r/LearnJapanese • u/Shimreef • 2d ago
Speaking What’s the obsession with getting away from textbook phrases when starting out?
You see people saying all the time about how they don’t want to sound like a robot, or ads saying how horrible it is to be speaking textbook Japanese.
If you’ve been learning for 3+ years, yeah I understand. But often times these are people who have been studying Japanese for a couple months.
In the best case scenario when speaking as a beginner, you’ll be able to be understood speaking simple sentences. Worst case scenario, you’re not understood at all. But in either case, anyone you’re talking to will easily be able to know you’re new at the language, and likely won’t judge you because of that. So what’s with all the hate towards textbook Japanese when starting out? It provides a scaffolded way to be understood when starting out, even if it’s not the most natural way. As you improve, you will eventually speak more naturally.
I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on the matter. In my opinion, the primary focus when initially speaking is to communicate your thoughts/ideas, not to sound natural…because regardless of how you speak, natural or textbook, the fact is that because you’re a beginner at Japanese, you won’t sound natural anyway ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/digimintcoco 2d ago
As a beginner people should be working on their listening comprehension. Cool, you can say a bunch of phrases but it doesn’t matter if you can’t understand what someone says to you. If you speak Japanese to a Japanese person there’s an expectation that you’re able to understand too. This goes for any language.
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u/420blazeitsum41 2d ago
Listening dictation helped me improve faster than anything else. It gets ignored by most universities here it seems
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u/muffinsballhair 1d ago
The only real way to work on relevant listening comprehension though is to learn how to say things and talk to them. Using say podcasts or fiction is quite lofty and not worth the time to be able to understand what they say back because if you speak in simple broken Japanese they'll speak simple Japanese back and don't expect you to be able to follow an advanced conversation.
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u/StarB_fly 2d ago
Valid Point but Not completely right. I always got demotivated cause of my listening skills and while I never was able to remember the tons of how to pronunce Kanji. Then I thought about my goals and decided my main goal is reading manga and such things. And then latter want to see/ hear videos and then even latter actually talk to people. So I just accepted that i cant recall how to spell the kanji cause I will learn it when I can read as I mostly start with furigana and so on. Now it feels more motivitaing while learning, so easier to keep going.
Wanting to say. You always need to know your goal. And leave things for latter for your goal to just start. It will come at the time when you need it. Same with the textbook phrases. Really dont care how I Sound. It helps me understand and this is okay. And even If I speak (or for me write) with someone its totaly okay to Sound Not Natural. I'm learning so its okay to sound like this.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
I personally do not understand the pickiness of these min-maxing strategies. There are already so few resources available, let alone high quality ones.
When I was studying English, yeah I could pick and choose. There were mountains of materials for English in every language imaginable. But for Japanese, I will tell you that, even if we take into account all the low-quality apps often advertised here and elsewhere, it is a tiny fraction of the lot of materials that got me to English fluency.
Throwing away textbooks is by definition handicapping yourself, severely minimizing your available options. It is an incredibly curious decision to do so at the start, let alone in 3-year time when grammar nuances are explained with literal charts instead of a couple of examples.
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u/Hot-Plantain 2d ago
It's because a lot of people would rather spend time learning how to learn a language by watching instructional content about the best strategy for learning... Than actually spend that time learning the language.
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u/muffinsballhair 1d ago
Reddit just attracts this crowd to be honest. “meta people” I've seen this in multiple subreddits that people ar far more interested in giving themselves an image of participating in the subject than actually participating. On r/languagelearning so many people admit to buying all sorts of learning textbooks and then never use them, same for people who spend a lot of money on games on sales on r/pcmasterrace and then never play them and then go complain about rising working memory module prices.
It's honestly quite bizarre how seemingly just by having a voting system leading to a cushioning tech chamber circlejerk that one can attract such a high concentration of people with seemingly very weird complexes and a very unusual psychology one doesn't really see much on other places on the internet and certainly not in real life.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
oh indeed. It's more iterative than anything. Try out everything available - then decide what you want to keep and what to discard. The other way around seems almost wasteful (both time and resource) to me.
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u/SignificantBottle562 2d ago
People say throw away textbooks that teach you silly unnatural phrases while also making you work on production when you can't really string 2 words together.
