How to find Japanese Speakers in your local area

by | Apr 30, 2018 | Tips

Find Japanese Speakers

How do you practice Japanese if you don’t know any Japanese speakers?

You find some!

Here are some of the steps that I took to find Japanese speakers in my city, Edinburgh… in Scotland!

You can take similar steps to quickly improve your speaking fluency too:

Try out Japanese language lessons in your local area.

  1. Not just for the Japanese lessons themselves but get to know the other students of Japanese and find some kindred spirits!
  2. Find out about other people’s favourite resources and recommendations for other Japanese teaching businesses to try out. I got to know about various Japanese teachers, about the teaching styles and their teaching experience. Of course I made some great friends and I was also lucky enough to often get introduced to their Japanese friends and spouses/family.
  3. Ask the other learners if they would like to meet between lessons to study together using only Japanese – that is how my weekly Japanese Conversation Club was born!
  4. Try lots of different classes to find native Japanese teachers that suit you. Not every pair of shoes will fit comfortably. The same with teachers and their styles. I tried lots of different schools in order to compare and contrast and find one that worked for me. This includes experiencing different textbooks, class sizes and even dialects.

Try out Japanese-related groups in your local area.

  1. Use MeetUp to find potential groups. Just put “Japanese” into the search bar on the Meetup site and find related Groups or search by Calendar to find events coming up. You can change the distance from any location. So you can narrow or broaden your search depending on how far you want to travel.

Using Meetup2. Facebook is fantastic for finding local Japanese-related events. Go to the search bar and type Japanese or Nihongo and then choose the Events tab which you should see at the top of the screen.

Find Japanese events

3. Another event site? We have Eventbrite in the UK and you will have something similar. Just search for Japanese events and see what you find!

Eventbrite

Start a group and start advertising in your local area.

Of course you can use any of the above sites to start your own group! Just start advertising the event and wait at the location. When I first started my group (and when I wasn’t sure if people would join me), I took some Japanese textbooks and studied until someone arrived. They found me by seeing the textbooks, the origami crane or the Japanese flag that I displayed on my table so that I could be found. Sometimes no one came and that was OK because I got lots of study done anyway!

Do you have any questions about how I started my group? Just drop me a comment below or send me an email 🙂

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