Not quite fluent at Japanese... yet

The past 2 weeks since my last blog I've mostly spent doing 1 thing, studying Japanese. Nearly every Japanese person I meet says I'm really good at Japanese, but I completely disagree. There's a few areas in which I do fine, but mostly it's still pretty terrible. I'll start off by listing the things that I do think I'm quite good at.

Online messages/Text messages

Pretty much fluent. Pretty much anything I ever want to say in online messages and text messages I'm able to express with what I believe are relatively few mistakes. Some sentences structures are possibly still slightly unnatural and I'm sure you could notice here and there that I'm not a Japanese person, but those are minor things and I'm honestly fluent.

Understanding online and text messages sent to me is also quite easy. There's the occasional Kanji(chinese characters) I haven't learned yet or even a word I haven't learned at all, but it's pretty easy copy and pasting a word or 2 into a dictionairy every now and then. It's quite rare that I see some grammar used that I don't understand and I can't remember the last time there was something I didn't understand at all.

1 on 1 conversations with people

These aren't too bad either. Obviously this is more difficult than messaging, because you have to think more on the fly and be faster constructing sentences. Nonetheless I believe I do an overall okay job and I'm able to get most things across, even some reasonably long stories I manage to explain, although I'm sure I make a bunch of mistakes in the process and undoubtedly have a bit of an accent, although I've definitely come across foreigners with (hopefully) far worse accents than mine.

Understanding the person I'm talking with in 1 on 1 conversations usually isn't too hard either, since they quickly get a feel for how fast they can speak and what kind of vocabulary I have and if I don't understand something I can quickly say so and they can repeat it slower, explain it in a different way or sometimes I look up a difficult word in my phone's dictionary. Overall not too bad and especially when first meeting people, the kind of topics you discuss are super easy and it's really rare for there to be any sort of misunderstanding.

Conversations in public places like restaurants/supermarkets etc etc

I rarely have issues saying anything I need to. It's not too hard ordering things are asking where something is in a store. However menus can pose an occasional problem and I usually try to look at the menu of the restaurant before actually going there. Things like Sushi and Tonkatsu are very easy. I've eaten them before and the menus aren't so hard. When there's pictures accompanying the menus it also is pretty easy, but there's definitely types of food and restaurants that I mostly haven't been to, where I could not order food on my own. Sometimes it's written on a chalkboard in a handwriting that's nearly impossible to read and sometimes it's a type of food that I haven't eaten before and I don't know any of the Kanjis(Chinese characters) used to describe that food. Never poses a huge problem though.

Understanding people in these places is mostly not much of an issue either, but this is in a big thanks to that I actually know what kinds of questions people ask and often they also use body language or signal to what they mean. As an example, in the supermarket they often ask if you want a bag, I'm pretty sure they use another word for bag than I've learned, but I still haven't been able to catch what it is, because they speak so quickly. Nonetheless I've always understood, since it's the obvious question to ask and they always grab the bag, so I can see what they mean. Generally the rule is, if it's something expected I'm fine, but when it's something unexpected it's a lot harder and I'll need to ask them to repeat it.

TV/Movies

I haven't watched that many as of late, but the last 2-3 days I've noticed a serious weakness in my listening ability, so I've been doing more of this to work on that. There's the occasional TV program where I understand a shocking amount. Like recently there was some sort of super simple course about computers and computer software, where I don't know how, but I was able to understand a shocking amount of it. Furthermore there's the occasional old lady on TV that talks really slow, which is also semi-easy to follow. There's also inbetweens like some news items that are fairly simple and I get the main lines if what they're saying, but there's definitely also some programs that I don't understand a whole lot more than people that don't speak any Japanese, simply because they talk so fast and there's often lots of background noise in these too. The talkshows are a prime example of this. Movies/TV Series also vary. I definitely have subtitles on still, but I do find myself listening to the Japanese in all but the fastest/most complicated parts and usually catching the main structure of the sentence with the verb at the very least, sometimes even understanding a couple of simpleish sentences in a row completely.

Group conversations

This is the thing at which I want to get fluent at the most, but it's also the thing which I sadly enough think will take the longest. The main issue is that to properly participate in group conversations you need to be able to follow everything that's going on　completely. You need to be able to grasp every nuance and understand everything that's going on. This would be hard enough if I was talking 1 on 1 with a Japanese person if he/she wouldn't adjust the speed at which he/she talked at all nor the vocabulary used, but in group conversations, since it's usually me and multiple Japanese people, it's only natural that they talk faster and more difficult Japanese. Furthermore in group conversations, things go back and forth a lot more and it gets really hard to 'follow all the action' and keep up with what's being said. When that happens, it gets hard to properly participate too, because if you don't know what's being said... well it gets hard.

It's probably also partly the contrast to English group conversations where I tend to talk quite a lot and simply being unable to express myself the same way as I am in English is kinda of shitty, but I guess it's simply unrealistic being able to this this after 13 months. If I remember correctly even when I had just moved to London and spent 6 weeks in Vegas during the summer it took me a little while to really get all the nuances in these types of conversations.

Apart from studying Japanese, I've gone to the gym a decent bit, ate out quite a lot(lots of return visits to this EPIC Sushi Bar, eat there almost daily now... it's impossible not to!) and I even played about an hour of poker. I'll probably try and start playing a bit more when I'm well rested and when I find the time. Oh and I bought a chair(to play poker), some shoes and started trying to dress better because everybody here does:

Anyway, that's it for now. Still enjoying everything about Japan that's better than the west(which is a lot), but I do wish I was as good at Japanese as I am at English(and Dutch) and I of course miss my friends living in other parts of the world!