Q&A: Khatz do you consider yourself to be native-level at Japanese? (Patreon)

Yes and no. I have strengths and weaknesses. I can fool some people all the time, and all people some of the time but not yet all people all the time. So, yes in that I can fool you, no in that I can't yet sustain it indefinitely.

In terms of passive (input/comprehension) ability, unquestionably native-level, down to being able to successfully infer the meaning of new, unknown spoken and written words from context. Also, I often no longer even consciously "read" Japanese text: it "reads" me. What I mean is, I process it unconsciously. Written words "scream" at me seemingly of their own volition; it's like they process themselves and I don't get given the option of processing them -- seeing and processing the word happen so fast as to be simultaneous. Sometimes, I read Japanese books in my dreams as well -- real grammatical sentences and paragraphs from books that do not exist in real life.

In terms of active ability, specifically speaking, it can depend on my mental state. If I'm calm and/or reading text aloud, it all sounds native and has since the 2000s. But if I get a bit amped up, a bit excited, my pitch accent may waiver here and there on a specific word, although overall prosody will be fine.

It's been pointed out to me that if I'm talking about something I've only ever read or thought about extensively in English, then my word choice and sentence structure can tend to be affected too much by the English. A phenomenon you might call "translatese" (or, more accurately, "interpretese"). 

This doesn't happen to me in writing because you can think out and edit your writing until it shows no signs of ever having been English; speech has to be on-the-fly. So my writing is strong and native-like thanks to reading and MCDs. Text never gives me away :D . My writing is so native-like that I've been getting requests from Japanese companies to do translation from Chinese and English into Japanese for years now.

As a result, especially in writing and to some extent in speech as well, my attention has moved away from being native-like to being verbally persuasive. I've been consciously using language as a tool to "win friends and influence people" as it were, and also to discover and exploit exceptions to social rules. That requires not simply natural/native word choice but effective (persuasive) word choice. So there's a lot of applied psychology involved.

Conservatively, I'd put my Japanese level at one of those Dutch people who speaks English so well that you really can't tell they're not native unless you're really looking for it or they get sloppy. Like, the Dutch people who are so good at English that you wonder whether they can actually speak Dutch (just like many Japanese people who've never seen or heard me speak English start to have a hard time believing that I can).

How can I get better? More Japanese TV and audio, less time spent with the other languages I'm playing with. More audio-based SRS practice. Solid roots, no fundamental issues to fix, just a question of continued refinement and fine-tuning at the leaves.