Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.
Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.