「私は日本語会話を分かってみますからTwitchに日本のゲーマーズをみます。」

Question

I wanted to write a short biography on my twitch account which I'm going to use to get used to spoken Japanese, but I am a beginner so I had to write this sentence with my Japanese grammar handbook and a French-Japanese dictionary open, and I wanted to be sure there was no mistake in order not to develop bad habits.

Basically, what I want to say is :

"I watch Japanese gamers on twitch because I try to understand spoken Japanese."

Which I wrote :

「私は日本語会話を分かってみますからTwitchに日本のゲーマーズをみます。」

And there are a few things I wonder about :

• 「日本語会話」 means "Japanese conversation" if I got it right, but does it really convey the idea of spoken language ? Or is it rather to be used in the sense of a dialogue between two people only ?

In that last case, should I use「口語」? Jisho org says it's a No-adjective, so from what I understood, the resulting sentence would be :

「私は口語の日本語を分かってみますからTwitchに日本のゲーマーズをみます。」

• About the particle 「に」I used it as if Twitch was a physical place, is it okay, or is there another way to say "on Twitch" ?

• To express the cause I've chosen to use 「から」, because it seemed to me that the form 「-て + みる」 wasn't a neutral form of the verb 「分かる」. But now I wonder if I could have used 「ので」had I written 「分かってみる」 instead of 「分かってみます」. Is it the case ?

• A closely related question : is a place like Twitch, which is mainly used by people between 15 and 30 years old, a place where I should stick to the 「-ます」 form because don't really know who we are talking with, or would it be okay to use neutral forms as people there are still young and are here to share video game experiences which is not such a serious subject ?

Answer 1

I'm going to try and answer some of your questions here. Hopefully someone better than me can fill in the rest and comment if I'm wrong on anything.

1. First of your english sentence feels very unnatural to me. Instead of "try" you should probably use "want" here, i.e "I watch Japanese gamers on Twitch because I want to understand spoken Japanese."

2. I could be wrong here, but people say overuse of 私 when it's clear from the context is a common beginner mistake, and I think this is one of those situations. You don't need it.

3. Since 分かる is an intransitive verb, it takes the object of the action with が instead of を.

4. Since you are doing a continuous action you should you use ~ている (見ています).

5. Regarding "on twitch", there is and you need to use it in this situation. で is used to show the location of an action, so since you are using Twitch as a service to watch gamers you would use that instead of に.

6. In regards to polite vs casual speech, in my experience people always use polite speech in those situations. It's much more professional. It's just common etiquette. They don't necessarily use it in chat, but in profiles it's very common.

7. Regardining から&ので, based on my research から is used in subjective cases and ので in objective and factual cases, so since you want to convey your feelings I think から is a lot more natural here.

All in all, I would say something like "日本語を勉強したいからTwitchで日本のゲーマーズを見ています" in this situation. It is not the same as your original message, but it conveys the overall message.