To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.
Unknown (Chinese Proverb)
To prepare my trip to Japan, I bought a hefty book on learning the how to somewhat fluently speak Japanese, it felt bad last time to see people trying to explain things in English to me, they shouldn’t have to reach so far out of their comfort zone to accommodate me. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to complete it in a month so I planned to learn as much as I can up to the trip, then leave it collecting dust until I remember that it was $30 and pick it up again.
I sped through the simple vocab, grammar and enunciation pretty quickly, since it’s pretty similar to Cantonese, which I’m fluent in. I got stuck at the characters soon though. Honestly, in hindsight, I should’ve just skipped learning the characters since most tourist places in Japan includes a Romanji version under the signs.
The trip is in a few days, and I’ve learned a lot of common phrases such as “how much is it?” and “can I get a discount?” — the most essential of knowledge only, please. But at the moment, I probably can’t understand anyone or hold a conversation, the exact words can be repeated back to me and I would absolutely blank. Vocab is a lot of memorization, and unless I can put it to use, it just disappears from my mind.
Anyhow, I have the basic phrases and know how to read a little, and I’ll probably be relying on Google translate quite a bit during the trip, but I would be able to navigate Japan pretty easily and cause less problems for the citizens with my broken Google translations.
Ivy In Japan 