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Originally Posted by StonerPenguin
I haven't talked to him in months and we usually talk in English. I hate that I can't carry on in Japanese and revert to English, which is why I'm going back to that site to make a better attempt. If I do talk in Japanese (with him, or the other people on Lang-8) I just use formal speech, and they do too. But I dunno if that's because I use formal speech first which sets the tone for how we talk. That, and most of my friends on there are young guys, I'd probably be more comfortable using casual speech if I was talking to girls my age :/ So I tend to just play it safe with formal speech  |
I would think that there could be a couple of reasons for two people with different first languages to tend to use more formal speech. Someone setting the tome is one for sure but I feel the bigger reason is that beginning and intermediate students of a foreign language usually are not very good at informal speech because they simply don't learn it. So, it's really natural that a conversation sounds considerably more formal than when two people from the same language talk to each other.
An overuse of formal speech could make you sound funny but it can never hurt someone. If I were you, I would not worry about the speech style. If you talk to the same person often enough, it will start changing.
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Cool! I didn't really know that before  And thank you for your input on what he probably said in Japanese. Very helpful. 
Sorry, one more 'how do you say' question;
How do you say "revert back to English" (like in "I hate that I revert to English when I do Japanese-English language exchanges.")
Is it 「英語に戻す」？
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Either 「英語に戻す」 or 「英語に戻る」 will do although the latter would sound more natural.