Input & Output
 

Recently I had been talking to my Spanish teacher about good methods to use when learning a foreign language. She had commented that output and input are equally important for a beginner in a language. However, in my Spanish class I had observed that most of the students had horrible pronunciation and often had difficulty discerning words from one another. Perhaps this is because few of them were heavily exposed to another language, but it reaffirms my belief that input, for a beginner in another language, is more important than output.

Therefore, I pose the question to those fluent or incredibly proficient in Japanese: For a beginner in Japanese, is input more important than output?

Because I have been applying the AJATT method, yet I have had people tell me that I should be speaking more of the target language instead of simply concentrating on exposure. Just wanted to get your thoughts on this.

Just like a balanced diet, you need a balance. Just learning with no practice still makes you a vegetable, but blabbering all day with little learning will also not help as you could be making mistakes over and over again without knowing it and soon it will become a bad habit that doesn't go away.

My advice, learn what you can, then practice as much as possible using the grammar/vocab learnt. And also think in Japanese natively, don't try to translate in your head, it won't work since Japanese as a language is tied to Japanese culture so much that a lot of the way you express ideas are much more vague and subtle than the straight punch European languages.