When I was there, I knew very little. I had to lean heavily on broken sentences and phrases like daijobu "It's fine / I'm fine / that's fine" depending on context, and sumimasen "I'm sorry" I did memorize this phrase 私は日本語をあまり上手に話せないので、現在勉強中です。 Which means I am too stupid for japanese, but I am learning as fast as I can. Which would usually get a laugh. Especially if I followed that up with pointing a thumb to myself and saying "baka no canada-jin" which means stupid canadian guy.
I did hire a translator for a few days, and probably peppered that poor girl with just as much annoyance as I did questions. But I genuinely wanted to learn. There are some difficult positions to twist your tongue, mouth and lips into if you are not used to it. My mouth always felt tired and sore after speaking japanese for too long.
I learned that speaking english directly to someone makes people around downtown Tokyo think it's freeze tag, because that's the outcome. So if you don't have a phone that can translate on the fly for signs/whatever. You're going to need to learn quick.
If you want a slightly more lenient surroundings, Osaka is a better choice. And if you want a very laid back attitude where they seem to enjoy foreigners, or are not immediately short with you, there's a little town in in Chiba called Kamogawa that was pretty cool. Their english was better than mine. I didn't hear the engrish I had grown accustomed to elsewhere in Japan.
Kyoto seemed to recoil in horror at my japanese. But I was told that almost everyone in Kyoto is like that, even to the Japanese that don't live in Kyoto, due to Kyoto ruling the country for a thousand years before Tokyo took over for only a hundred and a bit. So everyone is like a country bumpkin to them.
I could get into how the japanese love to short form longer words into new phrases that simply start with the first letter or syllable of the first word they're shortening down, and the last word or letter in the final word of the phrase they're squeezing down into the new word. And for a lot of things, that made them sound like mosquitos buzzing around each other. I'd hear things like Ossss or Zassss or Shasss or Ahssss, and it was a conversation.
To compare that to english, it was like the apostrophe contraction. But instead of one or two letters. (Like they're instead of they are, or that's instead of that is), it just contracts whole words, sometimes multiple words. And that can be confusing if you don't know what's being contracted. Like I didn't.
When I was there, I knew very little. I had to lean heavily on broken sentences and phrases like daijobu "It's fine / I'm fine / that's fine" depending on context, and sumimasen "I'm sorry" I did memorize this phrase 私は日本語をあまり上手に話せないので、現在勉強中です。 Which means I am too stupid for japanese, but I am learning as fast as I can. Which would usually get a laugh. Especially if I followed that up with pointing a thumb to myself and saying "baka no canada-jin" which means stupid canadian guy.
I did hire a translator for a few days, and probably peppered that poor girl with just as much annoyance as I did questions. But I genuinely wanted to learn. There are some difficult positions to twist your tongue, mouth and lips into if you are not used to it. My mouth always felt tired and sore after speaking japanese for too long.
I learned that speaking english directly to someone makes people around downtown Tokyo think it's freeze tag, because that's the outcome. So if you don't have a phone that can translate on the fly for signs/whatever. You're going to need to learn quick.
If you want a slightly more lenient surroundings, Osaka is a better choice. And if you want a very laid back attitude where they seem to enjoy foreigners, or are not immediately short with you, there's a little town in in Chiba called Kamogawa that was pretty cool. Their english was better than mine. I didn't hear the engrish I had grown accustomed to elsewhere in Japan.
Kyoto seemed to recoil in horror at my japanese. But I was told that almost everyone in Kyoto is like that, even to the Japanese that don't live in Kyoto, due to Kyoto ruling the country for a thousand years before Tokyo took over for only a hundred and a bit. So everyone is like a country bumpkin to them.
I could get into how the japanese love to short form longer words into new phrases that simply start with the first letter or syllable of the first word they're shortening down, and the last word or letter in the final word of the phrase they're squeezing down into the new word. And for a lot of things, that made them sound like mosquitos buzzing around each other. I'd hear things like Ossss or Zassss or Shasss or Ahssss, and it was a conversation.
To compare that to english, it was like the apostrophe contraction. But instead of one or two letters. (Like they're instead of they are, or that's instead of that is), it just contracts whole words, sometimes multiple words. And that can be confusing if you don't know what's being contracted. Like I didn't.