This is the Most Critical Skill to Becoming a Better Japanese Speaker

You’ve heard the usual complaints about the Japanese language. It’s a very difficult language to learn — even if <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/do-you-want-to-master-the-japanese-language-in-just-two-months-fa881d9ac364" rel="noopener">ads promise to make you fluent in just two months</a>. The writing system is convoluted. There are too many kanji and too many ways of reading them. <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/why-japanese-people-dont-understand-when-foreigners-speak-japanese-74b2641c2c19" rel="noopener">Japanese people don’t even understand it when non-Japanese people speak Japanese!</a> The list goes on, making Japanese learners possibly the craziest bunch of language learners on this planet. In my experience, the singular most important skill to be a better Japanese speaker is not <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/want-to-sound-more-natural-in-japanese-this-trick-might-help-f669a6848001" rel="noopener">perfecting your pronunciation</a> or even memorizing enough kanji to impress your friendly neighborhood obaasan. Instead, it comes down to listening carefully. <h1>Who’s doing what?</h1> Listening in Japanese is a completely difficult beast, and it can make you look like a linguistic acrobat or a complete jester. It’s been said to death that Japanese is a high-context language, so much so that it’s very difficult to figure out what is going on in a conversation if you don’t have prior knowledge. For one, <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/why-the-japanese-words-for-i-and-you-will-surprise-english-speakers-821946c777f6" rel="noopener">speakers typically drop the subject of a sentence</a>, leaving you bewildered as to who is being talked about. Nouns referring to people — “I, he, she,” and so on sometimes vanish completely. <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/the-most-underrated-skill-you-need-for-fluency-in-the-japanese-language-99e26333a612">Website</a>