First time in Japan

Japanese Language Speaking
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Hi, just returned from a 3-week trip to Japan. The trip itself was awesome! I was slightly nervous that my expectations would have been a bit too high beforehand, but it wasn’t. Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara - me and my gf had an amazing time and already decided to go again next year.

About my Japanese - I study Japanese for a year or three now. Lvl 60 in KW, N3 in Bunpro, I focus mostly on reading Japanese since that was the goal when I started studying.

What I learned in Japan is that both speaking and listening to real life conversations is much, much harder than the N5 and N4 listening practices I have been doing so far. I could understand simpler sentences, but when somebody spoke in their normal tempo I could only understand some words here and there.

When speaking I could only make myself understandable using supersimple sentences and often even only using some loose words instead of full sentences. When I practice at home I have all the time to think about a grammatical correct sentence, but when having a conversation I had a hard time of coming up with even the most basic sentences.

To be honest I was a bit bummed out that I could hardly have a simply conversation after spending so much time on Japanese. It made me rethink about my study. I decided to stop spending more time on more advanced grammar for now and focus much more on listening and speaking. Maybe use Italki to find a tutor to help me with this.

Anybody else having the same experience when having real life conversations in Japanese for the first time?

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fwiw I was at the level where I could pretty comfortably read books when I came to Japan, but due to lack of any listening and speaking practice I had a pretty hard time when I first got here. Thanks to my reading background I had what felt like a 10x EXP boost on at all times and managed to improve pretty fast though.

But yeah, I know that feel. It gets easier with practice (obviously). My personal favorite method was just typing out a bunch of japanese about some random topic. Honestly I think I improved far more doing that than actually talking to natives. Talking to natives (and sucking) honestly felt more like free motivation and a chance to use what I learned during my solo practice rather than a good means to improve. Some people seem to have success with it, but I felt so focused on just making the conversation flowing along (esp at the start) and didn’t really have any 余裕 to actually think how I wanted to express myself or reflect on anything.

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My listening ability is still atrocious, though I did have one or two instances where things just clicked and I was able to hold an actual conversation. But yeah, most of the time I could make myself understood okay (when I didn’t spontaneously forget all of my vocab) but getting information back was a struggle.

On the plus side, though, how was the trip? What did you see? Got any slides to share? :grinning:

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weirdly i always have the complete opposite experience. (same with listening on JLPT)
i understand quite a lot even with normal conversation speed (though it obviously depends on the topic of conversation) but reading takes some serious effort and checking up on Kanji.
not sure about my own sentence building though. i just thought yesterday how nice a just conversation class/ group would be, but that is not really in the cards right now.

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You get better at/good at what you practice. If you only ever practice skating forwards, you will not get any good at skating backwards, even though you may have been practicing “skating” for years.

It works both ways. I know people (I live in Japan) that can carry on conversations at near fluent level but can barely read any Japanese. Just had a conversation about this with one such person recently. She could understand everything being said on the show we were watching and I struggled to keep up and could not understand everything. Then we tried reading something. I could read it no problem, she could read none of it beyond picking out a few words that were written in hiragana.

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Now that is a statement that conveys something about age. If not yours, then mine for understanding it :slight_smile: I can practically hear the sound of the carousel turning and the slide dropping into the slot.

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That has been my experience with other languages as well. Obviously if you don’t practice listening/speaking at all you’ll always suck, but if you decide to put some time into it then having a large vocab and grammar knowledge will allow you to progress massively faster.

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Typing about a random topic is actually a pretty good suggestion. Will put that into my practice sessions :slight_smile:

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The trip was pretty much like a dream come true. We spent 3 weeks in Japan and every day was filled with things we saw and did. It took a bit of getting used to public transport, especially since our first hotel was next to Shinjuku station and navigating there was just pure hell :smiley:
But in short everything was just as how I imagined it too be. I will spare you a big essay on everything we did and saw, but some of my highlights were exploring Tokyo, it’s just an amazing city with so much stuff to do and see. Kyoto was also awesome (though the most famous places were a bit too crowded with tourists :smiley: ) I was only for 2 days in Osaka but we quickly ended up in a Karaoke bar singing along with a bunch of Japanese and Korean people. Maybe it was just me but I found the people in Tokyo superpolite and quiet, while in Osaka people were much more open and tried to talk with us. Loved it there.

Then we went for a day to Nara. I did not really read about Nara beforehand, so I expected a big park with deers but actually Nara was one of the most impressive places we visited. A lot of huge beautiful temples and parks and the deer were walking around everywhere.

