Donkimu: Read Japanese Menus

Japanese menus are hard if you don't know Japanese, and still strange even if you do.

Sometimes you can't read the words. Sometimes you can read them but have no idea what the dish is.

A translation tells you what the words mean, but often you still can't picture the food, so you end up searching for photos anyway.

Translation can help you order. But knowing what a word means is not the same as knowing what the dish is.

When I was a student in Japan, I often saw friends who could read most Japanese at JLPT N2 level still pull out a translator at restaurants because of all the dishes they didn't know.

It makes sense. When you study everyday Japanese or study for a test, you rarely learn food names like seseri, bonjiri or namero on purpose.

To read a menu, you have to learn the menu.

With Donkimu, you learn the dish names you'll see most at Japanese restaurants, together with what the food actually looks like.

You see the pronunciation, meaning and a short description together, so the moment you see the word, you can picture the dish.

And you don't see it just once. Words come back for review right when you're about to forget them.

A dish you've learned once will stand out at the next restaurant, and on your next trip.

But real menus come in many styles. Handwriting, brush strokes, vertical text - when the look changes, even a word you know can feel unfamiliar.

So you see each word in different lettering styles, and find the dishes you've learned on real menu photos in the quiz.

What matters is not whether you memorized it, but whether you can recognize it on a menu.

Translation helps you understand a menu you can't read right now. Donkimu helps you recognize it the next time you see it.

The more dishes you know, the less you need your phone, and the more you can compare and choose for yourself.

It's fine if you're just starting Japanese. If you've studied a lot already, you'll start noticing the dishes you used to skip.

Not Japanese for a test, but the Japanese you'll meet at a restaurant today.

The week before your trip, start with the menu.

Donkimu So you can read Japanese menus yourself and choose what you want to eat.