Tokyo in February!

[Keihan]

I'm quite surprised at how many people went straight to suggesting I get off my high horse based on such little information.

I realize that the stupid gaijin who overestimates himself is a thing but jumping straight to assuming that I'm him after reading just one short blurb reflects poorly on some of you guys. If anything, I downplayed my Japanese ability when introducing myself and was quite humble to begin with. I'm certainly unfamiliar with punting and new to this community but that isn't a free pass to assume I'm some ignorant gaijin who learned textbook Japanese in a bubble that would pop as soon as he steps out into the real world.

I could cite the hundreds of Japanese expats I've met in my locale who default to asking how many years I lived in Japan, whether I'm a hāfu or whether I work in a Japanese company (none of which are true) or a million other reasons but that's not going to convince anybody. I've been called a genius more times than I can count and I keep coming up with new nonsensical answers as to why my Japanese is so good (such as claiming I was Japanese in a past life or just claiming to be Japanese straight up despite appearances) because I'm so sick and tired of having the same conversation over and over again whenever I meet a new expat. I put a lot of work into being this good and I deserve to be proud of it but given all that I've said I think its sufficient to say that I never intended to flaunt to begin with.

I also dated a Japanese girl for 4 years with the intent to marry so I've been thoroughly culturally potty-trained. I merely brought up my language skills because it's relevant to the kind of advice I'm trying to receive here!

I don't intend to @ anybody because I'm here to make friends and hopefully have a fun time and I think we should look to being generous with each other unless given reason to act otherwise.
Please forgive me if this reply seems a little heated but I took some statements quite seriously given that I also dislike blowhards! Really not trying to step on anybody's toes here!

P.s. to address some questions about the accent, I'm also a native speaker of a language in the same language family as Japanese (shared grammar & pronunciation) which helped correct for a lot of the errors that English-only Japanese learners imprint into their speech and helped me speed along when I was building a foundation and learning vocabulary and kanji! I was going through a nasty breakup when I started learning Japanese and channeling my energy into studying/working out really helped me stay consistent which is most important imho.

I was on the fence and willing to give a wary benefit of the doubt, and then this. I feel so sorry for the patrons and young girls at whatever bar you descend upon to unleash this brand of unbridled douche-baggery.

And BTW, you aren't from Japan, you weren't raised speaking Japanese, you haven't spent even a miniscule amount of time in-country and N-1 doesn't mean shit. You DO have an accent, regardless of what the sympathetic Japanese you intrude and impose upon back home tell you just to get you to shut the fuck up and go away.

Enjoy your two weeks and don't forget to leave. And please don't go to the actual good bars that old-timer expats frequent, because you're seriously a prime candidate to get glassed. And, unfortunately, it would probably be hilarious.

 

[goodguyjean]

I was on the fence and willing to give a wary benefit of the doubt, and then this. I feel so sorry for the patrons and young girls at whatever bar you descend upon to unleash this brand of unbridled douche-baggery.

And BTW, you aren't from Japan, you weren't raised speaking Japanese, you haven't spent even a miniscule amount of time in-country and N-1 doesn't mean shit. You DO have an accent, regardless of what the sympathetic Japanese you intrude and impose upon back home tell you just to get you to shut the fuck up and go away.

Enjoy your two weeks and don't forget to leave. And please don't go to the actual good bars that old-timer expats frequent, because you're seriously a prime candidate to get glassed. And, unfortunately, it would probably be hilarious.

Can't even get offended by this because of the sheer level of entitlement and boomer energy you're giving off. You don't know the first thing about me but you're willing to paint whatever image you want because something I said struck a nerve. Fuck off. I stand by everything I said. Please do let me know what those bars you haunt are because any place that you visit is overgrazed pasture filled with graying, tired old souls like you who are trapped in their fantasies of Japan from decades ago still trying to live the golden days in their silver years.

 

[goodguyjean]

If your purpose is to claim it is a language family then that is actually exactly what you would need to prove by the definition.



