Benny Lewis | Benny's Japanese: Skype conversation over the half-way point ベニーの日本語：中間地点でのスカイプの会話 @irishpolyglot | Uploaded November 2013 | Updated October 2024, 3 hours ago.
fluentin3months.com/half-way-jap
This video marks my over-the-half-way-point in my three month project to learning Japanese.
To balance out last week's very short video, here is a much longer video showing a completely unprepared conversation. This is also the first time that I ever talked to Adzsa (it's a little harder when you aren't used to talking to someone), so I was a little confused that she was a photographer when starting our call based on a quick email I got from her, but it worked out fine!
Note that this video is not to show that my Japanese is amazing, but to serve as a snapshot on the road of my progress. As such there are many issues that I'm definitely still working on, such as:
* I can have Q&A exchanges OK within my limited vocabulary, but I fail miserably at explaining something, and did a terrible job at explaining what "Couchsurfing" is because of this. I hope to be able to confidently explain things like that in the next week or two.
* Loads of grammar mistakes, and still very limited vocabulary
* For some reason I mixed up imasu and arimasu a LOT in this video. I realize it immediately on re-watching it. I'm well aware of this now and will not make the mistake in future hopefully.
* My accent is still terrible. In my previous video people already pointed out lots of very obvious mistakes I'm making. I'm aware of these, but realistically improving my ability to communicate and my grammar and vocab MUST take priority over making my accent sound nicer. I promise I'll be fixing my accent in the last month though.
* Still saying um instead of Japanese hesitation words. By definition, when you hesitate you are already thinking of a word, and it's kind of a meta level of thinking about thinking to change how one hesitates. I've only been learning Japanese for less than 2 months, so I'm still fixing this ;)
Also, there were a few parts of the video where I stopped and hesitated because I simply didn't know what to say, even if you asked me in English.
If there are any genuine points of CONSTRUCTIVE criticism for things to consider, let me know, but keep in mind that I simply can't fix everything in a week, so I'll still make the same mistakes in the next videos, reducing them as I go on.
As many problems as this video has, the point is that I'm able to have some kind of conversation, and I now have a base to spring myself on to much more complex, natural and fun chats. Hopefully the progress will be apparent!
fluentin3months.com/half-way-jap
This video marks my over-the-half-way-point in my three month project to learning Japanese.
To balance out last week's very short video, here is a much longer video showing a completely unprepared conversation. This is also the first time that I ever talked to Adzsa (it's a little harder when you aren't used to talking to someone), so I was a little confused that she was a photographer when starting our call based on a quick email I got from her, but it worked out fine!
Note that this video is not to show that my Japanese is amazing, but to serve as a snapshot on the road of my progress. As such there are many issues that I'm definitely still working on, such as:
* I can have Q&A exchanges OK within my limited vocabulary, but I fail miserably at explaining something, and did a terrible job at explaining what "Couchsurfing" is because of this. I hope to be able to confidently explain things like that in the next week or two.
* Loads of grammar mistakes, and still very limited vocabulary
* For some reason I mixed up imasu and arimasu a LOT in this video. I realize it immediately on re-watching it. I'm well aware of this now and will not make the mistake in future hopefully.
* My accent is still terrible. In my previous video people already pointed out lots of very obvious mistakes I'm making. I'm aware of these, but realistically improving my ability to communicate and my grammar and vocab MUST take priority over making my accent sound nicer. I promise I'll be fixing my accent in the last month though.
* Still saying um instead of Japanese hesitation words. By definition, when you hesitate you are already thinking of a word, and it's kind of a meta level of thinking about thinking to change how one hesitates. I've only been learning Japanese for less than 2 months, so I'm still fixing this ;)
Also, there were a few parts of the video where I stopped and hesitated because I simply didn't know what to say, even if you asked me in English.
If there are any genuine points of CONSTRUCTIVE criticism for things to consider, let me know, but keep in mind that I simply can't fix everything in a week, so I'll still make the same mistakes in the next videos, reducing them as I go on.
As many problems as this video has, the point is that I'm able to have some kind of conversation, and I now have a base to spring myself on to much more complex, natural and fun chats. Hopefully the progress will be apparent!
