My Japanese Video Call After One Week

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In a change from my initial plan to wait a month before uploading conversations, here is my 10-day update in Japanese.

From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014), kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions.

This video is entirely in Japanese, and absolutely and utterly non-scripted (apart from the intro). I messaged my Facebook page, targeting just those in Japan, and Junpei offered to let me record a video call with him. (He's Japanese but has an English school in Japan, La Pacifica).

I asked him to keep it simple, and rule number one was no English whatsoever! He stuck to it.

That's what I had to work with. I had been doing every one of my video-call sessions this way since day four (as mentioned in my Day 5 summary). I wasn't allowed to utter a single word in English, but I still had to fill a 30- or 60-minute slot with something. The teacher or language exchange partner also had to keep everything in my target language.

As you can see, it wasn't pretty. We didn't debate Kantian epistemology; we talked about very basic stuff. Sometimes I understood what he said, and most times I didn't have a clue. Even so, we had a sort-of conversation for over ten minutes.

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How to have a conversation as a beginner

How can you have a live conversation when you're so new to a language? My answer was simple: I looked up what I needed as we went.

When I didn't know a word, I pulled up Jisho, found the translation and then said it. When Junpei said something I didn't understand, I asked him to write it out in kana, then copied and pasted the word into the dictionary.

As you can see in the video, this took time and slowed the conversation down, but ten days earlier I couldn't have said much more than konnichiwa, so I thought it was an acceptable limitation!

The dictionary was like a set of training wheels. It helped me do way more than my limited vocabulary would normally allow, while keeping the conversation entirely in Japanese.

I also prepared some words I hadn't learned well enough yet in a text document. I wrote about this in detail when describing how I got into speaking Polish on a video call just one hour into studying it.

Use context to keep the conversation flowing

This method isn't perfect. Japanese grammar was very different from what I was used to, so I couldn't make complex sentences, though I tried to absorb useful sentence structures between spoken sessions. Even then, Junpei could still understand me when I put together a rough collection of words. It wasn't pretty, but it was understandable.

When I said a particularly muddled sentence in the video, Junpei got the gist and repeated it back correctly, so I learned from the mistake.

The next ingredient was context. “Contextese” is a means of communication in itself. Rather than have him write absolutely everything out for me, I listened for the one or two words I did understand and guessed what he was likely saying. Near the end we talked about manga, and that was the only word I understood in his question, but the context helped me work out what he was probably asking.

There were issues, mind you. Near the start he said, “Could you say that again?”, and I didn't understand him. My “How are you?” had been unclear, which was why he asked. I also misunderstood the word for “why”, even though I knew it, because I wasn't confident about its pronunciation. Being put on the spot like that can make a word way easier to remember next time.

But when these miscommunications happened, did the world end? Did Junpei get so insulted that he closed the video call immediately and told the world how rude this Benny Lewis character was for misusing formal Japanese? Did the Japanese government officially forbid me from ever speaking Japanese again because I'd used it “before I was ready”?

No, of course not. Mistakes aren't the end of the world. We laughed them off and kept the conversation flowing. Mistakes happen, so you learn to deal with them as best you can and move on.

I hope this video reminds you that it's never too early to speak. All this practice helped me get mistakes “out of my system” so I could speak much better later. You can compare that early attempt with my two-month update below.

What happened after two months?

Two months into the mission, I recorded another Japanese video, so you can compare it with this early conversation.

If this makes you want to have a first conversation of your own, take a look at Conversation Countdown.