it right and you start to just kind of memorize it through osmosis and then you're not really listening and repeating what you're hearing you're just saying what you remembered was said right but that defeats the whole purpose the purpose is that you're listening with your ears and you're repeating what you're hearing and so I would never shadow the same thing multiple times I would always just keep using new material and just keep going and don't worry about how much you miss and if you actually practice every day just for twenty minutes but you actually you know practice very seriously in your and you're concentrated you will improve very quickly at least that's my experience and it's actually very satisfying to feel this improvement because you know you think back you're like well just a few weeks ago I was missing a word every other sentence now I can do almost the whole thing you know no problem and so that sense of improvement will be very motivating and so I would recommend doing that for at least try to get like 50 hours of shadowing under your belt while you're in stage 3 so you're basically you're listening to your parents a lot and you're shadowing these audiobooks and that's basically what you're doing to prepare yourself for output for stage 3 so what that's gonna do is it's gonna help your you get your tongue moving the shadowing well and then basically through exposing yourself to your parents are basically subconsciously biasing the the types of things are gonna say and you're giving yourself something to mimic so that your style of speech can be more consistent like you're not saying something that it would be used in a novel than something that's used in the news you know it's like you can kind of model and say I'm just gonna try to talk how this guy talks and then your style speech will be consistent and also it gives you something smaller to aim for right because when you're just trying to like sound Japanese or or whatever your language is that's a pretty broad target right and so it's hard to know when you're nailing it when you're not but if you have a parent that say like I'm trying to talk like this guy that's a much smaller target and when you have a smaller target it's easier to know what you're aiming for and it's easier to tell whether you're succeeding at what you're aiming for or not and even if you don't succeed you know they say like shoot for the moon and even if you miss you'll you'll hit the stars or maybe those opposite it was true for the stars even and even even if you don't get there you'll probably still land on the moon it's it's like that it's like even if you can't sound exactly like your parent you're much more likely to sound Japanese or like a native speaker of whatever your language is and so I would do that for Stage three think of that as a long-term thing like I said try to get 50 hours of the shadowing and then what you might also want to add in is like this is for if you care about pitch accent and a pitch accent is important to you then what you also want to be doing before you start outputting is learning about pitch accent learning the system of pitch accent this is for Japanese obviously you know memorizing the pitch accent of a lot of different words and then really training yourself to be able to hear the pitch accent and so if pitch accent is important to you then you want to be doing that alongside all this other work and then you you know when you're shadowing you want to try to make an effort to make sure that you're repeating things back with the right pitch accent you want to be training yourself to listen for that and if pitch accent is important to you then what I would add in addition to the daily shadowing is a period where basically you just read texts out loud but you're making sure that you have the right pitch accent so what you can do is you can download a book in text form and then read it like in a computer browser with something like Yomi Chan so that you can instantly check the pitch accent of words you don't know and basically the reason for this is that first of all it's gonna help you build these habits right because you want to build habits of always saying things in the right way but at first in order to build those habits you're going to have to be thinking about you know the pitch accent rules and stuff you're gonna have to remember like oh yeah this verb is that and when it's in this form it's gonna sound like this and so basically if you're trying to practice actually speaking and practicing the pitch accent habits then that's going to be difficult because now you have to do two things you have to be thinking about the pitch accent and you have to be deciding what you're gonna say and forming sentences and things like that but when you're reading you can dump that second half right you don't have to come up with your own sentences or anything the sentences are already there all you have to worry about is the pitch accent so you'll you know consciously recall the pitch accent consciously recall the rules and make sure you read it the same way every time and what will happen is that your brain will get better and better at doing this and you'll make a lot of shortcuts and I'll get to the point where you don't even really need to think about it anymore you'll kind of internalize pronouncing things in the right way and that will take a very long time it's a very long process and I'm still in the midst of this process but I see it starting to happen where you know on things where I've made sure that I've said it the right way multiple times I'm much more likely to say it the right way spontaneously when I'm just you know having a conversation and not thinking about the pitch accent and so that's another thing that you can add is shadow for 20 minutes and then for 20 minutes just read and make sure that you are getting nailing all the pitch exit and that will be very slow because you know you'll be having to look up the pitch accent of like multiple words per sentence but it's not that bad if you have Yomi Chen so you know I would set the timer do that for 20 minutes