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. In my experience, some people I met in Japan knew certain English words, but it could still be hard for them to recognize those words unless the pronunciation sounded 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.