Pro-tip for tourists: if you speak English LOUDER AND SLOOOWEEEER, you'll bypass any language barrier.
My wife stayed in a rural town near Shichigahama for a week. Nobody spoke English except a few students. But the citizens did speak Japanese louder and slower, showing that's a universal trait. It actually helped, as my wife knew SOME Japanese.
Hilariously enough, in Japan it kinda sorta works not really but ish... They have so many loan words from English that if you just say an English word in a Japanese accent it might be the right one. Like the word for print is purinto, hotel is hotelu (hoteru), and camera is kamera.
They also get taught English in school for multiple years, and English is on almost every sign in major metro areas
Travelling to Japan while only knowing a couple of phrases went perfectly fine due to most people being able to understand what I needed them to, even when my wife and I got lost and had a group of 6 or so people at a local hospital frantically trying to help us find our hotel
I lived there a couple years, if all else fails there is an even higher rate of understanding written English than spoken. In the two years I was there I never felt like I was in a situation ever I needed to know how to read or speak the language(s) even though I did make an effort.
My first experience was having to get from the airport to a hotel in Tokyo to stay the night. A gentleman outside the airport helped show me how the buses worked (those drivers are crazy) and when I got to the hotel counter the gal pulled out a pen and paper since I only knew English and we wrote back and forth to each other. After that my concern over getting lost went away, everyone was really friendly and helpful in my experience.
If you learn the katakana alphabet, most signs and menus in Japan are like this. They're just English words approximated to sounds in Japanese speech.
It's like, 70 characters. Not huge at all.
Yeah after years living here I'm finally trying to learn how to actually read, but I gotta say that memorizing a thousand kanji and still barely being able to read shit is pretty discouraging.
I've been practicing that alphabet for over a year. I still see some of them, and my mind just blanks. It's fun, though, slowly understanding more as time goes on.
It's surprisingly doable. If you have a free weekend you can learn all of them. Even one day may be enough if you are dedicated and a quick learner. Of course, repetition is a must if you don't want to forget them again, but the initial investment is really not that big.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/
This resource suggests mnemonics which are surprisingly effective. They teach hiragana first, but it's not a hard requirement if you want to learn katakana exclusively.
I did my first trip to Tokyo a few months ago. A week before leaving I started playing a kana learning game on my phone while I was on the train to work. I also played it during the flight over.
Two things I figured out:
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Just learn katakana. Even if you do learn hiragana, it just sounds out the japanase words that you don't know anyway. Katakana seemed to be used exclusively for English pronunciation.
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It's actually fun. The majority of signs and labels are bilingual and you will see English and Katakana side-by-side. Once I walked into a cafe (in Disneyland) that had no English menu. The whole thing was katakana. I figured out how to order a "ka-fe ra-te" (cafe latte) and a "ko-ka ko-ra" (Coca Cola). I was so pleased with myself.
Is the u pronounced? I recently learned katakana and it seems like the u variant is used to just get the consonant, i.e. if you pronounce words by leaving out the u they often match more closely to the English word than if you do pronounce the u (or to (ト), because tu doesn't exist, it's tsu). The two examples you gave match that thesis.
The u is pronounced, but it's a shorter sound than English u. Vowels in Japanese are shorter than English ones, which makes sense for a language where vowel length matters, eg su (vinegar) is a different word than suu (to smoke).
I'm trying to think of a word that wouldn't use u as an insert between 2 English consonants, like trip becomes torippu, but that's probably because they wanted to avoid tsurippu, as you mentioned about tsu. One word is garasu meaning glass (the material), but they also have gurasu, meaning drinking glass.
Most words do tend to use the u between English consonants though (supo-tsu, purezento, surippa, sute-ki, etc).
The kana alphabets were (probably) borrowed from Pali, and syllables follow the structure (consonant + vowel) or (vowel). In other words, a consonant must not, grammatically, occur alone. I don't know if Japanese still retains this as an explicit rule, but this is why you see the -u ending. It may or may not be pronounced, depending on which way flows better.
Many other languages with Pali / Sanskrit heritage have similar behaviour. However, Sanskrit itself and some modern languages have a dedicated character called a 'viraama', which says 'this consonant has no following vowel'. For example, in the word 'Padma' (lotus), the d is followed by a virama. Other languages, like Japanese, use 'u' instead of a dedicated viraama. So different languages in east, southeast and south Asia might write and say it as Padma, Paduma or Padama, but all versions would be mutually intelligible.
You need to put your foot down demand that they speak English to you and abuse them if they refuse. Most people don't know this, but it's hazing ritual in a lot of countries for locals to mess with tourists by speaking made up languages to them, they actually all know English, because that's the only actual human language that exists.
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No fucking way! You're telling me my whole interpreting major is a lie?? I'm gonna send strongly worded email to professor "Peña," or whatever her real name is. 😡
I mean, come on! Two letters away from penis? And what's with the squiggly line over the N--we're just drawing all over the alphabet now? Those should have been a dead giveaway: she's totally messing with you.
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The same technique works back home in the US too.
Foreign immigrant, but they're not brown enough to shoot on sight? Louder and slower while you assess the foreign devil... Just because they're white doesnt mean they can't be a commie.
This was meant as a joke, but living in the south this has certainly happened recently somewhere nearby.
As someone who went to the greater Tokyo area about a month ago. I can unironically confirm that pretty much everything does have subtitles. (in the form of text translation and most workers speak some sort of english/have someone available that speaks english)
As someone who lives in Japan, that is true as long as you stay inside the tourist bubble. Once you start venturing into places not meant for visitors, the difficulty goes from 0 to 100 real quick. That said, sometimes those experiences of struggling communication can be among the best you’ll have here.
I lived in Busan Korea back in the nineties before it was developed and before it was exporting its pop culture. I remember struggling to even get a Coke out of a vending machine. It was really difficult, but since I was young and adventurous, it was also super fun.
By the time I went to Fukuoka a couple times for visa runs, I had that expat sixth sense that allowed me to navigate around with next to no knowledge of the language. I was able to get cabs, take the subway, find my hotel, get food (though I didn't always know what I was ordering) etc.
I still laugh to this day at my attempts to play pachinko when I stumbled upon such establishment. The people inside were particularly entertained with my nonsense.
Ye, I did go out a little bit of the Tokyo tourist area and it was a bit confusing with restaurants but not bad either. Tech really helps with all of that nowadays. DeepL did some heavy lifting there.
Pretty much yea, the hardest part was the train but tbh that's because I'd never been on a train so I wasn't sure how the map worked. Took me like 15 minutes and a couple missed trains to figure it out. Google maps is actually amazing for this, assuming you're staying in the greater Tokyo area.
More importantly, at the urinals how do they properly aim their piss what with all those huge pixels
An underpowered one; In Another World With My Smartphone, trying to make a hotel understand that my wallet was stolen, using Google Translate, while they increasingly seem to question my sanity.
The funny thing is that Japanese kanji sometimes do have subtitles, and these may even be in the Latin script.