to shadow for 20 minutes do this for 20 minutes and also you know whenever you're listening Japanese try to get better and better at hearing the pitch accent noticing the pitch accent patterns and things like that but I'll talk more about pitch accent a lot more in the future and so basically now you're laying some really strong groundwork so then by the time you get to stage 4 in MI you're really ready to output basically I would keep doing all of the stuff that you've been doing but then add to your routine filming a 5 to 10 minute video of you just talking to the camera like speaking Japanese to the camera on a spontaneous topic and then watch that video back and this I think is the best way to start doing output at least spoken up but if you want to talk about written output that's a little bit different I would recommend you know just instant messaging Japanese people are starting really slow making sure that you're only saying things you know is correct and and there's that process but kind of separate from that process is the process of actually learning how to speak and so you know what I would do is you know you want to build up this morning routine right of deliberate practice you're doing to help yourself be able to speak Japanese and so you can wake up you can shout out for 20 minutes you can do that pitch accent kind of dictation or like the pitch accent you know reading out loud for 20 minutes and then you can just film a video of yourself speaking for 5 to 10 minutes and then watch it back and then total that should take about 20 minutes but it's very important that you watch the video back because you're going to notice a lot of problems with your output you're gonna notice like oh I didn't pronounce that word at all like I felt like I did when I was speaking but yeah my pronunciation sucked on that word or like oh that was a weird way to say it I should have said it this other way or oh yeah I couldn't think of a good way to say that let me go look it up now the better way to say that or like oh I said that word at the wrong pitch axon or whatever and you're gonna notice these things and then just by noticing them that's gonna make you notice when it's done the right way in your input later and that's really important because like for example if you want it to say something but you couldn't think of a good way to say it then next time you are listening to your parent or watching a movie in the language and then you hear a Japanese person say the thing you wanted to say in a very Japanese way you're like oh that's how I should say it and the next time you'll probably remember that that correct way to say and then it won't be a problem and so basically you get good at output from first finding out what your holes are and then going to immersion to fill those holes so if you're just immersing without ever doing any output practice or anything to discover your weak spots you'll still get better slowly but you know basically always have these sort of blind spots right that just won't won't ever kind of work themselves out in order to work themselves out you have to basically first of all find out what those blind spots are and then pay attention to your input in a more directed fashion in order to find out the correct way to fill those blind spots and then you can improve and so basically I think that for the first probably six months just every single day film a five to ten minute video of you speaking and then watch it back and in terms of what you're gonna talk about in these videos just make sure that it's spontaneous don't actually think of anything ahead of time don't start planning sentences ahead of time you've been think about what you want to talk about broadly but it's important then it's totally spontaneous because then you're getting a really good sample of your raw ability you know for example if you thought ahead of time in the shower for like 20 minutes what you were gonna say in the video then you're gonna sound way better in the video because you already have thought of you know ways you're going to phrase certain ideas or constructions or a good structure to your thoughts and of course the products gonna be better but that's kind of a different thing that you're practicing you know you're not really practicing speaking off-the-cuff when you're doing that you're practicing you know giving a performance and so you really want to practice being on the cuff and that will also put you very in touch with how much you suck because the reality is you're going to be devastated with how awful you sound and the reason why this is is because first of all he takes a lot of practice to get good at output that's what I said at the beginning of this video but second of all because you have such a strong foundation and input right like through stages one and two of MA you were just getting input you weren't outputting then you were doing all this other practice to make yourself more attentive to things during stage 3 so basically you have a pretty robust internal model of what the language is supposed to sound like and that model is going to allow you to recognize how far off you are from you know what a native speaker was unlike whereas if you just took a random you know Japanese learner off the street hate to talk but if you took a random Japanese learner off the street who was mostly just studying for the jlpt and he was using Yankee textbooks and had very little immersion you know if they recorded a video of themselves speaking listen to it back I mean they might still think that they sucked but they wouldn't understand the true depths of it right whereas you have such a strong foundation an input you you understand the depths of how much you suck and that's a huge strength because in order to fix a problem you have to be aware of the problem right and you have to know what it looks like to be fixed so that you know whether you're going in the right direction or not so basically you're in a really good position when you are outputting listening to your output and being very disgusted but it's important that you do go through