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Comment by antsam | Hacker News Reader

I love going to konbini whenever I'm in Japan but do yourself a favour and don't go to one for every meal. If you want a bento or some small dishes, there are lots of good and affordable ones at the grocery stores and department stores. They even discount them by quite a lot near closing time. Check the basement or top floors of the major train stations as well.

There's lots of good restaurants as well all over the place and even at the top floor of many Yodabashi (a giant electronics chain). Don't be afraid of places that don't have any English signage, you can usually request an English menu or see if they can just recommend you a good dish if you're adventurous.

If you're hopping onboard the Shinkansen (bullet train), grab yourself an ekiben at the station before you go, lots of delicious regional dishes to try out!

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It took me a few reads to realize you were saying the Japanese write/say “convenience store” as “konbini”

Reminds me of the sarariman I first read about in Neuromancer.

Loan words are interesting micro insight into culture.

The Japanese writing system uses three different character sets. Loan words are generally always written using one of these three sets, "katakana". Learning how to properly read and write Japanese will take years, but I highly encourage anyone visiting to at least learn how to read the 48 katakana (entirely phonetic). It's relatively low effort for the value it adds to your trip. Many of the Japanese loan words are of English origin, meaning you'll effectively be able to read some Japanese and understand it which can be very satisfying, useful, and hilarious.

I agree, I thought learning spoken phrases would be the way to go when I first visited, and it certainly helped with the basic stuff like restaurants and saying please/thankyou.

But knowing how to read the alphabets would have helped a lot more, because there are so many very understandable things sitting right infront of you if only you knew how to read the characters. コンビニエンス seems impenetrable if you don't know the alphabet, but it's just the adapted word for "Convenience": Konbiniensu.

Duolingo copped a lot of flack here in a recent thread, but it was great for initially learning the alphabets, it took nearly no time to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. If you don't know the alphabet you can't even begin to try and learn the language in situ, so that's step one and a huge help when travelling.

Minor nit: the kana are not alphabets, they're syllabaries. Each character represents a complete syllable (except ン/ん) as opposed to representing a consonant or vowel sound.

They are really straight-forward to learn as, unlike in English, they don't have di and trigraphs and extremely few pronunciation exceptions. Learning the characters can be done in an afternoon, though of course being able to read them quickly will take quite a bit of practice.

That makes sense! Not having variations based on neighbors is a very nice simplicity to have, except for the lengthening and doubling symbols.

Both kanas definitely have digraphs, they are called yōon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Don

Oh right, I forgot about those. They're really so straight-forward though that they barely count, in my opinion.

My favourite is アルバイト (Arubaito) for part-time job, from the German “arbeit” (to work)

I tried to learn Japanese by sheer force of effort and managed to make "do-eet-su" stick in my mind to mean "German". It was years later that the penny dropped and i realized it was just "Deutsch" transliterated.

I am fond of Pasokon for PC and Super for supermarket

I like this one I heard in the movie Close-Knit: "raburetā" (ラブレター) from English "love letter".

Pokemon is "pocket monster".

And now we in the US have stupid restaurants like Poke Land which would be pocket land, but they thought it related to Pokémon. And it's just a shitty overpriced FoTM.

So now we have double-borrowed words. By the time it gets back to Japan it will be something like Land-Land and will mean something different again like monsters.

Pretty amazing.

I don’t know the specific place you’re referring to, but at least all the restaurants I know of with Poke in the name are referring to Hawaiian Poke [1]. Although it’s influenced by Japanese cuisine, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poke_(Hawaiian_dish)

Sure enough, thanks for the correction!

Adidasy and Junckers in Polish were - are? - terms for sneakers and gas fired water heaters.

It's hilarious to this English speaker.

My mind was blown when I realized the same had been done with the Japanese word "mamachari" — that is, a popular bicycle for women that allow them to carry a child and grocery bag.

For anyone wondering, "mamachari" is Japanese shorthand for a "mama chariot!"

They're a joy to ride.

To stay within the food sphere, how about "kapsalon"[0] in Poland? Popular fast food created in the Netherlands in 2003. "kapsalon" is Dutch for "hairdressing salon". Etymologically, it can be tracked to a man who always asked for "the usual for the hair dresser".

Polish workers took the name home and it's now not an uncommon sight in Poland [1], amongst other places.

P.S. Don't eat it. It is disgustingly fat and unhealthy...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapsalon [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kapsalon+site%3A.pl

"...1,800 kilocalories in a large serving" !

Eat two pints of ice cream (2K cal) and nobody bats an eye, but eat a large serving of kapsalon and everybody loses their minds.

Nothing really disgusting about it, it’s just a pile of fries, meat, cheese and salad. Not much worse than the average Shawarma in healthiness, probably better.

A large serving feeds two easily.

I think, the first time you are in Japan, you can absolutely go to the conbini for a meal.

Compared to what you get outside of Japan it’ll be fantastic.

Once you start eating out at other places you won’t be able to go back to conbini food anymore (especially once you realize the price is basically the same).

It’s also not a bad idea for your first meal in Japan, as unless something has changed, recently, they have the only ATMs that work with foreign cards - you’re outta luck getting cash anywhere else.

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