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Japan Pins Tourism Hopes on PDA

Posted by samzenpus on from the great-idea dept.

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."

2 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. katakana by augnober · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. They did the same thing last year by Chang · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.