If you’ve been following this blog - the writing not just the pictures - for the past week then you know that I had a great time at the NYC Kendo Club 30th Anniversary Tournament. You also know that a major contributing factor to that good time was speaking in Japanese with a lot of people that I’d never met before.

Over the past couple of months I’ve slowly, but steadily been getting better at inducing people to have Japanese conversations with me. It really hit a head during the weekend of the tournament; probably because there were so many new faces and I spent almost no time in the English speaking bubble.

One of the primary complaints that I used to hear from other gaijin and utter myself, is that it is so difficult to get Japanese people to speak to you in any language other than English. Well, the truth is that it actually isn’t all that difficult to do, but it does take an effort to induce them to stop seeing you as an English slut.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll post some of the strategies and tactics I’ve been using and observations that I’ve made about breaking down barriers and going from a free English lesson provider to a free Japanese lesson consumer. So check back next Tuesday for the first installment and leave comments with your own observations.

Let’s have a conversation (in the language of our own choosing)! ;P

This entry was written by pug and posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 7:29 pm JST and is filed under SLA, Life in Japan.
Tags: japan, japanese, second language acquisition, 日本語