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Ok so I've realized just how BAD I am at speaking lol xD I can call myself an intermediate student, but I'm really not when you throw in my speaking ability. It's not that I can't pronounce things, it's more like when I try to say an actual sentence I stutter and freeze and mis-pronounce things when I'm trying my hardest not to. I had a Japanese tutor and she said that I have near native pronunciation on everything- but now I don't have someone to actually talk to, meaning that I only have near-native pronunciation on individual words.......

Surprisingly, I can say 行かなければならないのなら早くのほうがいいです without many problems (occasionally stumbling on the "ra" of "nara" but that's it)

but I can't say 朝ご飯を食べないで学校えいった which is a rather simple sentence...

I repeat on CDs, I sing Jpop (lol when no one's around emo thank god xD), I make an EFFORT to speak, but I just get worse and worse xD I get extremely embarrassed when speaking Japanese around my parents. I don't know why. I will speak to anyone else in Japanese, but not my parents (same goes with singing. IT's just this strange embarassment I get around them when it comes to doing anything individual), so I have a lot of trouble studying when they're around. Unfortunately that's a lot of the time, cause if my dad isn't travelling for his job he's at home, and my mom comes home from work around the same time I get home from school, meaning I don't really have much time to practice (oooh how I LOVE it when no ones home O_o singing AND Japanese practice time xd )

Anyway, do you guys have any good ways to practice speaking? I know of www.sharedtalk.com and I've used the speech thing on there, but the thing is if you don't understand what they're saying, yer kinda screwed if their English isn't good.

So, I'm really stuck on this. Help, please?

Ah, the joys of being home alone...
I'm pretty newbie still... I didn't recognize the first three kanji characters in that second sentence, but that first one sounds like a bit of a tongue-twister, lol. Were you always able to say that one fine, or did you have to practise it a lot? I guess you could try to think back on how you originally approached that first sentence and try to apply those methods to other sentences.

Maybe try saying it slowly at first, or even breaking it down into smaller pieces? I used to think it was kind of confusing how there aren't any spaces between words in Japanese, but now I can sort of recognize which characters make up a word and which ones are particles. Like, in that second sentence, I would have read it as "_go_wo_benaidegakkoueitta", which is sorta hard to understand. I think it's easier to say it when you look at it like "_go _ wo _be nai de gakkou eitta" (I probably broke the words down there wrong since I don't know the meanings of most of them, sorry).
Anyhow, the breaking it down stuff... Maybe try practising the first half of the sentence alone and then the second half later, then combining them when you think you have the hang of both?


Do you only have trouble with saying what you're reading, or do you also have trouble with saying your own sentences and/or singing along to Jpop?

I have the same thing about speaking around my parents. xD Except it applies to my entire family. I just get really embarrassed doing japanese stuff around them, even though my sisters are really into anime/manga/gaming. (we go to anime conventions and stuff together.) But I'm the only one learning japanese, probably because they're too lazy to.

I haven't done this yet as I don't think I could keep a conversation up, but you could go to skype forums and find someone who's native language is japanese and add them to your skype (get one if you don't have it already) and then you could talk to them for practice. :]

Also, in "朝ご飯を食べないで学校えいった" shouldn't the "え” be "へ" ? As in 「朝ご飯を食べないで学校へいった。」 (but still pronounce it as "e")

Haha, wow. Well for me it's not that bad around my little sister, but very for my older one. For my younger sister I prefer not to, but sometimes I will IM her in japanese... or if there's something I want to secretly communicate I might using japanese, since she watches way too much anime and can actually get the gist of it. (far from fluency though)

Ah man, I wish I could read that without using romaji. Fail. emo

It's been a long while since I've studied anything about it sadly, and school's been dominating my life (or at least as much as I let it...I'm not exactly doing the homework). It would be so cool if school offered Japanese classes; I would be the first to sign up and enjoying every moment.