Thanks for that awesome list of advice. To answer a few questions that have come up, we were looking into getting the full JR passes, I did not know about the regional ones, and those seem like they make more sense. We're planning roughly a week in the Kansai region, probably staying in & around Kyoto & Osaka, 2 or 3 days in Tokyo (either at the beginning or end of the trip).
We definitely are looking to spend two nights at a traditional style ryokan, my wife found one online she's fallen in love with (Sanga Ryokan, which I believe is part of Kurokawa-onsen in Kyushu), it looks great to me too, but it's not set in stone.
Can anyone comment on how easy it is to rent either sim cards or smartphones as a foreigner?
I like to buy b-mobile sim cards (from amazon or yodabashi camera) for my unlocked iphone, but they require you to have a residential address. If you know someone who lives in Japan and is willing, basically they'll get a postcard with a code & you can register it. There are different types and plans -- I went with a 20$/month 1GB soft limit data-only plan, combined with viber & google voice (for US calls), and used a green phone when I actually needed to call someone in Japan (rare).
Also, I really like jalan/jaran for finding bargain prices for places to stay.
If you're going to a big city, don't worry about it. There's English signage most everywhere, and there's usually a person at train stations whose job it is to help foreigners. And if nothing else, ordering food will be super easy because of the replicas.
I'm incredibly skeptical about DuoLingo, especially when it comes to non-Latin based scripts. I've played with it a bit and found it wanting. It seems to be using machine translations as a base for sentence translation accuracy, and a lot of the "best translations" are fairly indistinguishable from Google's (while being significantly different from the actual meaning). For example:
Comments
We definitely are looking to spend two nights at a traditional style ryokan, my wife found one online she's fallen in love with (Sanga Ryokan, which I believe is part of Kurokawa-onsen in Kyushu), it looks great to me too, but it's not set in stone.
Can anyone comment on how easy it is to rent either sim cards or smartphones as a foreigner?
Also, I really like jalan/jaran for finding bargain prices for places to stay.
Yes, no, thankyou, sorry.
Also, tasukete (tas-ke-teh) kudasai = please give me help.
Eigo (eh-ee-go) o hanashi masuka (mas-ka)? = Do you speak English?
For example: