6 ms·
Might be tricky if you don’t speak Japanese though. Do they have multilingual optometrists that cater to tourists? I suppose Tokyo is big enough you can probabl
by rhexs 4y ago
Might be tricky if you don’t speak Japanese though. Do they have multilingual optometrists that cater to tourists? I suppose Tokyo is big enough you can probably find one of anything.
- QuarterReptile 4y agoFrench people are rich enough to be proficient English speakers, as are people in Tokyo. Seems like it'll probably work out. I spent about a week in Japan, split between Tokyo and Nagasaki, and had no problem, having not even tried to learn any Japanese, except that I couldn't get the right train stop because I couldn't even recognize the characters, much less read them.
- missedthecue 4y agoApparently Japan has fewer bilingual citizens than even the USA.
- Bilal_io 4y ago> than even the USA. The US has a lot of immigrants, so I wouldn't count it as a country with a low percentage of bilinguals.
- missedthecue 4y agoCitizens?
- Bilal_io 4y agoYes. As of 2020 nearly half of immigrants in the USA are citizens according to Pew Research[0] 0- https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
- missedthecue 4y agoSo about 6% of Americans are immigrants
- todorus 4y agoThe ability to speak English is a function of wealth? Sorry, what?
- waste_monk 4y agoI'm not sure how much it would cost to hire a translator for an hour or two, but you'd probably still come out ahead.
- rhexs 4y agoIs the eye chart in kanji? That’d be tough to translate.
- waste_monk 4y agoI was thinking more that optometry appointments usually include medical testing (the "air puff" test for glaucoma etc.) and may turn up issues that you need to be informed of. A machine translator or a friend who speaks both languages conversationally may not be sufficient to translate complex medical terminology. I'm not sure what you'd do about the eye chart. I don't know about optometry but I would imagine you can't just print off a poster of an English-language eye chart and use that, I always figured they'd be calibrated for a certain size, resolution, and the distance from the vision test machine taken into account. As you suggest, given the number of western tourists to Japan I'm sure there'd be some subset of optometrists who are set up for English-language patients.