Unformed Delta - japan

How to speak more Japanese in Japan

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:43:00 +0000

For the intermediate Japanese learner visiting Japan there is a problem: Japanese people are too good at English. They’ll often begin an interaction in English or immediately switch to English if your Japanese isn’t perfect. If you know the natural way to continue the conversation in Japanese, they’ll probably appreciate your effort. In many cases, they’ll also switch back to Japanese. With practice, you can have longer, more meaningful interactions while traveling in Japan.

Let’s walk through a simple example:

You walk up to the empty register, carrying your tray with a curry roll and a melonpan, calling out “こんにちは”.

As the cashier walks up you say “この二ふたつください”.

Since you’re a foreigner and your pronunciation wasn’t the best, the cashier responds “For here or to go?”¹ while wrapping your individual rolls.

You respond “持もち帰かえりで”, saying that you want them to go.

The cashier, slightly surprised, continues “Do you need a bag?”² asking if you want an extra bag to carry the two already wrapped rolls.

You respond “袋ふくろは大丈夫だいじょうぶです”, confirming that you don’t need a bag.

The cashier continues, “七百二十円ななひゃくにじゅうえんです” saying that the total is ¥720.

You say “一千円いっせんえんで” handing them a ¥1000 bill.

They say “はい”, take the money, count out the change and then say “二百八十円にひゃくはちじゅうえんのお釣つりです。レシートは要いりますか”.

You respond “大丈夫だいじょうぶ、ありがとうございました”, take your individually wrapped rolls and leave as they echo “ありがとうございます”.

The cashier switched to Japanese by the end; often just being a bit stubborn is a enough to achieve this. Sometimes it ends up being easier: staff in small towns are less accustomed to tourists and more likely to just muddle through the whole interaction with you in Japanese. At other times it’s near hopeless: most often at hotels, but also in more touristy locations/situations, your conversation partner might not switch to Japanese no matter what you do. It’s still worth trying, but often giving in and finishing the conversation in English leads to a more pleasant interaction.

Here are some things that have helped me have longer, better interactions in Japanese:

Listen to the people ahead of you in line: usually they’re going through exactly the interaction you’re about to have. This is also good listening practice.
Practice upcoming interactions using LLMs: if there’s a harder conversation you anticipate having, you can practice with Claude before having it. After losing my toiletry bag I practiced with Claude before heading to the sento where I thought I lost it.
Sometimes less is more: for example, when ordering from a list of variants it’s more natural to just say “二番にばんお願ねがいします” to specify the second option. You won’t impress anyone by demonstrating your vocabulary unnecessarily.
Know your counters: at a museum you ask for 大人おとな二枚にまい tickets, at a food stall you ask for 一本いっぽん skewers, at a restaurant you’re seated as 二人ふたり people. Often this is your first interaction; nailing it can help set you up for success (and using them wrong can signal: I’m a beginner, switch to English). When in doubt, つ likely gets the point across well enough.
Know filler words: used appropriately えっと, あの, まあ, etc. can help you stall for time to formulate your response.
For longer interactions, aizuchi (相槌あいづち) is important: Using はい, なるほど, そうですね, etc. appropriately reassures your conversation partner that you’re following along. Make sure you’re actually following along though. If you aren’t, tell them you don’t by saying 分わかりません、もう一度いちどお願ねがいします.

Checking out at a bakery, ordering at a restaurant, or asking where to find 着火剤ちゃっかざい in a Daiso are all quite short/simple conversations to have. But I’ve found that having simple/transactional conversations builds the confidence to tackle the harder, more open ended conversations.

On my recent trip to Japan, when sitting down to sip some free tea at 一石栃立場茶屋いちこくとちたてばちゃや, a tea shop on the Nakasendo between Magome and Tsumago the owner asked me curiously: “Where are you from?”, “How long are you visiting Japan?”, and so on. I stubbornly responded in Japanese; he eventually started asking me questions in Japanese. After a while he asked “Why do you like visiting Japan?” and my Japanese vocabulary failed me. I responded in English, but by then the conversation had gone on long enough that it was effortless to shift back into Japanese afterwards. The conversation with the owner was memorable not because I managed to speak a lot of Japanese, but because we actually connected, comfortably mixing languages as needed.

It’s useful to know how the conversation would go if the whole interaction was in Japanese. In Japanese this might be 店内てんないでお召めし上あがりですか. ↩
In Japanese this might be 袋ふくろはご利用りようですか. ↩

Vibe-planning a trip to Japan

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:19:00 +0000

Yesterday I arrived at Inkhaven from my most thoroughly planned trip ever: a 3 week trip to Japan. My highlights from the trip were: attending Idolm@ster Million Live! 11th Live 百合咲く誇るレムリア, a couple of action-packed days hiking the Nakasendo + seeing Matsumoto castle/Lake Suwa, an overnight bikepacking trip from Fujiyoshida to Minobu with a stunning view of Mount Fuji from my campsite, and a memorable dinner at a tiny home restaurant in Shuzenji after seeing at least 8 waterfalls on the Izu peninsula.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to plan such a trip. On my first trip to Japan, I hadn’t even booked a hotel for my first night in Tokyo before my plane landed. I enjoy the spontaneity afforded by last minute planning, but mostly that trip was a product of my laziness/procrastination. The last minute planning led to days with more time spent researching than actually doing things plus significant stress from making same-day hotel bookings while on the train in the afternoon.