that process for two reasons first of all like I said before it will help you become aware of your weak spots and then through that it will help you fill them but it's also just very motivating like for me when I started doing this thing right just speak to myself in the camera pretty regularly and then watch it back I would get so disappointed to be like holy I am nowhere near where I want to be and then later on during the day when you're thinking whom should I watch something in Japanese or should I just you know watch that interesting English podcast that my friend was telling me about you'll remember how bad you you suck and then you'll give me a lot more motive to be like no dude I want to get better I want to actually you know be able to to get to that level where I can speak just how I want to and so it's very motivating but it's also kind of nice because you're still kind of safe in the sense of you're not engaging directly with other people whereas when you go try to have a conversation with a real person and you get destroyed because you don't understand them or you sound really awkward they don't understand you or just you have a miscommunication that can just really knock you down and sometimes that might be motivating but other times it might be discouraging but with this type of thing I think you have most of the encouraging motivational elements without the kind of discouraging you know heart crushing ones so I would do that for about six months and then I would start trying to have actual conversations with Japanese people but maybe only a few times a week at first because in a way having a conversation isn't that bit of practice like the real main point of it is that you find out what your holes are and then you fill those holes during your active immersion when you're paying attention right specifically and also what my experience is is that talking to people is it's kind of like what caught Simona said it's like it really is kind of like the game it's like you don't get good in the game you get good at practice and then the game is where you show off but you do definitely need to practice talking to people because that's just different than talking to yourself right but you can get really confident talking to yourself and then talk to people and then maybe when you're getting really serious about nailing your input like you feel like you have a good foundation and input like you know you can speak with proper pronunciation and proper pitch accent and you know that you can phrase your thoughts in a way that you're comfortable with and sound natural just it still takes more effort for you to speak or you feel like you want to be faster then it's kind of just a matter of drilling it down and be like okay I'm gonna talk to Japanese people for an hour every day and get to that point where it's totally effortless but the thing is is that if you go into that ultra practice output mode before you have the foundation then you're likely to build bad habits right it's like if you're not happy with your pronunciation but you just start speaking four hours a day then you're kind of just gonna be nailing in that pronunciation whereas if you're doing something like shadowing or like recording a video and then washing it back it's gonna the opposite effect because you're getting feedback right you're putting out some output and then getting feedback and then thinking about how to fix that then you're gonna get better and better but when you're just talking you don't get that much feedback I mean you can record conversations and listen to them back and then you get a pretty good effect but that's normally really boring to do because conversations are long and so really I think having real with natives is kind of the place where you learn the more social aspects of communication which is really important and you're basically just like nailing in and solidifying all the foundation that you already have and so I'd say that overall learning how to output is kind of these three stages of one the preparation work where you're doing the shadowing if you're trying to a nail pitch accent then you want to be practicing or reading things out loud at the correct pitch accent to kind of get that muscle memory that pitch accent muscle memory really into place and then also listening to your parent and then adding in the actually filming short videos watching it back and then really paying extra attention to the parts of the your immersion especially with your parent right that you think you're missing and then you just go into the drill down mode over there and once you're in the drill down mode you also probably you might want to get regular feedback from natives and ask what to fix because like I said once you start maxing out your potential getting to the point where you have fixed all the problems that you're aware of and that's going to take a very long time and if you have the true foundation that you should have built in stage 1 and 2 then you should be sounding extremely good by the time you have maxed out your potential but they'll probably still be lots of things that you can't catch yourself and that's when you need to go to a native and have them point that out and you can kind of start that process but I think a lot of people will already be pretty satisfied by the time they get to that point because you know they'll be able to speak easily fluently and in a very not you know natural way you'll be so close where the few percentages that you're away from a native speaker probably won't bother you and it also just feel like the returns have diminished so much at this point where it's probably a better use of your time to just do something else then continue to try to perfect your output but anyway those are my thoughts as of now hopefully that was useful and good luck guys

Channel: Matt vs Japan

Views: 101,514

Keywords: MIA, mass immersion approach, mattvsjapan, matt vs japan, ajatt, khatzumoto, input, output, outputting, srs, fluent, krashen, mistake, perfect, meditate

Id: YCESUUA0wL0

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018