How to get over my fear of speaking Japanese?

Japanese is the Eastern-Asian language spoken by some 128M people, mainly in Japan, which is also its national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic family(or Ryukyuan-Japanese) of languages with its ultimate derivation or source being unclear. Japanese languages were grouped with other language families like Ainu, Austroasia, Korea, and Altaic(which were now discredited), but none of these proposals was widely accepted.

Speaking skills are quite similar to writing skills in the sense that neither can be mastered without practising. You cannot expect to wake up one day and be able to speak Japanese perfectly. If anything, in order to master the speaking skills you are going to have to put in an immense amount of effort and time and constantly practice this language. Now all these factors might scare you from speaking the language or worse you might be underconfident, and you might be underestimating your own abilities. Nevertheless, there are multiple ways of getting over this fear.

For starters, I suggest you practice your reading skills as well as speaking skills. What I mean is, you practise your reading skills as usual but instead of reading in your mind, you read it out loud. In this manner, you will begin to get a hang of speaking in Japanese. You will also be able to identify a couple of mistakes that you might make while speaking the language when compared to what you are reading. Next up, I suggest that you hold a conversation with yourself. I know how crazy this sounds, but trust me. This is one of the most effective and easiest ways of mastering and getting over the fear of speaking Japanese. Try holding a conversation with yourself on different topics, try talking about music or maybe about a Japanese movie or maybe even about anime and follow that up by talking about manga.

Basically, hold a conversation with yourself about absolutely any topic in the world. Start with some simple topics and then advance to rather difficult topics like politics or current affairs. The final step in the journey to get over your fear or speak in Japanese would be to hold a conversation with yourself in the mirror. You might think that this is similar to the previous step. That is far from the truth because when you hold a conversation with yourself in the mirror you also take into account a lot of other factors like your body language or your pronunciation etc. To get over your fear of speaking you also need to get comfortable in the way you speak and that is where this step comes into play. Once you’re comfortable with yourself and your speech you can try talking to Japanese natives or other Japanese speakers and students.

There is little known of prehistoric language or when it appeared in Japan for the first time. A few Japanese words were recorded in Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD, but significant text only appeared during the 8th century. The Chinese language has had a considerable influence on the Old Japanese vocabulary and phonology during the Heian period (794-1185), in Japan. Changes that evolved during the late Middle Japanese (1185-1600) and European loanwords absorbed then, got it more closer to what we know as the modern Japanese language.