0·
11 months agoITT: lots of people wondering why this is an issue at all when obviously butter contains milk.
It’s because the company can effectively print whatever they like for the name of the product with no regard to the actual ingredients. A consumer needs to know what they’re actually buying because of things like allergies and intolerances.
In this case, and depending on the severity of the allergy, that missing ingredient warning could cause someone a bad case of the farts or something as serious as anaphylactic shock.
This being said, I’d still agree that people not wanting to consume milk should stick to products with positive confirmation that it is milk-free.
I went to Japan for my honeymoon and so did the obligatory ‘learn the basics’ that I try to do before any trip to a new country.
Getting to a polite level so you can order food, find a train station and so on is relatively easy - probably a week’s effort if you really go for it.
Getting to a conversational level is a whole extra jump from there, however. Definitely a bigger leap than the equivalent in Spanish, for example. Based on this, I’d think that getting to a level where you can follow native speakers doing the exaggerated anime over-acting dialogue would be a hell of a slog and a very commendable achievement.
As everyone else is saying, the written language is very hard to learn, especially if you’re new to non-Latin alphabets. Japanese has three of the damned things and they mix and match seemingly at random (to the eye of the uneducated).
Edit: forgot to say - I like Duolingo for ease of access and I also bought a little phrase book.
My opinion: if you have an interest and an excuse, go for it! Learning more is never the wrong answer.