Sarah’s Blog Post 6: October 23, 2015
One of the most difficult and most important skills to learn when traveling abroad is how to understand food labels. Whether you are eating in restaurants or cooking for yourself at home, knowing food words is important. Kanji makes this difficult for a non-native Japanese speaker. I know that 鳥肉 means “chicken”, but I didn’t know that 鶏 was also the same as “chicken”. I think it is probably the same in English, because we have two words for chicken meat as well. You can call it “chicken” or “poultry”.
Japan has many more different kinds of fish than the United States. For example, mackerel, or 鯖, is a very common type of fish to eat and buy in Japan. In the United States, you mostly only find mackerel in Japanese restaurants. The most common types of fish to eat in the United States are tuna/鮪, salmon/鮭, tilapia/ティラピア, catfish/鯰, and cod/鱈. Since the kanji for many types of fish start with the radical 魚, it is difficult to remember which fish is which. If I had to give Japanese travelers any advice about visiting a foreign country, the most useful types of words to learn are food words and direction words (方向の言葉).