cross-posted from: retrofed.com/…/how-true-is-this-on-the-first-trip…
Tip: NEVER use google translate for Japanese! (Even for travel) It’s so bad!
You don’t need to know any Japanese to pretty easily navigate metro Japan. Basically everything in Tokyo that you need to read is in Japanese first and English second. The same is mostly true in Kyoto but to a lesser extent. If you have an internet connection the trains are so accurate that you don’t even need to know the name of the stop you’re getting off at. Google maps says “get on the 3:12 train and exit at 3:38” and it’s accurate enough that you hit your stops
If you want to leave metro Japan then it gets a lot harder with less English around and the people are less accommodating but it’s still pretty manageable. This was in 2018 so I would imagine there’s more English around but people are probably less sympathetic to tourists
Unboxious@ani.social 6 hours ago
Maybe like 50% true. There’s a lot of stuff in Japan that has English “subtitles” IRL because they get so much tourism these days, especially if you go places tourists go. That said there were still a couple of times where I went to a restaurant and the menu was only in handwritten Japanese. That’s how I ended up trying whitebait for the first time!
As for google translate, I don’t use it much simply because I’ve been studying the language for long enough that I don’t usually need to. That said, as long as you’re pointing it at something that is printed cleanly (not handwritten lol) it’s usually good enough for travel. If it makes a mistake you can usually use the context in your human brain to figure that out.