What is actually difficult, and what only looks it

The sounds above are the easy half, and unusually so. What follows is where English speakers genuinely struggle — none of it fatal on a trip, all of it worth recognising when it happens to you.

Length is meaning. Because every beat counts equally, holding a vowel or a consonant for one extra beat makes a different word, not an emphatic version of the same one. おばさん is an aunt or a middle-aged woman; おばあさん, one beat longer, is a grandmother. きて is come; きって is a postage stamp. 主人 (shujin) is a husband and 囚人 (shūjin) is a prisoner. English hears these as the same word said sloppily. Japanese does not.

The small words do the work that English word order does. The verb goes at the end, and particles tag each piece of the sentence: は marks the topic, を the object, に a destination or a time, で a place or a means. 私は寿司を食べます is, literally, as for me, sushi, eat. Two of these are also a spelling trap: the topic particle is written は but said wa, and the object particle is written を but said o.

You cannot just say two. Counting takes a counter that matches what is being counted — 一本 for long thin things, 一枚 for flat things, 一杯 for glassfuls, 一人 for people, 一台 for machines. The reprieve is that the generic ひとつ・ふたつ・みっつ series works for most objects up to ten, and pointing works for the rest.

And the English on the page is not English. Words borrowed into katakana keep the shape and lose the meaning. マンション is an ordinary apartment building, not a mansion. バイキング — viking — is an all-you-can-eat buffet. コンセント is a power outlet. サービス means on the house. They are Japanese words now, and treating them as English is how you end up agreeing to something you did not expect.

What the sounds are actually like

Japanese is the reverse of the language most travellers brace for. The sounds are gentle: five pure vowels that never slide, no tones, and an even beat that makes every syllable the same length. An English speaker can produce a passable sumimasen on the first afternoon. The difficulty is not in your mouth. It is in the writing, which uses three systems at once, and in a grammar that puts the verb last, drops the subject whenever it is obvious, and hangs small words called particles off the end of everything to say what each part of the sentence is doing.

The one piece of reading worth doing before you fly is katakana. It is the angular script, forty-six characters, and its job is to mark words borrowed from elsewhere. Learn it and a startling share of menus, signs and convenience-store shelves resolves into English you already know — コーヒー, ビール, チケット — spelled the way a Japanese mouth says it. Hiragana is the second-best hour you can spend; kanji can wait for the next trip.

Six things that catch travellers out

Do not touch the taxi door. The rear passenger door is opened and closed by the driver from his seat. Reaching for it, or pulling it shut behind you, is the reflex of every visitor in the first week and it is both unnecessary and mildly alarming to the driver. Stand back, wait, get in.

Stand on the correct side of the escalator, and it changes by city. Tokyo stands on the left and walks on the right. Osaka does the exact opposite, and does it with conviction. Everywhere else, watch the person in front of you for two seconds before committing.

There are almost no public bins. You will carry your rubbish for hours. The workable habit is the one locals use: drink it beside the vending machine you bought it from and put the can in the bin that stands there, or hold it until you pass a convenience store. This is also why eating while walking is avoided — people finish things standing still, next to where they bought them.

ちょっと is a complete refusal. Literally a little, and left deliberately unfinished, it means no. Said with a slight intake of breath and a tilted head, ちょっと… is the end of the negotiation, not the start of one. Pushing for the explicit no that an English speaker is waiting for puts the other person in an awkward position, and you will not get it.

Trains: silent, but not all trains. Phones on silent, no calls, voices low — and no eating on ordinary commuter trains. Long-distance is a different world: eating a boxed 駅弁 on the shinkansen is one of the pleasures of Japanese travel and nobody blinks at it.

Slurping noodles is fine. Genuinely. It cools the noodles, it pulls the broth with them, and at a ramen or soba counter the room sounds like it. Eating them silently is the odd behaviour, not the polite one.