Indeed, just like the hypotetic Altaic language family has been rejected by the research community since 1950's.

My purpose was never to prove it is a language family, just brought it up in passing. I didn't realize that every statement had to come with peer reviewed citations on this forum and merely wanted to use a well-known theory to explain part of my language learning process. Altaic may not qualify as a language family but the areal connection between Turkic and Sinitic (and therefore loosely Japonic) languages is not denied by critics either.

 

[YokoMonger]

Can't even get offended by this because of the sheer level of entitlement and boomer energy you're giving off. You don't know the first thing about me but you're willing to paint whatever image you want because something I said struck a nerve. Fuck off. I stand by everything I said. Please do let me know what those bars you haunt are because any place that you visit is overgrazed pasture filled with graying, tired old souls like you who are trapped in their fantasies of Japan from decades ago still trying to live the golden days in their silver years.

Yeah, you'll fit right in here. Just remember to do a few reviews of your adventures.

 

[requiemmorrow]

For what it’s worth, Japanese is mostly cardinal vowel and actually phonetically not that difficult to sound very good at. Most languages contain cardinal vowels, particularly frontal ones, so with some degree of raised awareness they can succeed easily to attain some degree of accuracy better than languages with tons of mixed vowels like German or French.

The hard part is its moraic structure, lenition, and intonation rules. English is absolutely backassward to Japanese and just simply because of how muscles in your tongue have developed since childhood you WILL have something off until you’ve done extensive training.

At this point I’m really good but fall apart when I get excited or tired. I likely get caught on the phone as a non-native because I mean…I’m ordering up a woman to shoot my load onto—how the fuck is that not exciting?

I actually have authority on this topic for reasons best left unknown, but I will say that the Altaic language family is a controversial theory and has no basis when the sounds of these languages are tested against a spectrogram.

That said, @goodguyjean just let it go. You can speak Japanese and you are proud of your minimal accent. Like the rest of us with similar effort put into blending in, I offer you a handshake with the hand I swear wasn’t on my dick just a moment ago.

 

[Secretmugen]

For what it’s worth, Japanese is mostly cardinal vowel and actually phonetically not that difficult to sound very good at. Most languages contain cardinal vowels, particularly frontal ones, so with some degree of raised awareness they can succeed easily to attain some degree of accuracy better than languages with tons of mixed vowels like German or French.

The hard part is its moraic structure, lenition, and intonation rules. English is absolutely backassward to Japanese and just simply because of how muscles in your tongue have developed since childhood you WILL have something off until you’ve done extensive training.

At this point I’m really good but fall apart when I get excited or tired. I likely get caught on the phone as a non-native because I mean…I’m ordering up a woman to shoot my load onto—how the fuck is that not exciting?

I actually have authority on this topic for reasons best left unknown, but I will say that the Altaic language family is a controversial theory and has no basis when the sounds of these languages are tested against a spectrogram.

That said, @goodguyjean just let it go. You can speak Japanese and you are proud of your minimal accent. Like the rest of us with similar effort put into blending in, I offer you a handshake with the hand I swear wasn’t on my dick just a moment ago.

In terms of the first part: yes, agreed 110 percent. Japanese only makes sense to me on the level it does because I was fortunate enough to spend my early childhood growing up in Kansai, so the phonetics were locked into my brain at a young age. That being said, with English being my mother tongue, there are still some sets of sounds or syllabic combos I stumble on regularly i.e. differentiating す from つ, or not tripping over words like あたたくwhen spoken at speed.

As for the second part...nothing to prove here, Jean, if you're confident in your language skills and can rely on them day to day. Just brush it off, move on, and enjoy the wonderful world of fuzoku.

 

[Simonka]

In hindsight maybe that would've been better. JLPT name drop was just meant to be supporting evidence since brand recognition is high and I was only trying to get across that I could handle myself.

Congrats on JLPT N1, that’s a great achievement and a strong indicator that you’re pretty much fluent in Japanese. (especially as a Caucasian person who doesn’t have prior knowledge of Kanji.)

