Have you ever been in a situation where you’re having a conversation with someone in Japanese and you know exactly what to say in your head, but it comes out sounding more or less like “lsiguhligfhslejfaoifjwa?” That, or your tongue seems to instantaneously tie itself into a big knot and you feel like you’re tripping over nearly every word coming out of your mouth, making speaking both a humiliating and exhausting experience.

As you probably know already, learning Japanese (or any other language for that matter) requires a lot more than mere rote memorization of lines or grammar theory from a book. It demands not only mental training, but physical training as well, as you gain the muscle memory to produce new sounds. Here, I’m going to present you with some great ways to improve both the speed and pronunciation of your speech in Japanese, and I promise, you won’t be bored.

Tongue Twisters

Tongue twisters are something you probably won’t come across in your Japanese classroom. In fact, it’s likely that you won’t even hear them in everyday Japanese conversation. Sometimes it seems that people forget about their existence entirely, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and extremely fun.

Japanese has many tongue twisters for you to give a try. Below, I’ve listed some of the most popular ones, and a few favorites.

東京特許許可局（とうきょう　とっきょ　きょかきょく）

生麦生米生卵（なまむぎ　なまごめ　なまたまご）

裏の竹垣誰竹立てかけた（うらのたけがき　だれ　たけ　たてかけた）

蛙ぴょこぴょこ三ぴょこぴょこ合わせてぴょこぴょこ六ぴょこぴょこ（かえる　ぴょこぴょこ　み　ぴょこぴょこ　あわせて　ぴょこぴょこ　む　ぴょこぴょこ）

すもももももももものうち　すもももももももううれた（すももも　ももも　もものうち　すももも　ももも　もう　うれた）

Honestly, I believe tongue twisters have significantly helped me improve my Japanese pronunciation by forcing me to practice making difficult to make sounds. Not only can tongue twisters helped you build muscle memory, they can also give you a fun activity to do with your Japanese friends and classmates.

At first when you do them, they’ll surely be difficult. Start off slow and do one part at a time. Then, begin to combine them together until you can say the whole thing at once at a moderate pace. From there, speed them up until they sound fluent. With tongue twister practice, you’ll make yourself able to say the more difficult pronunciations in Japanese. If you can do a lot of the difficult stuff, the normal stuff becomes easy peazy lemon squeezy. Give it a shot! If you like it, you can find more Japanese tongue twisters here.

Voice Shadowing

Voice shadowing? What’s that? Only one of the most useful things you can do for yourself in terms of language learning. That’s what.

Voice shadowing refers to the listening to and simultaneous mimicking of a foreign language. This can be really helpful if you want to improve your pronunciation because it trains your brain to mimic native speakers.

Voice shadowing can be done in the following steps:

Step 1: Listen to a clip of your foreign language of choice (in this case Japanese) from any source, whether it be a recorded book, TV show, movie, or even a real person (if they have the patience).
Step 2: Do it again.
Step 3: Do it again and then again, again.
Step 4:  Slowly, begin to repeat after the recording, doing so in small parts.
Step 5: Do it again.
Step 6: Once you get good enough, try speaking in time with the recording, doing your best to mimic exactly what you hear. This will train you to speak more like a native.
Step 7: DO IT AGAIN.

Voice shadowing is a lot like learning a song, except, this song is teaching you the melodies heard in conversations and everyday speech. Tricksy. The best part is, you can turn your habit of watching your favorite shows every day into learning a useful skill! The only down side to this is that it takes a lot of time, and that means that it will take longer to get to the end of Naruto. In fact, you might die before you get to the end of that series.

Also, make sure to pick sources that are sensible to mimic so you don’t end up sounding like Kermit the frog in the end. The following would be a bad example of mimicking a TV show, that is, if you want to learn Japanese:

Your Japanese friends will be so overwhelmed, they won’t know what to say.

Karaoke / Singing

Singing!? That’s everyone’s favorite thing, right? No? Well, even if it’s not, singing songs in a foreign language can help you speak said language. If you have a thing for Japanese music and you want to boost your speed and pronunciation, use your voice to your advantage and sing, sing, sing.

In Japan, singing karaoke is a popular activity to do with friends, but even if you don’t have karaoke near you, you can practice on your own or with friends at home. Check out these Youtubers who are willing to share their talents with the world:

This girl practices rap songs in Japanese. I haven’t tried this myself, but it seems particularly good if you want to speak faster Japanese, yo. Honestly, I’m pretty amazed.

The next video went viral in Japan a while ago just because the amount of passion this guy has is hilarious. I’m pretty sure he can’t understand Japanese based upon the video, but even so, his pronunciation isn’t bad, perhaps because he is able to mimic the sounds through song. Just imagine how good you would be if you knew Japanese and sang this passionately.

Seriously, this shows the true powers of music.