What the language asks of you

None of which matters much for a two-week trip, and it is worth saying so plainly. Travel Japanese is a small, closed set of phrases used with enormous consistency, and the polite です／ます forms in this kit are correct with literally everyone you will meet — station staff, chefs, taxi drivers, the person you sit next to at a counter. There is no register you can accidentally fall out of. That is a genuine gift, and not many languages give it.

And a note on English. It is more visible than it is available: signage in the big cities is excellent, station announcements are bilingual, and menus in tourist districts have pictures. Spoken English is far less common than the signage suggests, and asking for it directly can be uncomfortable for the person you ask. Opening in Japanese, even badly, changes the temperature of the whole exchange.

You will be spoken to in a Japanese you do not need to speak

In Japanese, politeness is not vocabulary you sprinkle on top. It is built into the verb, and you cannot avoid choosing. The plain form (食べる, taberu) is what friends and family use with each other. The polite form (食べます, tabemasu) is the public standard, and it is what this kit teaches, because it is never wrong. Above it sits 敬語 (keigo), the honorific register — and this is the part worth understanding, because you are not expected to produce it, only to recognise it.

Staff will use keigo at you constantly, and it sounds nothing like the Japanese in a phrasebook. いらっしゃいませ as you walk in — a greeting that needs no reply, a nod is plenty. かしこまりました for certainly. 少々お待ちください for one moment please. お会計は千二百円になります for the total. Answering any of it with a plain はい or ありがとうございます is entirely correct. The gap in formality is meant to be there.

すみません is the workhorse of the language. It covers excuse me for getting attention, sorry for a small collision, and a warmer, slightly indebted thank you when someone has gone out of their way. It is how you call a waiter, how you get past someone on a train, and how you apologise for asking a question. If you learn one word before you land, learn this one.

Two habits to unlearn. Do not use あなた for you; it reads as cold or oddly intimate depending on the moment. Use the person's surname plus さん, and if you do not know it, restructure the sentence so you do not need a word for them at all — Japanese does this constantly. And never attach さん to your own name. It is the linguistic equivalent of introducing yourself as Mr.

Tokyo is not the whole language

The Japanese taught everywhere, including here, is 標準語 (hyōjungo), the Tokyo standard that broadcasting and schooling made national. It is understood and answered in every prefecture. But the country's second language of daily life is 関西弁 (Kansai-ben), spoken across Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe by more than twenty million people, and it is different enough that a first-time visitor notices within an hour of getting off the train.

The swaps are systematic rather than random. The copula だ becomes や. ありがとう becomes おおきに (ōkini). だめ — no good — becomes あかん (akan). ちがう, that's wrong, becomes ちゃう (chau). とても or すごく for very becomes めっちゃ (meccha). Even the pitch pattern is close to inverted, which is why Kansai speech sounds musical and a little theatrical to a Tokyo ear — a stereotype the region enjoys and plays up to.

One difference is worth carrying as a warning rather than as trivia. Tokyo's usual word for idiot is ばか (baka) and Osaka's is あほ (aho) — and the sting is swapped. In Osaka aho is nearly affectionate and baka genuinely stings; in Tokyo it is the other way round. The word you thought was the mild one is the sharp one, half the country away.

Beyond the Kansai split: Fukuoka's Hakata-ben ends questions with と and statements with ばい and たい; the northeast has the slurred, softened accent Tokyo calls ずーずー弁; and Okinawa's own うちなーぐち is not a dialect of Japanese at all but a related language, which is why the welcome you see on signs there is めんそーれ and nothing like ようこそ. Even the brand names shift — Tokyo shortens McDonald's to マック and Osaka to マクド, and people will argue about it.

