I want to share my experience with learning to speak Japanese.

Before I start, I should say clearly that I still cannot read or write Japanese well. I learned mostly through daily conversation, mistakes, and trying to make myself understood.

To give some background, I first started speaking Japanese at a language exchange in Kyoto. It was an English-Japanese practice meetup.

I’m Korean, and I didn’t speak English fluently at that time, though my English is much better now. So I was a beginner in both English and Japanese.

Surprisingly, I learned how to communicate in both English and Japanese quite quickly as a foreigner.

Maybe most people start with a book when they learn a new language. Yeah, that’s a very common and reasonable way. But it didn’t suit me because I’m not really a book-study type of person.

I think I focused more on whether people could understand me. Many Japanese people know some English words, but it can be hard for them to recognize those words unless the pronunciation sounds close to katakana-style Japanese.

So even if I didn’t know how to say a word in Japanese, I could say the English word with a katakana-style pronunciation.

For example, when I tried to find cereal in a convenience store, I said “cereal” as it is in English, but the staff couldn’t understand it. Later, we realized that it is pronounced シリアル (SHI-RI-A-RU) in Japanese.

After that, I often had dinner at a small local bar. I drank and talked with other customers, and they taught me Japanese while we were drinking. So I can say that I learned Japanese from them.

Fun fact: I still can’t read the menu at that bar.

Looking back, paying attention to what people could understand was the most powerful way for me to improve my speaking.