A couple of things have changed since that last trip. I’ve traveled a lot more: that trip to Japan was both my first trip to Japan and my first time solo traveling. More importantly, since mid-2025 I’ve been using Claude Code to do increasingly larger programming tasks. At first it was mostly useful for making relatively easy changes in the context of a robust test suite, but now it is quite useful for spec-ing out features and planning work too.

Time to plan my trip in March felt very limited: I was leaving my job to start a gap year, applying to Inkhaven, planning my birthday party, pursuing a crush, and focusing on spending more time with friends. While chatting with Claude about my anxiety and stress from all the things I had going on, I laid out that I hadn’t planned anything but a rough itinerary:

I would stay in Fukuoka/Kitakyushu for the first couple of nights after my flight landed + for the live show, and didn’t really know if there was anything I wanted to see in Kitakyushu other than the live show
I wanted to spend some more time in Hiroshima and see Miyajima having previously only overnighted there
I wanted to spend some time in Nara having missed it on my first trip to Kyoto
Inspired by watching Yuru Camp I wanted to go through the mountains in the Kiso valley/Nagano/Yamanashi, hike, stop at interesting hot springs, possibly climb Mount Fuji, and maybe camp
Spend some time in Tokyo, see cherry blossoms at peak bloom, do some shopping, and maybe take a day trip
Finally I had a multi-day layover in Taiwan/Taipei and didn’t really have any idea what to do there¹

I often get stuck at a rough itinerary because figuring out details to the level of booking accommodations for specific nights causes cascading changes. Waiting till the last minute prevents ever needing to change or cancel plans you spent time working on. By the time you plan something you’re already executing on it. Irrationally, this makes it easy for me to procrastinate work at this stage. Since any work I do might need to be thrown away, why start it at all?

Claude took my rough itinerary and immediately started poking holes into it: Mount Fuji wouldn’t be climbable in March, camping with a hammock in March would be far too cold. I checked some alternatives with Claude: perhaps I could spend some time on the Izu peninsula instead of hiking Fuji, maybe I could rent camping gear suitable for camping in March.

I had Claude summarize our trip planning into a markdown document so I could start to nail down details and have a single source of truth to iterate on. Since OpenAI’s o3 in early 2025, I’ve found LLMs using web search more useful than the likes of Tripadvisor for giving personalized recommendations. Now, combined with the longer time-horizon capabilities of coding agents, Claude Code & Cowork were able to break up that markdown file and research, producing detailed itineraries for individual segments.

This medium level of resolution before booking specific hotels/accommodations was particularly critical for the camping/biking segment of the trip. Knowing that there were at best limited buses in the Fuji 5 Lakes area, I had Claude evaluate busing vs biking to the campsite. Claude found a bike rental company that was willing to do 1-way rentals and found a good 40km bike route to Kouan campground at Motosuko. After confirming details of the bike and camping gear reservations, this turned into my favorite portion of the trip: the bikepacking segment with a view of Mount Fuji.

Once I had a mostly finished plan it was also possible to ask Claude to do things like go through the entire itinerary and add vegetarian food recommendations. On my first trip, finding food that I was happy to eat continually brought me stress, so I ended up settling for sushi or meat more often than I’m really comfortable with. Having a bird’s-eye view of where it would be easier/harder to find vegetarian food made it easier to holistically plan where to be less strict. Overall, this left me more satisfied with my food choices than when choosing in the moment. I was also pleased Claude found Kakurinbo, a touristy but nice Buddhist temple stay in Minobu, with a completely vegetarian dinner/breakfast menu.

With the medium level itinerary complete, I was also able to verify that everything made sense / was possible. One thing I noticed at this stage was that Claude had created the itinerary starting from the 12th, but the 12th was the day that I was flying to Japan, and I didn’t actually arrive in Japan till the 14th due to time zone shenanigans. Claude didn’t catch this mistake, but also made it easy to prioritize which activities were the easiest to cut, rejiggering dates to make everything fit with two fewer available days.

Eventually the plan was ready enough to start booking things. The closest thing to a planning failure was mostly caused by me. Claude had warned me that accommodations in the Kiso valley would be limited. But because it was right before the biking/camping segment, which required confirming gear/bike/campsite reservations, I waited to book my stays in case I needed to change plans. I ended up being stuck with a remote mountaintop resort, which, while beautiful, required taking a bus followed by a 3km hike on a day where I already had hiked ~11.5km of the Nakasendo from Magome to Nagiso station.

The result was one of the most action-packed, stress-free trips I’ve ever gone on. I’ve also been able to enjoy the benefits of planning further in advance on group trips where communication forces more eager planning. For solo travel though, this was a first: the reduced planning friction let me overcome my laziness.

Taiwan ended up getting cut because I got into Inkhaven! Partially because I thought I might get into Inkhaven, I’d procrastinated booking/planning Taiwan in detail. ↩