Japanese phrases for tourists: what to have in your mouth before Narita

Most of what you will say in two weeks in Japan sits inside a very small set. You will ask for a thing, thank someone for it, pay for it, and find out whether the train in front of you is yours. Start with these, said out loud, before you worry about anything else.

• Sumimasen (soo-mee-mah-sen). Excuse me, sorry, and over here please, all in one word. It is the most useful sound you will make all trip.
• Onegaishimasu (oh-neh-gai-shee-mass). Please do this for me. You can bolt it onto almost any request and be polite immediately.
• Arigatou gozaimasu (ah-ree-gah-toh go-zai-mass). Thank you, in the version you can use with a stranger.
• Kore o kudasai (koh-reh oh koo-dah-sai). This one, please, delivered at a menu, a display case or a vending machine button.
• Okaikei onegaishimasu (oh-kai-kay oh-neh-gai-shee-mass). The bill, please.
• Eigo no menyuu wa arimasu ka (ay-go no men-yoo wa ah-ree-mass ka). Do you have an English menu.
• Kaado de haraemasu ka (kah-doh deh hah-rah-eh-mass ka). Can I pay by card.
• Kono densha wa Shibuya ni ikimasu ka (koh-no den-sha wa shi-boo-ya ni ee-kee-mass ka). Does this train go to Shibuya. Swap in your stop.
• Saishuu densha wa nanji desu ka (sai-shoo den-sha wa nan-jee dess ka). What time is the last train. Ask it early in the evening, not late.
• Toire wa doko desu ka (toy-reh wa doh-koh dess ka). Where is the toilet.
• Daijoubu desu (dai-joh-boo dess). I'm fine, thank you. The polite decline, for bags, chopsticks and extra sauce.

Two pronunciation habits worth fixing now

Japanese vowels are short and even, so no syllable gets leaned on the way English leans on the middle of banana. Keep the line flat and you will be understood. And the final u in desu and masu is barely there: say dess and mass, not deh-soo and mah-soo. Say every line above three times at the speed you would actually use in front of a person, not reading speed. A list you can read is not a phrase you can produce when a ticket machine is beeping at you.

You are the person who booked Japan months ago, downloaded the obvious app in a burst of good intent, and has since been opening it mainly to keep a number alive. The taps accumulate. The number survives. You still could not order a coffee out loud. It is a familiar account from adults who have quit: one developer, writing about building his own replacement, described it as "my streak became a trap: I wasn't learning Spanish, I was learning how to keep a streak alive". You are an adult with a departure date and a reasonable goal: be polite, not fluent, and not be the tourist pointing silently at a menu.

So the job in front of you is not learning Japanese. It is arriving at Narita with a specific, small, spoken set: enough to order, enough to board the right train, enough to check in and ask for the bill. You have a finite number of evenings left, you know roughly how many, and you would like to spend them on the fifty things you will say rather than the five thousand you will not.

That is the brief Phrazl was built to answer. You tell it where you are going and when, you tell it which three situations frighten you most, and it hands you the phrase set for those, in the order they matter on a trip. No streaks, no XP, just the phrases and the days remaining.

The voice is synthesised, not a native speaker. Every phrase has audio you can play at speed or slowed down, with a written pronunciation guide beside it, and the app says plainly where you hear it that the voice is machine-made. Native-speaker recordings are not part of what you buy today. Treat the audio as a metronome for length and rhythm, and copy a human once you are standing in front of one.

Fill in the blank does less work in Japanese than in Spanish. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so that mode cannot pull a single word out of the middle of a sentence and instead works on the whole phrase. The same is true of the Mandarin and Thai sets, which the Mandarin page covers in its own terms. For a Japan trip, flashcard and listen and repeat are the two modes carrying the load, which is the right order of priority anyway: you are learning to say things, not to spell them.

What Phrazl keeps, and how you get rid of it. It stores your email address, name and a hashed password to sign you in, the trips you set up, your review history per phrase, purchase records from Stripe, any support request you send from the account screen, and one timestamped milestone per trip when you set it up, finish the free twenty, see the paywall, start a checkout or complete a purchase, so the product can see where travellers stop. All of it sits on Amazon Web Services in a managed Postgres database, kept while your account exists, with server logs rolling off within thirty days. You can delete a single trip and its review history from that trip's edit screen, or use the delete account button to remove the account, trips, review history, purchase records and support requests at once. Stripe keeps its own payment records as the law requires.

If a purchase goes wrong, you say so on the account screen. Sign-in is an email address and a password, with reset emails sent through Resend. There is no support email address: purchase and refund problems are raised from the support form on your account screen. There is also no data export of your review history and no two-factor authentication yet, and no independent security audit has been done.

If Spain is the trip after this one, there is a companion page on what to learn in Spanish before you fly, and another on which languages and destinations Phrazl covers, both built the same way around scenarios and a departure date.