The last 4 days were spent in a hotel in Akihabara. I’m a huge Steins;Gate fan so it was awesome to visit all the places from the VN and Anime in real life. It’s a bit of a tourist trap though - I planned to buy a lot of figurines which I collect but the prices in Akiba were crazy. For example, i wanted to buy a specific S;G figurine there, but the price was 99.000 yen in multiple stores. The new price when ordering online is 35.000 yen :slight_smile: Still, even if you don’t care about Anime, Akihabara is a must visit.

We visited a lot of the must-see places like the Tokyo Tower, Shibuya and what not, but actually our fondest moments where when we just walked through Tokyo or Kyoto a bit away from those places and discovered the most beautiful places and restaurants ourselves.

I returned yesterday and sitting at home again in my normal life, it kind of feels like a dream I had, still processing everything. It probably sounds silly but everything was just so overwhelming that I’m having a hard time putting my thoughts in words at the moment.

I just can’t wait to go back there. 11 months to go :slight_smile:

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I started learning Japanese because I wanted to read untranslated Manga and Visual novels (and I just love the language itself) so i didn’t put any time in speaking practice and only recently started with listening practice.

That changed - now I really want to be able to have at least simple conversations when I get back there. It’s not much use studying grammar up to N1 when I can’t even hold a basic conversation :slight_smile:

Meanwhile I read a bit more how Italki works and I’m going to start with that.

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Which reminds me of this The Metro Classic episode :rofl:

I hope you don’t mind me leaving it here for general entertainment education :sweat_smile:

That’s the usual cliché :grin:

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Hehe that movie was brilliant :slight_smile: I read before I went that Shinjuku was a pain so I watched some Youtube videos about the layout, studied the map and thought I would be ok.

Well… as the guy in the video said - half of the station is under construction. The signs, especially around the Under Construction parts, just don’t make any sense at all. You see a West Gate sign and follow that, only to never find another West Gate sign again and you’ll get lost at some random spot. The station is HUGE, multiple layered, with tunnels leading everywhere, shopping malls randomly thrown in here and there, it’s just crazy.

Kyoto also has a freaking huge (and gorgeous) station with lots of malls inside and 10 floors or so, but navigating there was no issue at all, the signs were superclear and the layout just made sense.

All in all public transport in Japan is almost perfect - I’m sure they keep Shinjuku as confusing as it is to compensate for this perfection a bit.

Oh one other thing was confusing - when using the Shinkansen you first have to use your Suica card (the one used for normal trains), but when entering the Shinkansen part of the station you have to use both your Suica card to check out and your QR code for the Shinkansen reservation to check in, at the same spot. Each time we had to do that an assistant had to help us. There was some kind of device over the card reader and he had to manually change that to switch between reading the Suica card and the Shinkansen QR code. I’m still not sure how that worked and if it’s even possible to do that without assistence of the people working there :smiley:

About Osaka - I didn’t know that was a cliche but it was almost like being in a different country with a different culture. I like both, the politeness, cleanness and quietness in Tokyo was great, even at Shibuya crossing it was relative quiet because the crowds where whispering at most there, but I felt a bit more at home with the openess of the people in Osaka.

One last thing I forgot to mention - I always read that Japanese people hardly speak English. That was not my experience at all. Even when I asked something in Japanese, they answered in relative good English. Especially younger people seem to be able to speak English pretty well.

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奈良なら鹿しかいない？ :slight_smile:

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Yep was the case for me too.

I spent a summer in Japan at a host family in Niigata, dialect is hella powerful :smiley: I was about n4 at the time and could barely speak, went to a local school thats for ppl moving to japan, was told that the ppl teaching are local volunteers (idk if that’s true or not). Looked like sitting at a table w 3-4 ppl from all around the world (some were good at jp and some weren’t (coughnot mecough)) and one japanese local that barely speaks any english trying to teach japanese to some1 who barely understands anything he says :smiley: and ngl it kinda worked, u know like the activity board game やり方:D. I learnt a lot there in just 3 weeks, everyday lingo was way easier to understand.

Regarding japan; The food is the best ever and i fell in love with their countryside, Niigata prefecture especially.

I became the ultimate ざるそば enjoyer.

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Don’t spare me. I can take it. My own Japan travel blog is the size of a small book. :stuck_out_tongue:

But yeah, it certainly sounds like you had a lot of fun. :slightly_smiling_face:

Ah, tell me about it…

To be fair to Shinjuku, Kyoto’s hugeness is mostly one big open space - it’s only served by three companies (four if you count JR West and JR Central (who run the Tokaido shinkansen) as separate), with twenty-five platforms across all companies, most of which are on the surface, and parallel.

