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And what if a tree fell on my house during a typhoon ? I have never been locked out of my house and neither do I know someone (close to me) who has.
Happened to me. Keys can fall out of pockets. I'm not saying it's going to happen to everyone, but it can. Anyways, it was just an example of a time when you'd be screwed if you didn't speak the langauge. That's to say, when signs won't help you, you have to rely on people, in which case it's NOT an English-friendly place to live. In my case, there were no neighbors, and the landlord wasn't home. At the time I had about 3 or 4 years of Japanese to fall back on though, so no worries.
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Never had any problem with that. Just go to the supermarket and see by yourself what you need.
Well, you obviously aren't a vegetarian living in Japan. People that are picky about what they eat want to know the ingredients of what they buy. I"ve not been to any country where a cabbage has a list of ingredients. A bottle of dressing or something else that might contain something does though. Also - not everyone cooks.
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She could recognise the various kinds of sauces (bulldog, soy sauce, etc.) or guess from the image that one puding was "pumpkin" taste, while another was "mango". Even a child could do that.
I could go on about a friend that was hospitalized due to an allergy she had to an ingredient in some food.
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Not sure what you mean. It's impossible to confuse in a supermarket (ketchup is red, FYI). In a McDonald or something, either ask (the Japanese words are the same : "masutaado" and "ketchappu") or see by yourself the colour of the package.
It was a joke. If you ask for Mustard instead of ketchup, you get a look of confusion. It will take a second to register that the person actually does want mustard. Or at least it did 5 years ago when I last ate in a McDonalds.
Bilingual mobile phones have been there for a while. My first one in 1998 was bilingual, so they're nothing new. Not all models are bilingual though. PCs in English have been around as well, but you gotta pay for them. If you think about it, you can get just about anything in English you want if you don't mind going out of your way or paying for it, which is why I quickly got out of the habbit of going the English way.
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English-speaking emergency services (police, ambulance, medical information, foreign residents advisory, etc.),
I've got a story about that one... ambulances/hospital specifically. I guess it's not too geared towards English speaking though, although langauge barrier was a big element. It'll need to go into personal stories though. It's a little long.
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and 2) you forget that this is a compared to other countries in the world, not what you'd personally wish to find.
I'm basing it on other countries I've visited (not lived in).
South Korea, Thailand, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, and McAllen, TX.