🇯🇵 日本語
Practice speaking Japanese
Japanese asks you to choose a politeness level before you open your mouth, and that decision shapes every verb in the sentence.
How you practice Japanese on Tokmia
Tokmia runs lives — group voice conversations you can drop into. Every live has a stage and an audience, and you arrive in the audience. You can stay there and just listen for as long as you want; when you are ready, you raise your hand and the host brings you up. A live holds up to eight speakers, so the people who come up actually get a turn.
If a group feels like too much, Practice Now pairs you one-to-one with somebody learning your language while you learn theirs, on a fixed timer with a shared prompt on screen — eight minutes of free conversation, or seven minutes of vocabulary or role play. Neither of you has to invent the first sentence.
Japanese is one of the twelve languages on Tokmia with the learning side fully built out, so words you look up during a conversation and grammar mistakes pulled from the session afterwards go into spaced-repetition decks you can review the next day.
What is actually hard about speaking Japanese
Not the same as what is hard about reading it. These are the things that show up specifically when you have to produce the language in real time:
Politeness is grammar, not tone
Whether you use plain, polite or humble forms depends on who you are talking to and their relationship to you, and it changes verb endings throughout. There is no neutral setting to fall back on, so real conversation with real people is the only way to calibrate it.
Pitch accent distinguishes words
Hashi is bridge or chopsticks depending on pitch. It is rarely taught explicitly and rarely marked in textbooks, and it is one reason otherwise-correct Japanese can be hard to follow.
Counters, and a lot of them
Objects take different counters by shape and category — 本, 枚, 匹, 台. Choosing under time pressure is the difficulty, not memorizing the list.
What a Japanese live looks like
Hosts name their own lives and set the level, so you can tell before joining whether it is meant for you. Titles look like:
- 日本語で雑談
- 初心者向け・ゆっくり日本語
- ビジネス日本語の練習
Examples of how hosts title lives, not a listing of what is running right now.
Before you start
- Listening counts. Sitting in the audience is a legitimate way to use Tokmia and a lot of people do it for their first week.
- Nobody can message you unless you follow each other back. There is no setting that opens your inbox to strangers — see Safety.
- Nothing is recorded. Voice conversations are never recorded, by us or for us.
- It is free. Joining and hosting lives and the review decks cost nothing, with no minute limit and no ads.
Free when it launches. Other languages