Japan, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• In Tokyo people stand on the left of an escalator and leave the right clear for anyone in a hurry; in Osaka the custom runs the other way round.
• Japan is an archipelago of thousands of islands strung along the Pacific, but nearly everyone lives on four of them: Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku.
• Japanese cities cast their own manhole covers, decorated with local castles, flowers or festivals, and enthusiasts travel the country photographing them.
• Komorebi (木漏れ日) names the light that leaks through leaves — the dappled, shifting sunlight under a tree, for which English has no single word.
• The Japanese giant salamander grows well past a metre in cold mountain streams and breathes through its wrinkled skin; its name ōsanshōuo means giant pepper fish.
• English borrowed tycoon from taikun, a title used for a shogun, and honcho from hanchō, a squad leader — both crossed over without their Japanese spelling.
• On New Year's Eve families eat toshikoshi soba (年越しそば), year-crossing buckwheat noodles, which break easily so that the troubles of the old year snap off with them.
• Tsundoku (積読) is the habit of buying books and letting them pile up unread; the word puns on tsumu, to pile up, and doku, to read.
• Tides forced through the Naruto Strait between Shikoku and Awaji Island spin whirlpools up to twenty metres across, easily watched from the bridge above them.
• The country reaches so far from north to south that Hokkaidō is buried in metres of snow while the Okinawan islands sit in the subtropics among coral reefs.
• The Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened in 1964 between Tokyo and Osaka as the first high-speed railway in the world, and every bullet train since descends from it.
• The QR code was devised in 1994 at a Japanese car-parts maker to track components along a production line, and the company chose not to enforce its patent, so anyone may use it.
• Roughly two-thirds of the country is forested mountain, which is why the cities crowd onto narrow coastal plains and the farmland climbs the slopes in terraces.
• Shoes come off at the genkan, the sunken entrance step, and many homes and inns keep a separate pair of plastic slippers to be worn only inside the toilet.
• Mottainai (もったいない) is an exclamation of regret at waste, said over a half-eaten meal or a usable thing thrown out, and carries a sense that objects deserve better.
• Mount Fuji rises 3,776 metres in an almost perfect cone and is climbed by way of ten numbered stations, with the official season lasting only a few summer weeks.
• By law a spring can be called an onsen only if it comes out of the ground at 25 degrees Celsius or warmer, or carries certain minerals; the volcanoes supply thousands that qualify.
• Katsuobushi (鰹節) is skipjack tuna simmered, smoked and cured with mould until it is as hard as a block of wood, then shaved into paper-thin flakes for broth.
• For Tanabata on 7 July, people write wishes on paper strips called tanzaku and tie them to bamboo, marking the one night when two star-crossed lovers meet across the Milky Way.
• The name Nihon (日本) means origin of the sun, which is where Land of the Rising Sun comes from; Tokyo means eastern capital and Kyoto simply capital city.
• Japanese is written in three scripts at once: kanji borrowed from Chinese, hiragana for grammar, and katakana for foreign words, emphasis and animal noises.
• Haiku grew out of the opening verse of a linked poem, and a classical one is expected to contain a kigo, a season word that pins the poem to a particular time of year.
• Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) means grilled how you like it: Osaka mixes batter and cabbage and fries them as one, while Hiroshima layers them and folds in a nest of noodles.
• Itadakimasu (いただきます), said before eating, does not mean bon appétit but I humbly receive — thanks aimed at everyone and everything that put the meal on the table.
• Fresh wasabi (山葵) is a rhizome grated in slow circles against sharkskin, and its heat fades within about fifteen minutes, which is why most wasabi served abroad is dyed horseradish.
• The beckoning cat beside a shop till is the maneki-neko, raising a paw with the palm turned outward, which is the Japanese gesture for come here.
• Hanami means flower viewing, and it is less about looking than about sitting: an office will send its newest member out early to hold a patch of ground under the cherry trees.
• Tempura arrived in Nagasaki with Portuguese traders and missionaries in the sixteenth century, and its name is thought to come from tempora, their term for the fasting days when fish replaced meat.
• Sumo wrestlers scatter salt to purify the ring before a bout, and the sport's year is fixed at six tournaments of fifteen days each.
• Japanese verbs have no future tense: a single form covers now and later, and it is context or a word like ashita (明日), tomorrow, that tells you which one is meant.
