I've not really been doing that well...

The last time we came, I knew:

-- Hello
-- Good morning
-- Thank you
-- Excuse me

This time, in terms of things I can and do actually say, I've added:

-- Do you speak English?
-- I'm sorry, I don't speak Japanese (I use that one a lot)
-- Is it OK to do this?
-- Do you have this?
-- This one and this one, please

My alphabet skills have usefully enabled me to decipher "udon", "soba", "ramen", "toilet", and "yogurt". But generally, by the time I've worked out whether the letters are hiragana or katakana, and struggled a bit with the weird font, and registered that not only do I not know the word the syllables spell, but I also don't know the kanji in the middle (these are the characters adopted from the Chinese system) -- well, the earth and its burden have moved on several degrees...

I have the feeling that I've done way less well than I did with Korean back in 2015...

This is partly because I spent more time on Korean. I started at the end of May 2015, with no other language-learning to distract me, which gave me a clear couple of months before we actually went. This time I had less than six weeks, and they were a really busy six weeks.

But it's also true to say that whereas I really did need to use the small amount of Korean I'd acquired, it's not quite so necessary to summon up Japanese. In fact, the Japanese are experts in making sure you DON'T have to speak Japanese...

It's not so much that they speak English (we haven't encountered that many English-speakers). It's more that they have a national mindset of hospitality and communication. They will communicate with you, come hell or high water... Partly, this involves just talking to you in the way they'd talk to anyone. OK, so you don't understand; and they know that you don't understand. But talking to you is still the polite thing to do, and if they give enough hand signals, they assume you'll at least get some of the message. And generally you do...

They're also quite into (reasonably clear) graphics.

And for a lot of things (train departure boards, the auto-checkout at Daiso, the ordering screen at a lot of eateries, the travel card top-up, etc), there are English options available.


"Mujirushi Ryohin", four kanji that translated into "no-brand quality goods". And why outside Lawson? Well, Lawson is due to start carrying Muji items in all its stores...

I don't regret making the effort with Japanese, though, because it really is a fascinating language.

The mixture of writing systems never fails to intrigue me...

In my picture at the top of this post, the first thing you see on the left is the kanji for "fresh"; then there are two words spelled with the hiragana alphabet ("soba" and "udon"), and then on the right we have the katakana for "West", which is the name of the chain.

In this next one we have a mixture of kanji and hiragana (plus a suite of translations into English, Chinese, and Korean):



But noticeable here too are the little superscript letters above some of the kanji. This is furigana. It's a hiragana (or katakana) rendering of the sound of the kanji, and it's helpful because the 2,000 or so commonly used kanji that people come out of school having learnt is nothing compared to the tens of thousands of kanji that exist (but are not so frequently found in daily life).

Furigana (in the form of katakana) is also used to transliterate foreign words:



The other thing that's been fun to try out on this trip is the Google Translate camera function. To be honest, when I've tried it in the past, I've never had much success. But either it's come on by leaps and bounds, or it works better with Japanese than with other languages -- whatever the explanation it has been pretty useful. Basically, you point your Google Translate app at your text, click the "camera" option, and up will come a translation:


The text you want to translate


The translation

It has been useful.

But it doesn't do to rely on it too much... In Yanagawa, we unwisely got ourselves into a not very pictorially inclined eating house. Using the "translaterator", as I call it, we thought we'd ordered a chicken, egg, and rice dish for Nigel (me, I just stuck to the ramen, which I could read for myself). What rolled up (after the waitress -- using an ordinary translating app -- had checked that we were OK with raw egg) was a bowl of rice, a bowl of miso soup, two little bowls of condiments, and a raw egg (still in its shell). Rather than the chicken AND egg that we'd understood, we figured the app had meant "chicken egg"... (I checked later, and this dish is tamago kake gohan, and it's "Japanese comfort food at its simplest". Not actually what Nigel wanted for lunch, however...)



I'll talk about language plans for the year in my next post, but I'm in two minds as to whether to ditch Japanese or continue. Japan is too expensive for us to visit often. And Japanese would be another language that I could never hope to read fluently (like Chinese, or like -- fun languages -- Korean, or Thai, or Hindi). And yet... And yet... I must confess to being just a little bit hooked.