Shinjuku, meanwhile, is served by five different companies, has fifty-three platforms, and has underground passages connecting to five other stations. There’s a reason it’s the world’s busiest train station.

That’s because when you enter the Shinkansen network, you’re leaving the regular train network. They’re completely separate, with separate ticketing. But yeah, I understand the confusion - since the Shinkansen gates are almost always inside the regular gates, I got into the habit of thinking of the Shinkansen ticket as just a regular ticket with a surcharge since it’s an express train, but no, it’s a completely separate ticket. Though perhaps one reason for that mindset was that until my most recent trip last year, I always went with a JR Pass of some variety - it wasn’t until my most recent trip that it really clicked for me.

Basically, when you enter, say, the Tokyo Station Shinkansen section, you need to tell the Suica system that you’re leaving the regular network, which is why you tap out. Aside from anything else, if you’re catching a Shinkansen, there’s a fairly high chance that you’re going to be disembarking in a different IC card region, and you can’t cross IC card region borders in a single trip, even if two regions have borders at the same station - this became fairly important on my last trip, as I did a fair amount of rural travel, so more than once I had to get off a train at the edge of an IC card region so I could tap out, and then come back in with a paper ticket.

One tip, though: if you load your shinkansen ticket onto your Suica card (the Smart-EX app can do this; dunno about the ticket machines in the station), then you can tap out of the regular network and into the Shinkansen network at the same time.

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As far as I know you can’t link your Suica and your Shinkansen ticket in person using the ticket machines. I always just buy the ticket online and link it using Smart-EX, it makes everything so much smoother. The other good option is just buying the combined ticket and entering direct from the station exterior gates.

I was under the impression that although it’s basically a separate network, it’s just a compulsory surcharge, hence why there’s the option to have only the super-express fare paid for, and use a separate ticket or IC etc for the basic fare portion of the trip. So it’s not really leaving the network, but telling the network that you have the basic fare portion covered by the combined Shinkansen ticket, and telling it you will be transferring to a different network at the destination, if that’s the case. And while you can’t cross IC card regions, again I thought that was the case for local and rapid trains, not super-express? I believe you can use your Suica when crossing regions for the basic fare portion of the Shinkansen (not 100% on this though - most of the Shinkansen’s I’ve taken have been just in the JR east area). It’s all just mostly unneccesarily confusing, though.

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The Shinkansen are outside the IC card regions. Sitation: Toica region map - note the blue Shinkansen line is outside the shaded blue region. The Suica/Pasmo region map does appear to include the JR East Shinkansen lines, though only as far as the region border that the regular trains also stop at.

When you buy a ticket with Smart-EX, you’re paying for the ticket separately, and then linking it to the Suica card - the ticket isn’t paid for with the Suica (plus, as the Tokaido Shinkansen is run by JR Central, it’s by definition outside of the Suica region anyway). I presume JR East’s Shikansen e-ticket service is similar, though I’ve never actually used it, just looked at the website - you can’t just rock up at the station and buy a Tohoku Shinkansen ticket with your Suica, you need to pre-register it.

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Fair enough, guess I understood that wrong.

However, you can actually just tap on with your Suica and pay for the whole ticket using it for Tohoku shinkansen etc (as long as you stay on the same section and register the card for the system in advance), or instead you can buy the whole ticket and link it in advance, either works. I think it’s different to the system for Tokaido.
タッチでGo!新幹線：JR東日本

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Thanks for all the info, I’ll check out the Smart-EX app. For now I had to buy a physical Suica card (only apple supports it digitally unfortunately) and bought Shinkansen tickets with the Klook app. Not knowing about the transfer part, it was bloody confusing what was going on :smiley:

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I haven’t had any problem crossing IC card “brand” boundaries, i.e., from Suica to PASMO to ICOCA, etc. if that’s what you mean. They seem interchangeable at this point; it probably wasn’t always like that.

I HAVE been caught out by the switch to ワンマン territory. I headed up the Kiso valley past Magome and Tsumago toward Matsumoto. When I got on the train at Nagoya, it was Suica, but when I got off the train I had to pay in cash to the driver. So far so good.

But next time I tried to use my Suica card I hadn’t checked out of the system and got rejected. That was… a stretch of my bad Japanese explaining myself to get it reset.