HI OK SO i recently started attending this buddhist church & there are a lot of japanese people who happen to go there too and i might be going to japan within the next year or so but since i think you've been there before do u have any advice for first time visitors and/or resources/tips for learning japanese?? i can read kana already and have some verrrry fundamental knowledge of kanji if it helps lol but answer this at your leisure!! thanks a ton!
ooooh buddhist church- that’s super cool! i wish you lots of luck with your japan and japanese endeavours, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff to discover so that’s fun. i did indeed live in japan last year for 12 months and i’ve been learning japanese for a couple years (although i’m still pretty shit lmao) so i can give a couple tips hopefully!
japanese:
if you already know kana that’s fab- make sure you always read japanese in that rather than romaji so that u get more and more fluent with it (and also it will help your pronunciation as well since you won’t need to fight with your brain trying to read off the english phonetics of romaji letters)
KANJI IS SUCH A STRUGGLE I HATE IT but mnemonics are usually the most helpful thing for me- you can find a bunch of example ones online or in specific kanji mnemonic textbooks but also it can be good to just make up your own really dumb ones. the more bizarre the better imo. you can make them super simple like how 肉 looks kinda like it could be meat hanging up or a steak or something OR you can make it convoluted (like one my japanese teacher gave me for 特 (of 特別) was “Hallo. I am a cleaver cow. I can even learn at a temple. That’s why I am so //special//.”(i’m including the spelling mistakes in this because it just really makes me laugh and honestly helped me learn it. Hallo)
on that note- if you learn radicals it can be easier for some people to use those as building blocks for kanji and memorise them more easily. also can be useful because radicals often give you an idea about meaning/reading
in terms of speaking and listening it’s basically the same as any other language- gotta try and speak to native speakers, listen to japanese media, etc etc. in my experience japanese people are usually super super friendly and excited about people learning japanese so you get a lot of positive feedback from native speakers lmao (although sometimes a bit TOO positive because theyre so impressed by u just saying こんにちは that they cant really get past it omfg)
in terms of JAPAN:
honestly i could give so much advice about first time visitors for japan that i need to be kind of limited a bit omfg because otherwise i don’t know where to start
i was in tokyo (well technically kanagawa but shh) for most of the year so that’s where most of my experience is
one thing i’ll say is definitely always relevant regardless of how long you’re there for or anything is to get a travel card like suica or pasmo. they will make your life SO MUCH EASIER. you can just buy them at ticket machines in just about any station and then you top them up and use them as a contactless card to travel, it’s so much easier than trying to calculate the tickets and shit for every single station you go through. would recommend (then you can either refund them when youre done or keep it as a lil souvenir when you leave)
100 yen stores are love, 100 yen stores are life
ALSO KONBINIS family mart is the best konbini this is an objective fact. although 7/11 has its uses if you need to get money out from a foreign bank account
it gets really hot and humid in summer which is gross but there are summer festivals and fireworks which are fun. there’s basically something cool to do in every season in japan- festivals in summer, autumn colours in autumn, winter illuminations in winter, and of COURSE sakura season in spring. cant forget that
there’s all the classic etiquette tips like taking off your shoes and bowing and all that but you can find those easily basically anywhere online tbh
OH MAN THERE’S JUST A LOT OF STUFF
if you have any more specific questions or wonderings at all then totally ask but those are some of the more general things that come to mind about going to japan omg
hope that helps!! hmu if there’s anything else u wanna know or anything
