I recently moved to Japan

and almost everyone around me is asking

"How does your Japanese already sounds so natural

if you only just moved here?"

There are a lot of different parts to this answer

and I hope to get to them all

but today I want to focus on a specific tool

that I've been using recently to sort of

iron out the kinks in my sometimes unnatural Japanese.

"How to speak Japanese more naturally"

The truth is, I actually feel the opposite.

as soon as I moved here I started learning

how many awkward things I actually say

that being said, smoothing it all out

is something I've always been trying to do with Japanese

So today I want to focus on

one specific tip that I've been using recently

and a specific tool that I've been using

to get things smoothed back out

and ready to go!

The tool that I've been using most recently

is an app called HiNative

I had it originally in my American phone

but I never transferred it to my Japanese phone

there are a couple phrases that I've been trying to use

that I'm pretty sure I haven't been saying right

and the guys from HiNative reached out to me

and asked if I would introduce it to you guys

so I figured today was an excellent opportunity

to redownload it, get right back on track

and show you how I like to use it.

In a nutshell, you ask a question

and a native speaker will respond pretty quickly

and let you know if what you said sounds close to native

or natural or not.

They have a huge selection of languages

so its not just for Japanese

but in my case, I'm specifically concerned with Japanese

so let's go ahead and get this set up!

(Download!)

The reason I really like this app is because

its not a translation app.

I find that the key to sounding really natural in language

is to forget about trying to directly translate your language

and by learning how to match up words

the way that they usually are in that language.

I made a video about this almost five years ago

but the word for this is actually COLLOCATIONS.

or "rengo" in Japanese.

It's the idea that

certain words tend to always pair with certain other words

and when you fail to match up these pairs

is when you give away that you're NOT a native speaker.

So let's go ahead and get this set up

and see if I sound natural enough.

First things first, let's set this up

with my native language...

and the language that I'm trying to learn...

Japanese...

my screen is set in Japanese just because my phone is

but this is basically how it is set up.

Once you log in you can either ask,

"How do you say this?"

"Does this sound natural?"

"Please show me an example sentence with ~~"

"What does this mean?"

and "What is the difference" between A and B?

I first want to start out with just

"How do you say this in Japanese"...

So the first thing I want to check for is the word for frizzy hair

Japan is about to enter into the rainy season

and my hair is going to explode!

"My hair gets.... fluffy puffy???"

"A little afro-ish" ???

My hair gets really frizzy during the rainy season.

You know what i'm talking about!

(Ask!)

Let's go ahead and ask this...

Let's do another one

I want to try saying this one in Japanese

and lets see if I sound natural or not

I'm assuming "not".

The phrase I want to say is

"Give your dog a bath".

"Let her... into the bath???"

"Give the dog the tub...???:

...this is just so wrong!

Whatever, let's just see if that sounds natural

(Ask!)

Pretty sure the answer is no...

Only 9 Minutes Later

One answer just came in!

So they first answered my second question

about my dog!

He said it's unnatural!

Very unnatural...

I knew that was coming. So...

"I gave the dog a bath."

Gotta keep her clean!

Oo, and we got our first answer!

so, "my hair get's really frizzy during the rainy season"

My hair is very curly and frizzy

apparently "kusege" is the word for frizzy hair?

My hair type is curly and frizzy

so during the rainy season it get's really frizzy.

To get curlier or frizzy...

Your frizzy hair gets even curlier.

Or another option is,

My hair is naturally curly so

it get's really bad during the rainy season.

The frizziness gets even worse

I kind of like that one, like it's so bad.

Totally dried and fried.

OK I can remember that...

So, that's how I use it as a learning tool.

obviously you can ask for translations into Japanese

but I prefer to try it myself first

and let them sort of correct you

but with this they can tell you how natural or unnatural it was

and specifically how to fix it.

It's a free service so that's really helpful

But if you want to speed up the waits and get a richer experience out of the app

they did just release a new premium version of the app

and what you get with that is

in addition to all these ridiculously good features

you also get priority on your questions

you get access to voice recordings

so that if you don't just want to read the answer

and get better access to audio resources

there's that and a bunch of other features as well

so if you're looking to focus on more natural language

and not just textbook style language

I definitely think this is a great resource for that.

Woo! I'm locked and loaded!

OK, so that's all for today!

If you like this video

please LIKE, SHARE and SUBSCRIBE for more!

I'll see you guys next time!