The only downside is that it will attract hatred and jealousy online and fuel endless arguments about your fluency whenever you mention it.

 

[sewbed]

Can't even get offended by this because of the sheer level of entitlement and boomer energy you're giving off. You don't know the first thing about me but you're willing to paint whatever image you want because something I said struck a nerve. Fuck off. I stand by everything I said. Please do let me know what those bars you haunt are because any place that you visit is overgrazed pasture filled with graying, tired old souls like you who are trapped in their fantasies of Japan from decades ago still trying to live the golden days in their silver years.

I guess you never learned about the importance of social harmony and humility though, very valued qualities here. Pissing contests are not as valued.
Just riling you up! But, actually serious too. It’s not the 1980s, so there are a loads of fluent foreigners living here now and it’s not really that special anymore. 空気が読めればベスト！

 

[DragonSlayer]

It’s not the 1980s, so there are a loads of fluent foreigners living here now and it’s not really that special anymore. 空気が読めればベスト！

In which remote areas of Japan do you still get to transform into Charisma Man? Asking for a friend.

 

[MrDuBois]

Second rule on the forum: if Keihan took time out of his very busy day to write up some random insult about you, you have made it, congrats!

 

[qcryp]

someone told me foreigners tend to overestimate their own fluency.

unless you practice accents like actor, yeah doesnt matter if how long we have exposure to the language.

someone told me I sounds native with english, but I know deep in my heart he was just bullshiting.

maybe I will learn some mandarin and korean for P4P in the future lol.

TBH girls interested in hooking up with a foreigner probably would prefer them to have an accent, if it is anything like girls hooking up with foreigners where I am from. Perfect Japanese probably a bit boring.

 

[MikeH]

TBH girls interested in hooking up with a foreigner probably would prefer them to have an accent,

Back in the day when every white boy was a Charisma man the girls were looking for boyfriends that spoke no Japanese. If you did then your value would be lessened.

 

[goodguyjean]

I concede. Will save my energy for doing research and writing up reviews.

Hard to say how things will go until I get there but at least I can fumble around less and communicate with providers more confidently.
While I'm young and in shape I'm definitely not some kind of giga-chad with model looks and rely on banter to get my foot in the door, being able to shoot the shit with them in Japanese should open doors as I'm not trying to just sit pretty and wait for a gaijin hunter to come flag me down.

Shocking as it is I'm very into the Showa period and 歌謡曲 in particular so I enjoy chatting up and doing karaoke with ossans as well who are not known for their stellar English ability but enjoy the same music I do, heh.

 

[nikkeimob]

Oh hey! I actually am a linguist (syntactician, but with adjacent research interests in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics); I know the Altaic conversation is over but it didn't feel right to my soul if I didn't put in my two cents.

Honestly, Ural-Altaic hypotheses still hold some comparative weight in Russian (Moscow School, to my knowledge), Turkish, and I believe Chinese academies. It's difficult to directly attack Altaicism on the basis of its data because of the fact that their data is really good—it's rigorously derived and accurately describes certain features crosslinguistically. Even in western traditions, there are a few stragglers—notably Robbeets at Max Planck SHH, who has Altaic (under the name Transeuropean) literature out as recently as (Robbeets, 2018). The major problem, however, with Altaicism is their inability to distinguish these common features being a result of long term contact (hence its more-accepted refactoring into an Altaic sprachbund theory) from their intended hypothesis of actual genetic relation and inheritance. I would recommend "The end of the Altaic controversy" (Vovin, 2005) as a concise and non-comprehensive, but overall rigorous and fairly damning rebuttal to the Altaic hypothesis.

