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Japan Pins Tourism Hopes on PDA
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "According to Australia News.com, Japan will start lending PDA's to foreign visitors to help tourists get to grips with the country. The aim is to make Japan more attractive to foreign tourists, who are often put off by the country's language barrier. The PDA's will be loaded with travel information and translation services as part of a tourism promotion scheme. "Japan's tourism authority will lend the PDAs containing Chinese, Korean and English software, to selected tourists who land at Narita Airport near Tokyo from February through March to test the response" Japan's transport ministry said."
Ah it's no problem, the flightticket will cover the cost for buying a new PDA ;) and they'll even throw chopsticks for free.
Someone once told me that I'd have to have at least $1500 if I want to visit Japan. Then add another ~$1000(last I checked) for the flightticket. So it's not very cheap.
Install japanese language support for your operating system. (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Regional Settings in Windows). Yes, it really is a quite trivial thing to do. I have no idea what you are babbling on about paying for japanese fonts. Do you think all native japanese people pay someone to be able to read and write text on their computers?
Sleep is futile.
According to another article (http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273 322.htm), the PDAs won't just have maps and common phrases, but will also have voice translation (in the english models), as well as free unlimited Internet access and free phone calls within Japan. These seem to me to be substantive services beyond just a flashy way to deliver basic, predefined information.
http://www.narita-airport.or.jp/e-navi/howto.html
A guide to katakana (Japanese phonetic characters for foreign words) would be nice.. Or perhaps a little education campaign about it.
Many of the most important signs are written in katakana, which in essence means they are written in English. There are only 46-or-so basic characters to learn, which you can get a decent handle on by the time you step off the plane. This is more than enough to find hotels (hoteru), order food and drinks off most menus, find restaurants (resutoran), etc.
I knew katakana in Japan and only a few Japanese words. I'm not kidding about how handy it was.
A collegue of mine told me that he had to pay $5 an apple when visting there. Granted, they probably do not grow many apples in Japan, but here in Montreal we do not pay $5 the Marocan tangerine.
Japan is expensive, and Tokyo very much, but it's not that extreme, or at least I can't verify.
In restaurants, we paid less than twice of what we pay at home. Substract another 10% because you don't tip in Japan. Then you're at roughly London prices.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They ran a similar pilot during the same period last year.
From the looks of the website - the devices haven't really changed much.
http://www.narita-airport.jp/e-navi/
They are, however very fun toys even if nothing has changed. I'm planning to be in Japan again in a few months and if they have any available I'll definitely try them out.
I went to Japan for the first time this year as part of a tour group. I also was afraid of the language barrier, even though I actually know a little Japanese and can read a bit. But it was a lot easier than I could have imagined. Many of the people know enough English to answer basic questions, especially the younger people.
At the hotels, all of the staff know quite a bit of English, as well as the staff at all the tourist spots. Mind you, I was in Osaka, not Japan, which should have been less-English friendly but wasn't. Many of the signs are in English on the Highways and in mass transit, so getting around was a piece of cake.
It was certainly easier to get around than I expected, and although I knew a bit of Japanese, I avoided using it (mostly due to my fear of being embarassed for saying something inadvertantly inappropriate). I'd imagine Tokyo would be even more friendly for tourists, and I'd definitely like to go there one day. In short, everyone should consider going there; the language barrier isn't much of one. I think I had a harder time getting around in Europe than I did in Japan.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
I knew about 350 kanji when I was i Japan this past summer. I still couldn't read what was in a piece of sushi when I was standing in the local kombini (unless there was furigana on it as well). I could of course ask the people in the store but since I didn't really care I just learned some that I liked.
;-)
And if you learn kanji in Japan you are expected to know all jyoujou-kanji (1946 IIRC) plus about 500 more that are "common knowledge". But most people know a few more in their work field.
Naturally just because you "know" a kanji doesn't mean you can read or understand a composite that it is included in. Learning the kanji shape and basic meaning is just the first, easy, part.
for future reference, the shirt in question says
nihonjin kanojo boshuchuu (currently accepting applications for a japanese girlfriend) and why doesn't slashdot let me post japanese characters??
and if you wear that shirt, japanese people will feel embarassed for you, so i suggest you don't ^_^
From the chinese I know here, this is only partly true, and depends a lot on the style of writing used.
It is true that Kanji was taken from the Chinese from the beginning. Also, a large corpus of words written onloy using Kanji have been borrowed; they tend to be abstract terms or high-status words, while the older, indigenuous words are more familiar (think "ascertain" versus "make sure").
However, the actual meaning of the Kanji have tended to shift or extend somewhat differently, and so have the borrowed words. And Japanese is written with two other writing systems in combination with Kanji. This includes the all-important particles that determine what role each word has in the sentence.
Being able to decipher Kanji is helpful, but will give you only the barest inkling of the intended meaning, and that only with sentences that are straightforward - with signs probably being among the easiest.
It is worth noting here that in train stations and the like, signs are usually in Chinese, Korean and English as well. And at least in Kyoto subway, announcements are bilingual too. You aren't totally lost when you come here. The biggest problem really is being able to communicate with people, not read signs.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Put another way (and quite roughly), Chinese writing is a subset of Japanese writing."
I disagree with that statement entirely. The majority of Kanji symbols can be found in Chinese symbol set; there are some exceptions where the Japanese invented their own characters such as the symbol for cultivated feild (hatake). Most of the katakana are radicals in chinese characters, though I haven't been able to find a similar corespondance with the hiragana.
The converse cannot be said for Chinese characters. There are a large amount of chinese characters that don't exist in Japanese, compared with a small amount of Japanese kanji and phonetic characters that don't exist in chinese.