[tokyokawasemi]

This is also super useful for learning a second language.

I once met a dude in China without much of a noticable accent. I asked him if he had lived abroad, to which he replied that he had never been outside the country. He just regular talked to himself in English in his head. I'm sure other factors contributed to his strong English, but I found this really interesting and started trying it with Chinese (which I was studying at the time). I discovered that talking to yourself as you go about your daily life really helps you identify really practical words that you don't know yet. Or even, very impractical words like "elbow" which can be embarrassing gaps in your vocab when you reach a certain level.

[redcap]

One of my Japanese teachers really stressed reading out loud as good practice - you practice reading the piece, you practice saying the words, and you get some listening practice too.

One nice big feedback loop!

[wapz]

I've studied Japanese for a long time (and work in Japanese only now) and if you want to work on pronunciation I learned to "shadow" in my Japanese class. You watch any tv show and you repeat exactly what they say right after to get the intonation down. It's weird at first but it's super effective due to the difficulty of Japanese's hidden intonations.

One other thing we learned was to talk real loud with either a high or low pitch as it helps you learn very quickly the proper pitches. I heard news casters in either Japanese or American news casters do this.

[goblin89]

Working in Japanese only means you’re located in Japan? What’s your line of work? Just curiosity.

[wapz]

I'm a unity developer (50% games, 50% 3d desktop programs)

[TeMPOraL]

Personally, I believe the mark of proficiency in a language is the point when you start thinking directly in it - when you stop explicitly translating to it from your native language.

[majewsky]

That weird moment when you're not a native English speaker, lying in bed at night, pondering an open question while trying to fall asleep, then suddenly thinking to yourself: "Wait, why'm I thinking in English?"

For me, it seems to happen most often when I remember a certain word or phrase in English only, which causes my thought stream to switch languages.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. At first it was weird, but then I got used to it.

The thing is, nowadays I read and write much more in English than in my native tongue, so there's an ever-increasing amount of things I default to thinking about in English. I also tend to switch languages on the fly in my thoughts, depending on which one "feels" better at any given moment.

[majewsky]

Exactly.

The turning point where I started thinking in English increasingly was when I stopped watching TV shows and movies dubbed and went looking for the original version instead.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah.

Curiously, I noticed that I still prefer to have subtitles on original versions. Not in my native tongue, but in English. Besides not missing some unintelligible dialogues, I found it reduces the feeling of cognitive load for me when watching a movie.