I am back in the states after an amazing ~2 week visit to Japan, with stops in Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. It was a fantastic trip! My family and I were so enamored of everything we saw and did that we started (in jest) looking up visa opportunities to move there! While it was wonderful as a tourist experience for my family, taking that trip was very interesting for me as a Japanese learner. Here’s a little trip report on just that language-learning side, if anyone is interested:
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It was awesome to have the chance to try more conversational Japanese, and most folks were extremely kind and generous in trying to play along with me. Most of my actual practice was with cab/Uber drivers - we’re a family of four, so I mostly took the front seat and tried to chat, and that was a lot of fun. I found that waiters and the hotel staff were also more than happy to let me practice my garbled and broken Japanese output, and I think I really started to improve a bit in certain topics by dint of sheer repetition (once you ask for four waters over and over again, it begins to stick!).
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In terms of preparation, someone had suggested really drilling down on katakana. Turns out that was really the best advice. I did that a bit, but I wish I had really started sooner. I don’t think I appreciated how useful it would be to have real facility with katakana as a tourist, both because it’s everywhere and because so many of those terms are English loanwords. As a beginner, I can sight-read hiragana because it shows up so much more in training and grammar and the like - but still have to parse katakana a bit. Having more fluency in reading katakana quickly would have been amazing!
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Apart from that, I was well practiced for ordering food and buying things at the Pokemon center; I was a little underprepared on my vocabulary for directions (understanding when staff told me how to get to the elevator, for example). I would have liked to be a bit better on numbers as well, since that came up a lot - but studying numbers is just so dry when drilling.
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One of my big shopping goals was to get manga for practice material, since I can’t easily buy it here in Miami - and Bookoff was the hands-down standout for that, bar none. We hit Bookoff in Akihabara and Shibuya in Tokyo, and also the one in Namba-naka near Den Den electric town in Osaka. All had amazing collections. I was mostly looking for bound complete sets, since they were the best bargains and because I wanted to be able to go through the entire series. Of the three we visited, the Osaka store ended up having the widest selection of full sets (I got a full set of Spy x Family there).
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Boy, is it a different world trying to do live Japanese conversation than anything I’ve done for studying - even my Italki conversational practice. Output is insanely hard for me, since I’m still at the “translate in my head before speaking” stage. But even live-fire listening with native speakers was often beyond my first-year Japanese.
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Highlight of the trip from a language learning perspective - late in the trip, we went into a restaurant. In my Japanese, I ask for a table for four, ask for english menus for the family, request waters for the table immediately since we were dried out, and ask where the restroom was for my wife. All with getting responses back in Japanese, whereas earlier in the vacation I would be responded to in English. But here’s the kicker - the waitress confirmed that she would bring English menus for my wife and kids, but then asked me if I would prefer a Japanese menu!
After two weeks of being jouzu’d, my heart sang with accomplishment at that small gesture of someone sincerely thinking that I was competent in the language! Best feeling ever!!!
We’re already planning our return trip…