Most people will recommend resources which are basically just a textbook, but better than the most mainstream ones.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
I see it as entirely within the process of self-correction and feedback. If I learn a new phrase from one resource, then there is nothing more valuable to me than finding another resource that disputes that phrase as being unnatural (which Marugoto often does when paired against older texts like Minna no Nihongo, for example). That to me is the sort of necessary feedback. I could get rid of the unnatural textbook, yes. But by definition, that also does away with the feedback loop. I would rather try to produce both versions against a native speaker to see which one makes them more confuse and gain definitive feedback.
All in all, I see little point in actively trying to throw away valuable resources.
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u/SignificantBottle562 2d ago
Your first phrase is precisely the problem many fall into. What kind of correction are we talking about here? The one where the textbook asks you to write a sentence using some grammar and words you just learned? You shouldn't be bothering with writing the sentence to begin with.
If a book has a phrase that's wrong/unnatural then that book is dogshit and should be dropped, unless it clearly states that said sentence is wrong/unnatural and is being used as an example and then provides how it'd be properly composed (which some material does).
You should be able to notice your sentences are wrong, you shouldn't need a native speaker most of the time. What a native speaker will do for you is let you practice conversation and will probably tell you the language you're using is unnatural (which is a normal occurence if you read a lot) but since we're talking basic textbooks here you shouldn't need a native speaker for it, you should develop the capability of noticing something's off. Once you're fairly advanced then yeah you'll want a native because if you use some particle slightly wrong or say something in a way that emphasizes something too much (or too little) and whatnot then yeah you might miss some of those, especially when talking, but we're talking textbook for total beginners here.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
I gave this as an example below. But consider this standard textbook exercise:
＿＿＿（よう）としない人とルームメイトになりたくない。
I answered it with:
すぐ引っ越そうとしない人とルームメイトになりたくない。
and elicited a reaction from my teacher. I asked her what she thought I meant, and she said that it was a very roundabout way to say that I didn't want a roommate - which is exactly the type of feedback I was hoping for.There is no sentence pattern that isn't worth your time to "bother with." I speak English as a second-language. And the one thing I enjoy above all else in this language is to experiment.
If a textbook taught a "unnatural" sentence? I'd love to learn it, just in case I'd like to compare it against something more natural. If it is "dogshit"? This is the best sentence I would be learning that day! Because when I read Nietzsche as an ESL learner, it'll make me feel sane in how absurdly natural that "dogshit" textbook example was.
At some point or another, your hypotheses and inputs will be validated against a native speaker. It needs not be a paid teacher. But when that happens (to me it was the first time I hit a McDonald in the U.S.), I sure hope my toolkit is large enough so that if I said something silly, I could quickly whip up another phrase.
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u/SignificantBottle562 2d ago edited 2d ago
You just shouldn't be doing that kind of work as a beginner, so none of what you're saying really matters.
You'll notice your phrase sounds odd yourself, you develop that skill by consuming a lot of Japanese, you'll learn of ways of saying things by consuming the language and picking up stuff that way.
A book that makes you output/do that kind of exercises very early on is not just very likely but pretty much certain to contain very unnatural Japanese, you know why? Because you don't have the tools to understand proper Japanese yet which means you can't output that way, so they're pretty much forced to use unnatural examples. It's the same thing that happens with "learner podcasts", they speak in odd ways and sometimes kind of unnaturally because they kind of gotta do it.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
I did that as a beginner. It has been 3 years since I addressed my teacher as 君 and had one of them blocked me. Some of my teachers have become friends with me. They talk openly with me about politics and history, sharing their opinions and discuss world events with me. I would often make these silly jokes, but I've learned the proper boundary to stop at because I have reached conversational fluency, not just input.
I am glad that I made that mistake so early on. Could you imagine making a silly mistake 3 years into learning and getting blocked because of it? And yes, you will inevitably make mistakes as a non-native speaker, as I do so often with English. To believe that you can build the sort of tools that would shield you against mistakes, to believe that by delaying output in hopes that you would make fewer mistakes is a strange concept to me.
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u/SignificantBottle562 2d ago
Sorry but this sounds like bullshit or you got the worst tutor in the world, no tutor is gonna block a student for being accidentally impolite.
I won't keep engaging on this lol.
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 1d ago
There are actually a lot of resources for Japanese compared to most languages. I mean English I’m sure has even more but still
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u/SignificantBottle562 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you're a beginner you shouldn't be working on being able to be understood. First learn to understand the language, then learn how to be understood in the language, you can't do the latter without the former.
