indessed roscivs

As many of you may already know, I’m planning a trip to Tokyo next month. I’ve been there once before, but for business—this will be the first time that I actually get to do what I want to do while I’m there. Mostly what I want to do is speak Japanese and play Go, but I’ll probably do a little bit of sight-seeing as well.

Yesterday, I made reservations at the ryokan we’ll be staying at. I was terribly nervous—they didn’t have an email address, so I had to make the reservation over the phone, and my Japanese conversation skills are shaky at best. (Speaking of which, I just received the results from the Japanese Language Proficiency test I took in December. I passed! 90% in writing, 80% in reading, and 60% in listening. That’s about what I expected, and enough over the 70% minimum requirement to pass handily. This year’s goal—JLPT 3!)

So, in preparation, I wrote down the entire dialog as I imagined it would go, along with other vocabulary words that I might need, just in case. I added the phrase for, “Do you mind if I speak English?” in case I got stuck—I figured in a foreigner-friendly ryokan they’d at least have one person who spoke English. Even so, I nervously kept putting it off until finally I managed to bite the bullet, pick up the phone, and dial the international number. I took a deep breath and mentally prepared myself for what was to come, as I heard the click on the other line as the phone was answered.

“Hello, Kimi Ryokan. How may I help you?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.