Story Telling / Acting

Story telling is an important part of every culture and language. An important part of good story telling is the expression of a range of emotions, characters, and situations through language and voice. I mean, how exciting was that monotone story your 7th grade history teacher told about something you can’t even remember? I’m sorry, I want it to be exciting, too, but it just can’t be without the right voice.

Practicing story telling is beneficial for a number of reasons, other than it being seriously entertaining. First of all, telling stories gives you the chance to practice a wide range of language through different characters as you give your story life. Your pronunciation, speed, and quality of speech should change, so in other words, it offers you the opportunity to give your vocal chords more exercise and might even broaden your everyday speech capabilities. In many ways, it is similar to voice shadowing and also has many of the same benefits.

The Japanese art of story telling is called rakugo (落語, shown above), and involves a lone story teller on stage who usually depicts a long, comical story. One of the most famous stories, and personally my favorite, is called Jugemu (寿限無). This story is often used for training rakugo artists because the humor in it involves the repetition of a boy’s name which happens to be very, very long and very hard to say. Below is the “Fullmetal Alchemized” version of this humorous point, which I’m sure has confused many unsuspecting victims on the internet.

Personally I’ve tried memorizing this myself and I’ve got to say rakugo is one of the funnest things to learn if you want to invest the time into improving your voice in Japanese.

Talking to Yourself

So, you’re walking down the road home from school or work when you realize that you are talking to yourself in Japanese and it doesn’t even make any sense. “Dear, Jimmy! I must be crazy!” you might be thinking, “I better call the doctor!” But wait, hold the phone, and let me reassure you that this is 125% normal. In fact, talking to yourself has a name in linguistics, it’s called “private speech.” Sounds much less crazy now, right?

Private speech happens in many different ways, whether it be talking under your breath in class, or reciting a grocery list, but private speech in any form has one thing in common: it is necessary for language learning. In fact, it is impossible to internalize a language without first externalizing through speech. So, the more you talk to yourself, the better. Who cares if people think you are a nutcase as long as you can learn Japanese, right? That being said, it is pretty sad to call ただいま when no one is home to answer you.

Remember to Forgive Yourself

The most important thing to remember when practicing your Japanese speech is to forgive yourself and try your best! If at first you don’t succeed, although it is eternally frustrating, try, try again. You might have to practice pronunciation for a week, a month, a year, but all of a sudden it will happen without you realizing it.

Keeping Japanese fun for yourself is essential if you really want to learn the language, so when it comes to speech, relax, sit back, and try a million tongue twisters! If you have the ability to do so, we’d love to see how fast you can do them. Or, let us know what has helped you improve your Japanese fluency. Hit me up in the comments below!

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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Why Pay?

To sum it up in one word: efficiency. You can’t pay to inject Japanese into your brain with a syringe, but you can pay for things that will help to make the things you already have to do easier (and more importantly, more efficient). Most Japanese learners go through the same kinds of things, and the same kinds of hardships. Why not flash a Jefferson or two to not have to go through some of the more unnecessary ones?

The following are a few of my favorite paid resources for helping you to learn Japanese faster. A couple I use a ton, and one of them is new (to me). The thing that makes these resources unique, I think, is that they definitely aren’t good for learning Japanese if they are the only thing you’re using. These will all help you to supplement your Japanese learning along with something else (or some other things) – they won’t be able to single handedly teach you Japanese, unfortunately.

1. MyGengo Translation Service

MyGengo is the “new” resource. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it before, though I haven’t (in the past) thought of it as much of a way to help with Japanese learning (and only thought of it as purely a translation service… which is pretty much what they are).

There are times in Japanese study where you either 1) can’t for the life of you figure out what something means and 2) can’t for the life of you figure out how to say something in Japanese.

Now, I do think struggling and working really hard to figure out translations is a super important part of learning Japanese. If you, for example, just put every Japanese sentence you come across into MyGengo, you’d never learn a thing. 99% of time you should persevere and figure it out yourself. Only the other 1% of the time should you pay for translation. Here’s how it works:

First, you’ll have to create an account (I tried putting my test translation in first, then submitting it, and when I created an account it deleted the thing I put in to get translated and I had to re-submit, dang!).

Then, you choose what language you want to translate from and to. Japanese to English is 3 cents per character. English to Japanese is 5 cents per character (at least for the standard level translation, which should be all you need). If you stick an essay in there, then it might get pretty expensive, but I’m thinking this could be useful for single sentences or short paragraphs, mostly for when you’re really really stuck.

After you put what you want translated into the system, you just wait a bit (mine took a couple hours to be completed, pretty quick if you ask me), and then get your translation. I translated four of Shinnosuke’s Tweets (he’s the other guy in Cat Island, Part 1) just to try it out and it worked well. Gotta say, I was a bit impressed.