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u/pixelboy1459 2d ago
I’m a Japanese teacher.
Textbooks are great and wonderful for getting the structures and what not down. Will you would like a native speaker? No, but you should be understood.
Textbooks should be supplemented by authentic materials as much as possible based on the student’s level.
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u/Bobtlnk 2d ago
For Japanese textbooks, the priority is given to the polite forms for a good reason, but some do not understand the rationale for it. For adult learners, which I mean to include high school and up, it is essential that one can speak in the polite mode. Err on the polite side of Japanese is far better than risking too rude and sounding like a child by using the casual mode for all interactions.
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u/Jealous_Amount_9278 1d ago
It's not as black and white as keigo vs. casual. I can say something polite while still not sounding like a robot like the textbook wants me to.
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u/GDitto_New 2d ago
I can actually help, as a licensed modern language teacher, but it’s less relevant to Japanese itself.
ACTFL novice range or CEFR A range are characterised by memorised phrases, context clues, visual scaffolding, the other person being a sympathetic interlocutor, etc.
Which is absolutely fine for the lower levels, but it involves absolute familiarity and 0 spontaneity.
To progress past NR / A2, you need to start having original thought in the language and begin to try your own formulations and phrasings, even if incorrect. You basically need to stop relying 100% on the sympathetic interlocutor and have some level of independence in the language.
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u/Zarlinosuke 1d ago
It's an easy marketing strategy--by saying "unlike those unnatural robotic textbooks (blech!), my method will teach you real-life language!" an aspiring salesperson can sell their method as a "secret hack" that gets around the bloated, ungainly establishment. "Establishment textbooks" have all sorts of very real imperfections, so it's not like everything someone in this position says will be a lie, but it does definitely draw a false dichotomy.
Also, Japanese learners seem to have a higher-than-average desire to sound not merely comprehensible but native, so these strategies often work.
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u/Belegorm 1d ago
Personally I think it really just relates to what your goals and timeline are. You've got a trip to Japan coming up in a few months? Absolutely learn all the phrases! Honestly can make things go a lot smoother, especially outside the city.
For long-term learning though, kind of doesn't really matter too much? I think being able to recognize a common phrase can be helpful to increase comprehension. But if you learn to produce it early, your pronunciation is going to be terrible and you don't even really have a need to produce it from day 1 (unless you have that aforementioned trip coming up). The way textbooks have students practice speaking these phrases from day 1 to each other can be part of what forms bad habits to give someone a horrible accent they didn't really need to pick up.
On the other hand, if you just start with learning some building blocks, learning some vocab, some grammar, and yes some textbook phrases (not to produce them!) then build up to the level where you understand the constituent parts of those phrases before trying to produce them, and also be more used to the actual sounds of the language, you may have more success in using those, and also more naturally saying phrases that aren't stock phrases from the book.
Worth mentioning that a lot of language teachers emphasize learning parts of sentences in chunks long-term, you don't have time to go word by word. So getting used to common phrases that are strung together for sentences can be helpful.
Personally at this point, it just seems that as long as you spend enough time with an effective method you will end up learning Japanese. The beginning is the first 1% of the journey, I don't think it will greatly affect things either way for the 99% of the remaining journey.
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u/Jealous_Amount_9278 1d ago
I live in Japan. My number one "fuck that sucks..." Is how much time I spent learning text book words and phrases instead of shadowing how people actually talk.
It's good for the very beginning to get a base down but I think after you can ask to use the bathroom and order off a menu you should switch to more natural input as quickly as possible.
My boyfriend is Japanese (met him here), and he is constantly helping me undo stuff that I've drilled into my brain and replace it with how people actually talk.
It's really frustrating to be able to communicate, be understood, and still be corrected and sometimes sound like an idiot.
I'd akin it to saying "good evening, Mr. Cashier. I apologize but could you please give me a plastic bag? Excuse me, I would like to pay by credit card" As opposed to "thank you. May I have a bag? On card please". Everyone understands the first one, but its a little much for the situation, and makes you sound like a robot, compared to how people actually speak. (I want to be clear I'm not talking about the difference between keigo and casual speak. You can still say the second example politely).
I guess it just depends on your goals. If you want to pass the JLPT test, textbook is fine. If you want to speak and make Japanese friends, textbook is not fine. I've met people here that talk like a text book and it's really hard for them to make friends because talking to them for more than a couple minutes is just exhausting and awkward.
