[swordfish]

Let's face it anyone who is on a trip to Japan will definitely attempt to learn some of their language.
While at the airport I came across 2 books at the DFS bookstore. One call 'Japanese at a glance' and the other 'Japanese for idiots'. I didn't buy the latter. You know the reason.
So my 1st attempt to learn Japanese was by reading this book 'Japanese at a glance' in the plane from Singapore to Tokyo. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family in Japan. And even that it's not easy.
Learning to speak Japanese isn't so bad but learning to read it is insanely difficult. Start with the fact that for some malevolent reason the Japanese use 4 different systems which are often intermixed in addition to characters sometimes arranged vertically,in which case you read right to left but sometimes arranged horizontally, in which case you read left to right. I might have gotten some of this wrong but trust me there's no way you'd be able to tell. Also sometimes there's a mixture of horizontal and vertical writing, using several different character systems.
There are also Chinese characters which represent words not sounds. You might think that should make thing a little easier for me since I'm a Chinese. Well you're wrong. See this wouldn't be so bad if the characters looked like what they're supposed to represent. But the Japanese/Chinese characters don't look anything like the concepts they're supposed to represent.....and every one of those marks is important. If you put one teensy little line in there wrong you could change the entire meaning of the character from something like "man holding broom" to "sex with ostriches".
I'm sure Japanese speak a certain degree of English as well as I overheard a few Japanese in the plane talking and laughing not far away from me saying something that sound like "F##king nai yo".
Before I fell asleep, I was able to devote nearly an hour to the study of the Japanese language. My ultimate goal was to learn how to say "I do not speak Japanese" in fluent Japanese but I decided to start with "Thank you" which according to 'Japanese at a glance" pronounced as "DOH-MOH-AH-REE-GAH-TOH" and how to order a beer,which I later became really good at,pronounced as "BEE-ROO" unless you want a big beer in which case it is pronounced as "BIG BEE-ROO".
I tried practising on the cabin crews who continued to come around every few minutes with complimentary items. All seem to work pretty well but I suspect the cabin crews were just being polite. I never know.

Sayonara
SF