Speaking Practise
What has been going on in my life lately? Well, I've been attending various Japanese conversation meetups in Auckland1. These sessions have been very fun and have allowed me to meet many new and interesting people (not just Japanese!) who have helped out not just my Japanese skills but my general world knowledge as well.
However, it has forced me to grapple with one awkward thing - my near total lack of practise speaking in Japanese.
To understand why this is so awkward for me here's a bit of background on my life. I'm of Japanese descent (my mum was born in Japan, though my dad is not Japanese), but I grew up and had all my education in New Zealand. Naturally, I was pretty good at picking up language and I could 'speak' Japanese (as much as you could expect a 3 year old to speak any language) as well as English. But of course, as I started going to school and interacting more with the outside world, my Japanese skills atrophied and I ended up using English for everything, even talking to my family. So now, even as I spent a lot of my teenage and adult years studying Japanese and getting a good enough grasp at reading and listening, my ability to participate in all-Japanese conversations, even if I can understand what everyone is saying, remains pretty low. My speech is full of messy, fragmented phrases and second guessing myself.
So what do I do about it? The conversation meetup is a good start, but as it is intended both as an English as well as a Japanese meetup and as naturally the average level of English is a good deal higher than the level of Japanese most of the conversations are in English. Which I don't mind (getting to meet people and practise talking to strangers is in itself good and useful!) but as a matter of raw input it's fairly limited. Maybe I need to look around a bit more for Japanese speakers, or perhaps break the ~20 year habit of only speaking to my family in English.