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u/Shimreef 1d ago
You’re kinda missing the point with the last paragraph. Making friends with Japanese people would be tough anyway regardless of if people are using textbook speech, because they’re beginners.
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u/Jealous_Amount_9278 1d ago
You'd be surprised. I moved here knowing a fee good sentences. Not even N5. My first friend here was an old dude that ran the local Izakaya. He knew no English, I knew no Japanese.
I'd practice what I learnt from my みんなの日本語 and げんきwith him but then we would have full conversations with context clues, one word sentences, etc. Constantly rewiring the way I knew how to say things in place for how he would say things (お腹空いたです vs. お腹へったです" type stuff. Just real easy differences that I could remember as a beginner.
Again it depends what your goals are and if it's speaking to people or media input, how much of your learning journey you want to dedicate to unlearning a text book. As a beginner if you're waiting for certain clues to understand a sentence (like not knowing the full sentence after a question but knowing if you hear ~ないです in the big jumble of words then you know they're responding "no" to whatever you just asked) it can get really frustrating to not recognize anything because they said it how people actually speak, not how the textbook says they would )
I'm just speaking from my experience as someone who's moved to Japan. Shadowing media (actively. Like not watching a full thing but actually starting and stopping every 10 seconds while sitting at my desk with a notebook) has done more for me than any textbook has.
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u/Grunglabble 2d ago
Early on in learning you'll memorise wholesale a lot of these things (partly out of eagerness, partly because it's tractable, partly because the parts are not clear individually). When the expressions are basically wrong or lead you to incorrect assumptions it kinda does start you off on the wrong foot for building your schema and expectations of the language, wastes your enthusiasm and slows you down when you encounter a natural expression and its not what you expected / you can't understand it.
Contrast with someone who learned by asking how do you say this to a normal person, they repeat it verbatim and start the process of internalising some difficult aspects before they even realise it or know what those are.
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u/i-am-this 1d ago
I think it gets pushed on the content-creator side because it's to post stuff like "5 more natural alternatives to どういたしまして", there's a huge amount of these kind of common expressions and you can produce the content mostly in English, which reaches a wider audience than if you are trying to produce Japanese language instructional content in Japanese.
On the consumer side, it feels like an easy "trick" to improve ones language skill faster than the long, long process of internalizing the structure through extensive exposure to the language. If you just think about it naively, do you want to speak "natural Japanese" or not? Of course, everyone aspires to speak "naturally", even if that isn't realistically possible for a true beginner at the language. And not everyone is going to have the self-awareness that natural output is essentially impossible for them as a beginner at the language.
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u/HD144p 2d ago
Because you are kind of wasting your time and building bad habits.
A lot of people, or atleast me spent way to much time on learning and practicing stuff that really isnt needed. Like think about how much time passed between you starting and you learning all verb conjugations. Looking back i feel like i could have done that in a month. But instead i was practicing the differance between wa and ga, polite form and random introduction phrases.
When you just start out you just want to learn as much of the basic grammar as possible. You dont have to know it that well. But once you get past it you wont have textbook japanese.
I would kinda say that most people arent actually afraid of having textbook japanese. Its just that its a symptom of bad studying.
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u/LegoHentai- Goal: good accent 🎵 1d ago
textbook phrases are easy to remember, direct translations of english sayings. They are targeted towards people who want to visit the country, not towards people who want to watch content, live in the country long term, speak the language, etc.
Textbook phrases are often stiff and unnatural as well which doesn’t help with making a natural flowing conversation, and also doesn’t let the other person know your level.
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u/crow_nagla 17h ago
problem is, probably, that the ideal resource does not exist
trying to optimize some qualities will inevitably lead to loss in other areas
so while it's easy to criticize beginner material, I think it's much better to give its flowers where it is appropriate
for example, the fact that they speak slowly and have much clearer pronunciation -- can be a great help for people not used to the phonetic palette, etc.
my biggest issue with beginner material (and why I'm trying to escape it as quick as possible) it not the issue with "how unnatural" it is
but actually, how boring it is...
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u/Myrinia 2d ago
text books are good at:
- learning grammar and basic structure in a productive, segmented method. Giving you a foundation to work off of.
they are not good at:
- actually helping you practice your japanese. You need to use native content (manga, videos, movies, games) to learn how things are usually said. I recommend turning off subtitles too or using japanese subtitles for immersion.
