I have difficulty speaking English.
I've lived in New York for eight years and have been running a company there, so I can converse in English without any real issues in terms of understanding or being understood. However, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all meetings have been online, I've mostly stayed at home, and I've been in Japan quite a lot. I haven't been speaking English much at all.
And when I do have to speak in a meeting or something after a long time, I find it hard to start speaking. It feels like I need to warm up the engine by talking continuously for about 10-15 minutes before I can speak at a good tempo. Tempo is quite important in language; if the tempo is off, even the words won't come out. Conversely, once I'm on track, I don't really have to think too much and I don't get stuck with words not coming out. It's like I need to work hard to take off and then maintain altitude for a stable flight.
When I'm not speaking English at all, I lose a good sense of the speed and feeling of this takeoff, and I start to feel the burden of starting to speak, being pulled by the sensation that my English proficiency is deteriorating.
Because of this, I decided to ensure that I had regular opportunities to speak, and I registered for DMM English Conversation. Each lesson is 25 minutes long, and in my case, I use international news as the material because it is informatively useful. We talk about key words in the text, read the news, and have a discussion about it. I often have teachers from Africa, and I am interested in their countries, so sometimes we just end up talking about their countries. Since I take classes in the early morning, it's late at night in Africa. Despite this, the teachers are very polite and attentive.
And the result that I found was that, after all, I found it difficult to speak English, but what I mean by that is that my facial muscles, which are used for English conversation, have apparently degraded, and when I continue speaking in DMM English conversation, invariably, around the 18-minute mark in the 25-minute class, drool starts to fall from the corners of my mouth.
The teachers in Africa end up seeing a bald Japanese man on the other side of the globe, drooling like a character from Gataro Man's works, and insisting on something in English before going to bed at night. I feel very apologetic. At this point, I'm afraid to speak English in person.
It's about 1000 characters in length. I still think it feels like a long post on Facebook with 1000 characters, and it reminded me of this caricature that someone drew for me when he was in NY.
