I am still learning Japanese, and working in Japan has taught me something I did not expect: switching a support conversation into Japanese is far more than swapping the words. The grammar is the easy part. The expectations around it are where the real work is.
Politeness is structural, not optional
In English I can be warm and casual and still sound professional. Japanese builds respect into the verb forms themselves, so the level of formality is a choice you make in every single sentence. Getting it wrong is not a small slip — it changes how the whole message lands.
What is not said carries weight
A lot of meaning sits in what a customer leaves out. A reply that would read as polite hesitation in English may be a clear no in Japanese. Learning to hear the gap between the words has done more for me than any vocabulary list.
Apology is a greeting, not an admission
Sumimasen does a dozen jobs — thank you, excuse me, sorry, even a kind of hello. Early on I read every apology as the company taking blame. It usually is not. It is social lubricant, and using it naturally is part of sounding like a person rather than a translation.
I am nowhere near fluent, and I say so to customers when it helps. But living inside the language, even at a conversational level, has changed how I support people in English too: more attention to tone, more patience with what goes unsaid, and a lot more humility about how much a few words can carry.