I recognize that you mentioned that you don't necessarily consider Altaicism for its debunked genetic relation (which is good!), but rather for its apparently strong syntactic commonalities. It's also worth mentioning that strong Altaicism (including Koreanic and Japonic languages into the hypothesis) is not very popular even among Altaicists (it's also worth mentioning that no Altaic theories have included ST languages either). With this in mind, I would caution using Altaic as a framework for language pedagogy. Even at as close a geographic range as Korean and Japanese (which do share quite similar syntaxes), there are a lot of phenomena that throw a wrench in attempting to make even narrow crosslinguistic conclusions. For a basic example, drawing from (Saito & An, 2014), you can see that argument ellipsis and 'sluicing' are valid elliptical constructions in both Korean and Japanese, but N'-ellipsis is only valid in Japanese. One can only imagine what kind of weird shit you need to get up to in order to construct derivations, rules, then the ensuing exceptions and idiosyncrasies when considering languages as distant as, say, Turkish and Japanese.

Even if you do note broad syntactic similarities between (I assume) your L1 and Japanese, it's probably best to not draw any relational conclusions here; after all, most of the syntactic commonalities in Altaic hypotheses are really just either global or truly local commonalities. SOV is the most common word order in the world after all. Topic particles are common to a potential Japonic-Koreanic branch of Altaic; they're also present in Ainu, cool—Ainu is very rarely included in Altaic hypotheses, but it has been, so we can include it. Analyses that include Ainu are all overambitious and usually include Nivkh as well; notably, Nivkh does not have topic particles.

Sorry for few citations and no editing I'm a little too high to care right now

 

[DragonSlayer]

Sorry for few citations and no editing I'm a little too high to care right now

Average Altaic proponent

 

[Alice]

I hang around the Japanese community in my locale and drinking is the norm so I'm surprised to see so many people on here advise me to not hit the booze too hard. Definitely want to operate coherent but my assumption was that booze + schmooze went hand in hand.

I'm rehearsing my starry-eyed gaijin who is just curious about what a love hotel is routine but am open to any alternatives I can find (her place, idk) I really like the P4P to get rid of Nanpa jitters idea. I touch down on a weekday so maybe hit the ground running and then try to work my magic in bars over the weekend!

Will keep everyone posted as things go down. For now I'm heading over to the reviews section!

I would agree with the others to not drink before p4p (or maybe just one chu hai against the first time nerves) but for pick up I think you can totally drink beforehand and it helps if the girl has been drinking as well.
Now, key is that both of you should not be too drunk because you do not want to act like a boar and consent is sexy, also if you care about pretty, someone may not look as good the day after as when you are drunk.
But on the flip side this is a culture where girls want to have an excuse to do something crazy, so having a bit of alcohol in their system may be a must to have a one night stand with a foreigner.
Just do some bar hopping and clubbing in the usual main districts. Weekends get crazier but there will still be people on weekdays as well so whatever fits your schedule. Miss the last train and use being tired as as excuse to get a hotel room with a girl.
Shinjuku and Shibuya have a pick of love hotels in walking distance from the party area. Roppongi has maybe two LH and two hybrids of Hotel and LH to choose from, and they are overpriced.

Definitely try the “I’ve always wanted to try one of those” line for love hotels.
I think Bali An chain would be the best for it because they are technically not even love hotels and lots of people are curious about them because they are so gimmicky. Just say you have passed them when touristing and you’re so curious. And since they are luxury, girls will also enjoy them.
I’d say especially Bali An Honten and Bali An Glamping are good (both in Shinjuku).

 

[DragonSlayer]

I would agree with the others to not drink before p4p (or maybe just one chu hai against the first time nerves) but for pick up I think you can totally drink beforehand and it helps if the girl has been drinking as well.
Now, key is that both of you should not be too drunk because you do not want to act like a boar and consent is sexy, also if you care about pretty, someone may not look as good the day after as when you are drunk.
But on the flip side this is a culture where girls want to have an excuse to do something crazy, so having a bit of alcohol in their system may be a must to have a one night stand with a foreigner.
Just do some bar hopping and clubbing in the usual main districts. Weekends get crazier but there will still be people on weekdays as well so whatever fits your schedule. Miss the last train and use being tired as as excuse to get a hotel room with a girl.
Shinjuku and Shibuya have a pick of love hotels in walking distance from the party area. Roppongi has maybe two LH and two hybrids of Hotel and LH to choose from, and they are overpriced.

