Never noticed this thread until I'm mentioned.
First of all, don't be surprized when Japanese person orders
lice at restaulants.
It means
rice. Historically, pronounces of
L and
R are not distinguished in Japanese (language) for centuries, so often pronounced whichever the person feel comfortable. And this is one of the reason Japanese people (especially olds) hesitate to speak / can't hear well foreign languages. This would also make Japanese hard to learn for foreigners, as there are many cases that words having exactly same pronounce have different meanings as already noted by
SirDice as below.
The Japanese word for "four" looks and sounds very similar to the Japanese word for "death".
This should be 四 (four, U+56DB) and 死(death, U+6B7B) respectively, both pronounced as "shi". Another example would be 九(nine, U+4E5D) and 苦(suffer, U+82E6), both pronounced as "ku".
Fortunately, 四 (four, U+56DB) has another pronounce "yon" (oy "yo" as seen in 四ツ谷,pronounced as "yotsuya") and 九(nine, U+4E5D) has "kyuu" as seen in 九州, pronounced as "kyuushuu".
And even for Japanese person who speaks English, wait for the person if the person says "I'll go!". This often means "I'll come!". This is because of cultural differences. In English, the direction is "from the point of view from hearer", while "from the point of view from speaker" in Japanese.
And this is because my writings are quite often redundant to indicate directions not to be mis-understood.
I think he lives in Japan?
Yes, in Nagoya (almost geographically at the center of Japan, Pacific ocean side).
Japanese writing - to me - looks like drunken Chinese characters (they do share the same characters, but then Japanese writing has really wonky looking scribbly things that look like something maybe someone drunk would write haha).
It would be because of
Hiragana and/or Katakana that are used with
Kanji.
Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonograms, while Kanji are logograms.
Hiragana and Katakana were created in ancient Japan, based on Kanji (came from ancient China directly or via Korean Peninsula) that sounds like Japanese pronounces at the era and significantly modified.
Wouldn't that affect you a lot?
Thankfully, not until now for me.
Then you have this major, major urban centers like Tokyo that look absolutely unbelievable from above, giant sprawling concrete buildings wherever you look. Kinda scary! And people are in prison of these cityscapes. Then there's beautiful countryside that you can easily get to - oh my god, Japanese transportation system is so amazing from what I see online (and yes, I played that simple freeware Japanese train sim BVE trainsim many, many years ago).
In my humble opinion, Japan is too much centralized to Tokyo.
And Japan is a country of mountains. Plains are quite limited here in Japan.
And
do you mean this?
I've never played, though.
You may also interested in
simulators in the Raylway Museum at Omiya, Saitama city relatively near Tokyo.
Here in Nagoya,
you can find Shinkansen simulator at SCMAGLEV Railway Park.
And of course, sushi. Sashimi....mmmm, San Francisco has authentic sushi places in Japantown, so we don't have to ever go to Japan?
It strongly depends on how the fishes are treated to keep qualities.