So, if you’re having trouble with one sentence … or if you need to translate something really bad (and can’t figure out how to), give MyGengo a try. The four tweets consisted of 125 characters (and around 8 sentences, I’d say) and cost $3.75 to translate. If those were 8 sentences I couldn’t translate on my own, that’s $3.75 of well spent money, I’d say. Afterwards, you can compare the translation and the original, and try to figure out what you couldn’t figure out before (and hopefully learn something from it). The worst thing you can do when studying is get stuck. This will help so you don’t ever have that problem.

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2. Lang-8 Premium

Lang-8 is one of those sites that I just can’t stop loving. You can (and should) use it for free. It allows you to write journal entries in the language you’re learning, and get them corrected by native speakers (for this article, let’s assume that’s Japanese). In theory, you’d help out by correcting people’s English too (or whatever your native language is). It’s all about helping each other and language exchange. If you’re upper beginner / intermediate or above, you should be using this site every day. It’s seriously awesome.

There’s also a premium version of Lang-8 you can pay $5 a month for (or $45 for the year). When this first came out, there weren’t too many features. Now, though, I think it’s definitely worth that tiny monthly payment. $5 is barely enough to buy lunch, after all.

There are many other features you get with premium, but I have a few favorites (that make it worth while on their own, I think).

1. Emphasize / Prioritize Your Entries

By paying $5 per month, your entries get a special background color and show up higher in people’s feeds, meaning they get more corrections and get corrected faster. Time is worth paying for, I think, and this is something that will give you more time to study Japanese. You’ll be able to write more entries in the same amount of time (and get them corrected faster) and you’ll get higher quality corrections (in theory) because more people will correct your entries. This is my favorite feature of premium Lang-8, I think. It just saves you time and helps you to learn Japanese more quickly.

2. Personal Journal Search

If you take #1 to heart and write a ton of entries, you’ll start finding that it’s hard to find them all. With language learning, being able to go back is pretty important, I think. This just makes that easier. If you need to take a look at a specific correction that you learned something from (but apparently don’t remember it), this feature is awesome and helps a ton.

3. Journal and Correction Data Download as a PDF

If you’re the type of person who likes things on paper, this feature is great. It lets you get your journal entries and corrections in PDF format, allowing you to print them out and study with them. It also just makes it easier to study what you’ve done on Lang-8. Whether you like studying on paper or not, I’m a big fan of this one. Things suddenly become easier when you print them out in the special Lang-8 PDF version of your journal entries.

If you’re really serious about your Japanese studies, and want to learn way, way faster, use Lang-8. If you want to be faster than fast at learning Japanese, pay for Lang-8 Premium. Totally worth it.

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3. Evernote Premium

If there’s one service I use more than any other on my computer/iPhone/iPad … it’s Evernote. It’s one of those applications you don’t think you’ll need even if you start using it for a while. But then, if you keep using it, you’ll start realizing what you’ve been missing all this time. I use it to keep track of photos, articles, parking spaces, apps to try, and everything else in between. Ways you can use Evernote are literally just limited only by your imagination.

I wrote an article a while back about how to use Evernote to learn Japanese. You can use Evernote to keep track of vocab words, sentences, and so much more. The premium version of Evernote ($5 per month or $45 per year) takes Evernote and supercharges it for you. Here are the premium features I use for Japanese studies (though I use it for so many other things too, making it an incredible value for me).

1. Local Storage On Your Mobile Device

This is the most useful thing on Evernote Premium (especially when it comes to Japanese). You can put PDFs, text, and whatever else you want into Evernote on your computer and then sync it with your phone. With local storage (regular Evernote stores everything in the cloud and makes you pull it from there on your phone) you’ll have everything ready to go. I’m working on a post about “Japanese on the go” and this plays a huge role in what you can and can’t do. This is especially helpful when you have an AT&T iPhone, and can’t rely on having any reception anywhere away from wifi.

2. Allows different file formats

Standard Evernote allows for images, audio, ink, and PDF, which is pretty much all you need (I love saving Japanese audio files and Lang-8 PDFs), but sometimes it’s nice to have other file formats as well. It doesn’t come into play too often (most of your Japanese studying stuff is going to be in one of those formats), but if you need to put Word files, or something like that, you’ll wish you had it.

3. Access To Note History

Also nice is the ability to see your note history. If you’re using Evernote to study Japanese, you’re probably changing things, moving things around, and taking notes on things. With note history, you can see those changes. I don’t use this all the time, but I’ve found it really helpful quite a few times.

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What Premium Services Do You Use?

I’ve only listed three things, and I’m sure there’s plenty more out there. What pay services do you use to supplement your Japanese study? Try to keep it down to below $10 payments – We’re looking for things that just help you to get an advantage over everyone else, and no more. I’m curious what you’ll come up with! You folks are pretty smart that way ; )

P.S. It doesn’t cost any money to Follow Tofugu On Twitter!

P.P.S. Then again, perhaps you’re the Facebook type….