Definitely try the “I’ve always wanted to try one of those” line for love hotels.
I think Bali An chain would be the best for it because they are technically not even love hotels and lots of people are curious about them because they are so gimmicky. Just say you have passed them when touristing and you’re so curious. And since they are luxury, girls will also enjoy them.
I’d say especially Bali An Honten and Bali An Glamping are good (both in Shinjuku).

This post is gold, I especially like the Bali An tip, thanks Alice.

 

[goodguyjean]

I would agree with the others to not drink before p4p (or maybe just one chu hai against the first time nerves) but for pick up I think you can totally drink beforehand and it helps if the girl has been drinking as well.
Now, key is that both of you should not be too drunk because you do not want to act like a boar and consent is sexy, also if you care about pretty, someone may not look as good the day after as when you are drunk.
But on the flip side this is a culture where girls want to have an excuse to do something crazy, so having a bit of alcohol in their system may be a must to have a one night stand with a foreigner.
Just do some bar hopping and clubbing in the usual main districts. Weekends get crazier but there will still be people on weekdays as well so whatever fits your schedule. Miss the last train and use being tired as as excuse to get a hotel room with a girl.
Shinjuku and Shibuya have a pick of love hotels in walking distance from the party area. Roppongi has maybe two LH and two hybrids of Hotel and LH to choose from, and they are overpriced.

Definitely try the “I’ve always wanted to try one of those” line for love hotels.
I think Bali An chain would be the best for it because they are technically not even love hotels and lots of people are curious about them because they are so gimmicky. Just say you have passed them when touristing and you’re so curious. And since they are luxury, girls will also enjoy them.
I’d say especially Bali An Honten and Bali An Glamping are good (both in Shinjuku).

Sorry for the late reply! New years parties had me off the forums for a few days. These are some wonderful recommendations and I've saved the Bali An locations to my maps folder and to memory.

My new years resolution of sorts after receiving this same piece of advice from multiple sources on here is to reduce alcohol consumption! I want this trip to be memorable and not in the "I drank myself blackout drunk x ∞" kind of way, so just enough to keep a fun buzz going for all parties is the goal! I'd much prefer an encounter that feels vivid to one where I have to piece together the memories on the day after, truly I've had enough of that.
I'll also be hanging out with a local friend of mine who's no stranger to the clubbing scene so I will do my best to follow his lead and have a good time!

Thanks again for the great advice and here's to an amazing 2024!

 

[Alice]

Sorry for the late reply! New years parties had me off the forums for a few days. These are some wonderful recommendations and I've saved the Bali A locations to my maps folder and to memory.

Don’t forget to report later if the pick up line worked 😉

 

[goodguyjean]

Wasn't sure where to post this and content seems relevant to my introduction so I'm keeping this thread alive.

As promised, it's February and I've made it to Japan... Step 1 complete! All according to keikaku.

The waive of malaise that rushed in these past few days, no doubt from staying up all night trying to get rid my jet lag posthaste combined with whatever virus the stinky old man coughing next to me on the plane was carpet bombing us with, was definitely not according to keikaku.

Regardless, I persevered and chugged an ungodly amount of caffeine before taking my first tottering steps into Shinjuku and Ikebukuro (last night and today respectively) and have officially breached the flood gates of the water trade.

My thoughts at the moment are varied, changing by the moment and convoluted to say the least but I'd like to share my experience as a beginner and contribute some up to date information but it might take a little bit before it's done marinating.

I will say however that my choice was centered well reviewed spots on this forum to create a point of reference though and as I continue to explore I'll hopefully have a more thoughtful perspective and more experiences to share!

If there's anything you'd like me to keep in mind as I choose the next spot or write my reviews please leave below!

 

[goodguyjean]

Before anyone @'s me btw, I did not catch anything and go kissing any girls and spreading germs. The old man coughs mainly dealt psychological dmg and kept me unable to sleep well on the flight.

I'm just hella tired and travel worn.