I will meet your “blabbering” with my general rantyness :)

I can’t really answer this PROPERLY because I haven’t worked passed the middle of season 4 and I’ve never [intentionally] spoken Japanese to a human being. But that said, I know very much how you feel, and I may be able to help at least a little.

I’ve been spending my time learning kanji because that’s what my life permits right now, and honestly when I see a kanji without context, I’ll recognise that I’ve written it before, but it takes me some time to go “OH yeah that’s the kanji for [...]“. And I found the same thing with a lot of the vocab, although some stuff does stick with me, like じてんしゃ is just always bicycle, right away. The same speed as reading the English word.

However, a good 90% of the words I have to slowly read and translate, just like you do. I find it does help to hear the words more. Obviously you’re not going to find an episode of Naruto conveniently packed with Koichi’s adjective list, but you’ll be able to grab a couple words here and there out of anime/music/news/whatever.

Try this: go here and grab the captions for an episode of any show you watch (or discover a new show). Download the subtitle file (which you can just open in notepad) and then read through it (yeah, it’s Japanese, just trust me though). Identify words you know (worth mentioning that a lot of it will be kanji so don’t worry too much if you don’t recognise them) and highlight 10 or 20 that you don’t. Go learn the meanings/spellings/pronunciations of those words. Now watch that episode. Did you find all the words? No? Don’t worry. Make anki cards of those words. Study them. Watch the episode again in a week. How about now? Improvements? Having an actual context for those words should help you make sense of them. Otherwise it’s just a sound, and you might as well try learning to speak Wookie.

Obviously this is a LONG process and NOT the way to learn the Japanese language but it may help you get through periods of self doubt. Little successes are successes all the same. You might also learn some fun/cool words along the way.

As far as being able to think up a word on the spot… who said you have to talk to a person? Nobody home? Just walk around the house saying random crap out loud. Seriously. I’ll be doing laundry and saying (well, I tend to sing more than say) just junk like “げんき、 はたらきます、 アメリカジン!” It doesn’t make any sense, but you’re using the words, and you have to recall the words in order to use them. Try not to repeat words without getting at least like ten other words in between.

But seriously make sure nobody is home… not going to make THAT mistake again :S

memrise.com

• This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by  Jesi Cullison.
• This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by  Jesi Cullison.

It might help to learn some phrases that contain the words you are trying to learn.
For example, [信じる（しんじる）to believe] is used in the (one word) phrase じんじられない. I’m assuming you haven’t learned the potential form or the casual negative form of verbs yet (this uses both), but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that しんじられない means “unbelievable” and moreover, it can carry all the same nuances as the English “unbelievable”: “Amazing!”, “No way!”, “I don’t believe you”…

You can even slang it out a bit and go with しんじられん あいつ！ and yell it when you get cut off while driving. (あいつ means something like “that son-of-bitch”)

Obviously this doesn’t work for all words, but I find it much easier to remember phrases than individual words, since the phrases tend to have real-world context. You might struggle remembering a word like [いただく - to humbly receive], but when you switch to [いただきます！ - that thing you say when someone gives you food], it’s easy.