Where in the station? Japanese language tips to help you navigate their subway
Doesn’t everyone have stories recounted to them from friends who’ve returned from Japanese vacations with nothing but praise for their above-and-beyond customer service? What hardly anyone ever seems to mention, however, is that in spite of the multilingual signs and colour-coded labels, the experience of navigating the subway stations — especially a major one — is quite akin to navigating a maze.
We’re travellers ourselves, and we know first-hand how a Japanese train station could be overwhelming on first glance. So we’ve prepared an English-Japanese guide on the kind of words you’re likely to see that we think could do with a little more explanation. Hopefully, this will help you locate your desired exit a little faster:
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but we believe that this table is a nice complement to the signs and logos you’ll encounter inside a Japanese train station.
This next table contains some more common words and characters that you’ll see. They are a pretty self-explanatory, and we thought of providing you with pronunciations for a number of them in case you were curious:
Finally, we recommend never travelling on the railway without a powerful phone app that accounts for all the train stations and lines in Japan, as well as information such as train timings, the train types, the stations, transfer stations and more such as Hyperdia. It’s service is also available in Japanese and Chinese.
If you’re curious to pick up some more Japanese for the express purpose of travel, check out this short Japanese For Travelers course conducted by a professional language learning institution right here on our platform. Our teachers will cover know-hows such as asking for directions, ordering in restaurants, purchasing from shops and more!
Leave us a comment or two if you have any suggestions for other language guides you’ll like to see next!