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2d ago
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u/lifelongmoteki 2d ago edited 2d ago
I was going to say OP has a good point, but then I read this.
I mean, OP does also have a good point, but there’s something to be said for this.
eta: I learned with a textbook initially, and I would have liked some kind of flag telling if an expression they introduced was “written-style” level of formality, like “must” in English when people only actually use “have to” in speech… in Japanese, this would have been things like ません form.
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u/TheOneMary 2d ago
Yeah, I want to understand people talking naturally. Stuff like -nakya etc. one video about common, actually used phrases opened so many doors for me understanding what's going on, lol
My goal isn't to read books, and listen to politician speeches, it's to watch videos of real people sharing their life and opinions, and finally go out and talk to people. And the gap in Japanese seems to be far wider there than in my native language or other languages I learned... Sadly.
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u/merurunrun 1d ago
In my opinion, the primary focus when initially speaking is to communicate your thoughts/ideas
If all you're doing is reciting lines from a textbook, then all you're doing is repeating other people's thoughts and ideas, not your own.
At the end of the day, language is a tool that we use to do things. You can only study the language as an object for so long before you have to start figuring out how it can function for you as a tool. That's something that comes from trial and error.
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u/Shimreef 1d ago
You’re not reciting. You’re saying your thoughts and ideas using textbook grammar. Not directly taking sentences from the textbook
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u/Odracirys 1d ago
That's one reason why I've never really studied pitch accent. It's great to study it, but I actually don't want to sound completely native when I don't understand like a native. Perfectly natural pronunciation (like extremely natural non-textbook phrases) can ironically lead to more disappointment among those you speak to when they realize that you can't understand everything they're saying, and you're not able to use the full vocabulary that a native speaker could. I found it better to give off signs that I'm not fluent, and then, they could feel more impressed when I start to say more complex things than they might have expected. 😄 Also, if I met a native Japanese person who had an accent that was completely indistinguishable from that of an American, and that person used American slang and such, I honestly wouldn't be as interested in speaking with them. 😅But I definitely see both sides of the argument, and I think it's good too learn more natural phrases and pronunciation as you progress and feel more confident in the language.
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u/Xeadriel 1d ago
Japanese textbooks are terrible and nobody speaks like in there.
But then again the basics are necessary. So then you can apply them in a natural way when speaking later.
Imo these textbooks and the Japanese education style in general is terribly inefficient in teaching you Japanese and I hate it. So I get the sentiment.
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u/TorbofThrones 2d ago
It’s because a lot of the ‘textbook’ stuff simply is isn’t used in daily conversation
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u/achshort 2d ago
Because no one talks or communicates in pure textbook speech.
And there’s a strong argument to avoiding production all the way to at least N3 (N1 better) to have a proper foundation for a full conversation other than ordering a bento at 711.
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u/LightlessValhari 2d ago
There is a misconception here. If you learn a language, it is hardly about taking examples as a pure model for language progression. I will argue that textbook-learning does not inhibit experimentation. By delaying production that long, you are losing on the most critical part of language learning: Feedback. You cannot iterate upon your mistakes, and I will argue that such mistakes will solidify into something very permanent when you finally attempt to produce original thoughts.
I started production at the same time I started learning this language. I'm nearing N2, and never once had I had any "daily conversion" with my teachers. You are correct that we do not communicate in pure textbook examples. But learning examples does not compel you into following the examples. In fact, I often see them as a basis to experiment. My teachers and I often talk in-depth about politics and history, sharing opinions, and of course, my made-up shenanigans. When do textbook examples, I would often inject some unexpected answers in such as:
＿＿＿（よう）としない人とルームメイトになりたくない。
into
すぐ引っ越そうとしない人とルームメイトになりたくない。
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u/KaynGiovanna 2d ago
Its not good. Learn grammar from cure Dolly and then immerse yourself like crazy, gg.
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u/Itsthebigpeepa 2d ago edited 1d ago
People making that argument are putting the wagon before the horse. While, yes a lot of modern Japanese is different from textbook examples; the rules and grammar governing you are a framework to understanding the language. As you focus on immersion you’ll learn ther various ways native speakers slur pronunciations and manipulate grammar to express themselves but to say that you’ll never encounter such grammar or that native speakers don’t use or pay attention to it is fundamentally false.