24 Hours in Tokyo With Some Japanese Ability

[Axon]

I've just returned to the US from a month long trip through China. At the end, the cheapest way for me to get back to California ended up being to spend a night in Tokyo first. In the spirit of my Hong Kong and Laos threads, I thought I would do a quick writeup of the experience from a language point of view.

Now, I've been seriously learning languages for more than a decade, but Japanese has never pulled me particularly strongly. I've kind of gotten it into my head that you need to speak it particularly well as a foreigner and that it's intimidatingly hard. Being in the language learning community this long, I've of course dabbled in Japanese here and there and naturally watched quite a bit of content in and about the language. When you add on my many years of Chinese/Sinitic study, I'm definitely a false beginner.

So here's how my time in Tokyo went.

I arrived in the evening from Shanghai with a plane of mostly Chinese people. One of the first things I saw was a fire extinguisher and emergency telephone, which I smiled at because the kanji were immediately obvious to me and sounded funny going through Chinese to English. 非常电话 is literally not-ordinary telephone but in Mandarin it's just used as an intensifier, resulting in "Very telephone." Silly as this is, seeing that and other kanji labels on things become instantly clear to me was a huge boost to my confidence. I knew at once that I wouldn't be totally reliant on English.

Relying totally on English, I found my way through the airport, through the baggage claim, and through customs. My hotel was in downtown Tokyo, so the next mission was to get to the right train toward downtown. I soon found myself in the lobby for Skyliner airport train tickets.

On the plane I had intensively studied Tuttle's Instant Japanese, a kind of phrasebook that gives you common words in an order that helps you intuitively build new sentences by combining them. To give you an example of my level of practical Japanese, I didn't know the word "kudasai" before the flight. I was starving but dimly remembered something about eating outside designated spaces being considered rude in Japan. Using the book and Google Translate as a guide, I conjured up a sentence and went to the information desk. "Excuse me, is it okay to eat here?"

Without missing a beat, the employee replied in Japanese that yes, it was, and I went back and sat down elated that it had worked. That feeling of using a new language correctly for the first time is a joy that I can remember in so many different languages, and by now I don't think it'll ever leave me.

I got to the hotel easily enough after that, marveling like millions of other tourists at the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. It reminded me most strongly of Seoul and Hong Kong, and also Chongqing and parts of San Francisco to an extent. Based solely on first impressions of the city's vibe, I would say that San Francisco's Japantown is more similar to Tokyo than its Chinatown is to Hong Kong, especially if you add the Japantowns of Oakland and San Jose into the mix.

By the time I checked in and dropped off my bags it was already past 10pm. I went looking for some food and despaired that I had always been so bad at learning kana that all the signs were unreadable for me. With careful effort I could recognize "udon." Any time a shop sign had lots of kanji it was a blessing. Finally, I found a ramen place that was still open and approached the owner. I had practiced the sentence "Sorry, do you speak English" many times, but I still stumbled over the words. The owner shook her head and began to call over the other customer to see if she could help. I tried my luck with the same sentence pattern and the word "Chinese" instead. To my surprise and delight, the owner turned out to be a native of Nanjing and the conversation switched easily to Mandarin.

I won't bore you with a play by play of everything I said in Japanese to taxi drivers and waiters for the next several hours. I was pleased to find that I really could use what Japanese I knew to make basic communication possible where otherwise it wouldn't have been. I asked for more tea, I learned what time stores were open, I told people I had the correct amount of change, and other similar things. I'd say that in a tourist scenario, I only have slightly less Japanese now than I had Mandarin back in 2016 when I first visited China, and that's an incredibly motivating realization.

Here are a couple of stereotypes I had about Japanese before I arrived and what the truth turned out to be.

1. People will say "nihongo jozu" no matter how bad you are. Nobody said this to me at all! I have to admit I was a little disappointed, even though my nihongo is definitely not jozu in any sense. In contrast, this happens to me daily in China and has ever since day 1.

2. Japanese people will pretend not to understand anything you say because they're uncomfortable speaking with a foreigner in Japanese. Didn't happen, and even when I said something truly incomprehensible nobody gave up on the interaction.

Of course, both of these are probably much more true in places besides downtown Tokyo. I was somehow sure that it would happen to me just because I'd heard so many anecdotes of this type.

I'd love to go back to Japan some day, maybe even later this year if I'm lucky. I'm now readier than ever to learn and retain Japanese. Even if I just get better at being a tourist instead of committing to serious study, I've already taken a successful step in that direction!

[tungemål]

Sounds good!
It's a huge advantage to understand the Kanji of course. One question: Did you study the traditional forms, or were you able to understand Kanji based on having learned the simplified Chinese characters?

[Axon]

Sounds good!
It's a huge advantage to understand the Kanji of course. One question: Did you study the traditional forms, or were you able to understand Kanji based on having learned the simplified Chinese characters?

I've always studied about 60% simplified, 40% traditional. In other words, I study both but there are definitely characters I know in simplified that I'm unlikely to know in traditional out of context. I can't recall any characters I saw that I didn't know because they weren't simplified in the way that I expected. All my reading was signs though - I see Kanji I don't recognize all the time when I look at Japanese text.

[lichtrausch]

Great series. I think Japanese is well suited for this kind of exercise because its relatively straightforward pronunciation allows learners to be understood from the get go. Where is the next dispatch going to be from?

[youarethephotograph]

Sounds like you had a great intro to Japan despite only being there a short time. Being able to understand some signs and converse basic phrases in a new language gives such a confidence boost. And it's always nice when expectations don't match the reality - glad people were still trying to communicate even if you stumbled. Your language skills opened some nice serendipitous moments too. Makes me want to visit Tokyo now too!