• Sitting down at an izakaya usually brings an otōshi (お通し), a small dish nobody ordered — not a gift but the cover charge, served as food.
• Japanese keeps a large stock of sound-words for things that make no sound at all, among them shiin for the ringing of total silence and kirakira for a sparkle.
• Instant noodles were invented in 1958 by Momofuku Andō, who worked in a shed behind his house until he found that flash-frying cooked noodles let them keep and revive in hot water.
• Nigiri sushi began as Edo street food in the early 1800s, a quick snack of vinegared rice pressed under a slice of fish; the slow restaurant version came much later.
• Kaiseki (懐石), the name for a formal multi-course meal, literally means stone in the bosom — the warm stone a monk tucked into his robe to dull his hunger.
• Sake brewers grade rice by how much of each grain they grind away before brewing: for a daiginjō, at least half of every grain is polished off and discarded.
• The temple carpentry firm Kongō Gumi was founded in 578 to build Shitennōji in Osaka, and its craftsmen are still working on temples fourteen centuries later.
• Colleagues say goodbye with otsukaresama desu (お疲れ様です), literally you are honourably tired, which thanks someone for their effort and doubles as see you tomorrow.
• The tanuki, or raccoon dog, is a real animal that trots through suburbs at night, though most visitors meet it as a pot-bellied pottery statue outside restaurants.
• Emoji (絵文字) has nothing to do with emotion: it joins e, picture, and moji, character, and the resemblance to the English word emoticon is pure coincidence.
• Most Japanese streets have no names: an address gives a district, then a numbered block, then the building within that block, which is why people give directions by landmark and station exit.
• Karaoke (カラオケ) is a compound of kara, empty, and oke, a clipped form of the English word orchestra — an empty orchestra waiting for its singer.
• Japanese woodblock prints arriving in Paris in the nineteenth century redirected European painting, and Hokusai's great wave off Kanagawa became the most copied image of them all.
• Railway stations play a short departure melody, a different tune on each platform, so that regular commuters can tell by ear which train is about to leave.
• At Setsubun in early February, households fling roasted soybeans out of the door shouting oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi — demons out, good fortune in.
• Gyokuro (玉露) tea bushes are covered with shade cloth for weeks before picking, which starves the leaf of light and gives the brew a sweet, almost broth-like thickness.
• Japanese macaques at Jigokudani in Nagano sit shoulder-deep in a hot spring through the snow, and no primate other than people lives further north than Japan's macaques.
• The Tale of Genji was written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Heian court, and is often called the first novel in the world.
• Yakushima, off the coast of Kyūshū, is a granite mountain wrapped in rainforest where cedars called sugi have been growing for well over a thousand years.
• The taste umami (旨味) was identified in 1908 by the chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who traced the savoury depth of kombu seaweed broth to glutamate and gave it a name meaning delicious taste.
• Counting in Japanese requires a counter word matched to the shape of the thing counted: hon for long thin objects, mai for flat ones, hiki for small animals.
• Japanese schoolchildren clean their own classrooms, corridors and toilets at the end of the day; it is a scheduled part of the timetable, not a punishment.
• The sika deer wandering loose through the park at Nara have been protected for centuries as messengers of the gods, and many have worked out that a low bow earns them a cracker.
• Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make hanafuda, hand-painted flower playing cards, and sold them for the better part of a century before it made a single video game.
• Lake Biwa, north-east of Kyoto, is one of the handful of ancient lakes on earth, millions of years old, and it holds fish and snails found nowhere else.
• Nattō (納豆) is soybeans fermented with a hay bacillus until they trail sticky threads; it is eaten at breakfast, and the city of Mito is the place most associated with it.
• Ekiben (駅弁) are boxed meals sold on railway platforms, and each station sells its own regional version, a habit going back to the early decades of Japanese railways.
• A kotatsu is a low table with a heater bolted underneath and a quilt spread over the frame, and families spend whole winter evenings with their legs tucked inside it.
• Every spring the sakura zensen (桜前線), the cherry blossom front, is tracked northward across the country like a weather system, opening first in the subtropical south.
• The shrine at Ise is taken down and rebuilt on an adjoining plot every twenty years, the same timber joinery repeated so the craft passes intact to the next generation.