I want to know what Japan is like from people who actually live in Japan especially after seeing some misleading posts online from people who don’t live in Japan & people misunderstanding something resulting in people being misleadingly negative about Japan
There’s a Japanese YouTuber my japanese learning friend would watch called “that Japanese man Yuta” who goes into this
I know about yuta because I am learning Japanese but I don’t think I have seen their other videos outside of learning Japanese
Right now I’m slowly working my way through grammer at a pace that works for me
Do the videos help? I tried Duolingo with learning languages and nothing stuck from them.
Yeah they help but I mainly use them as supplementary information now because hearing the same information explained differently from other sources does help me understand something that may be explained in a way I don’t understand in a specific source
I mainly use the resources from: https://morg.systems/58465ab9
And I also created a github page that lists the other resources that I use though I don’t update it that often:
https://github.com/njosey/Japanese-Learning-Resources/blob/main/README.md
If you’re trying to learn Japanese, wanikani for kanji and bunpro for grammar have been the best resources I’ve found. People recommend to just use anki but I don’t have the time to customize decks and mine sentences for hours on end. Wanikani and bunpro set up a structure that’s easy to follow and understand. I’ve loved using them over the past year.
I’ve even living in Japan for almost a decade (probably closer if you count times I visited for months before living here). If you have specific questions, I’m happy to answer them.
I’ve often thought about taking a vacation in Japan, so I have a few genuine questions.
- What should a visitor see or do that isn’t too expensive?
- I’m a little over 190 cm tall. Are there any popular tourist activities that my height would make more difficult?
- My ability to communicate in Japanese would consist entirely of using Google Translate on my phone. Would language be a significant barrier to a good visit?
Thanks for making yourself available for this.
- really depends upon what you’re into and where you want to go. English ability can drop pretty rapidly outside of the cities, but I got by with and handful of words and gestures when I started visiting
- not really. Some old building are tough, but you can duck. I have a buddy who’s 194cm (I think) and he’s fine (born and raised in Japan)
- not really. I did fine as mentioned it point 1 with some very basic words and I’ve met plenty of people who knows zero and enjoy their visits
For your first question, maybe take a look at the youtube channel Abroad in Japan.
Usually highlights not so well known locations in various places around japan.
According to some bilingual JP youtube colleagues he is well received in the japanese community.
You might have to get used to ducking more than usual. And showers in AirBnBs might be too short to wash your shoulders and head. Hotels in the cities are fine in my experience.
I’ve heard the work culture in Japan, like many Asian countries, can be quite oppressive and sometimes even toxic when compared to its Western counterparts.
Obviously this is highly specific to the workplace in question, and the framing of this statement has inherent biases.
That said, could you offer any insights into the veracity or lack thereof to these claims?
I’ve only worked at two Japanese companies. My wife has worked at several in her life (and loves her current company and job). I’ve also read stories of people in bad places asking for advice. I’ll answer based on that, but realize that it is not a huge sample size.
“black companies” are very much a thing and take advantage of those that either can’t (or feel that they can’t) find other work. Recent years have seen laws to reform the number of hours worked and against various forms of “power harassment” (you can google that for what it is, but basically managers/superiors cannot do certain things). My first company in Japan kinda waffled between a company with a ton of overtime, got quite nice, and then went back the opposite direction.
Some of it is just social pressure, which is a big thing in Japan. People don’t want to rock the boat, so they will, for example, clock out but keep working, not leave before the boss, etc. Corona causing a lot of people to work from home has changed things, though, and a lot of people who have gone back to the office have a much better understanding of how much useless BS there is and how many hours of their lives they’re missing out on. We’ll see how it plays out in the future.
Thanks so much for your detailed response! I found the latter part regarding returning to the office after the lifting of quarantine to be particularly interesting, as it hadn’t occurred to me the ways working from home and then going back to the office might play out differently in other cultures.
I very much appreciate you taking the time to answer my query.
I’m not japanese but I want to travel there. We’ve discovered Takeshii from Japan on YouTube a while ago and I think he is doing a good job in capturing some opinions around different aspects of living in Japan. I’d say it’s worth checking.
“Japanese people on lemmy, what is Japan actually like?” “I’m not japanese but…”
“Japanese people on lemmy, what is Japan actually like?” “…”
wow that’s so much better than people trying to help!
I don’t know of any Japanese who really know of Lemmy and I’ve never seen it mentioned online (though mastadon is at least somewhat known, but not by the average japanese). Also asking in English is going to limit the pool of respondants quite a bit. I’m not japanese but I’ve been living here since 2015 and speak japanese on a daily basis with my wife and family.
I do watch him but I need to watch more of his videos as I’ve only seen a select few that intrest me so far
I’d like to expand to more channels like his as well
I had honestly forgotten about his channel when posting this question but it’s good to make this post because it does expand the scope of information on this subject to make it broader
These people have been living there since like 2011 or something. I don’t think it’s clickbait style stuff, and they give breakdowns on how some stuff works (like they bought a house last year)
We don’t have subtitles when speaking.
In one sentence or less.
