"Will do. Any other advice for me, or should I try to track down Tessai-san to see if he has any suggestions for learning Japanese?"

"Not that I can think of. Occasionally we get drop-ins, but mostly customers are only here in the afternoon or weekends anyway."

She nods. "Okay. Where should I go to find Tessai-san?"

She's trying to get in the habit of using the Japanese suffixes going forward, since this is her life now.

"He's probably tinkering with the barriers. I could help you look if you can't find him."

"Okay! I'll come ask you for help if I can't find him. Where roughly would the barriers be to be tinkered with?"

"He's probably in his office, unless he's tweaking one of them in particular in which case he could be anywhere."

"Okay. Will it be obvious which one is his if I head back to the back rooms?"

"His is the one that isn't a total mess. Plus the boss usually works in the basement anyway, so his won't have anyone in it."

She nods. "Simple enough, thanks!" She waves to the two kids and heads back to the back rooms, looking for Mr. Tessai's office.

As predicted it's easy to identify which one is his, though the door is currently shut.

She knocks, firmly but not too loudly, just twice.

The door opens, revealing a man with a very impressive mustache, who blinks upon seeing her.

"Did something happen?"

"Hello Sir. I'm a new employee, pending Mr. Urahara verifying something about my story, and Ururu suggested that you may have an idea what to do about my not speaking Japanese yet."

"That certainly sounds like him; you'd think he could at least tell me when he does it. I'm not sure how helpful I'll be with speaking it, but I had to learn reading the hard way and I've taught a number of people before to get by. How much time do you expect to have a day to work at it?"

"If things go how I expect, speaking won't be an issue, so reading is very much the focus. I can use my downtime between customers and chores on shift, and maybe an additional hour a day, at a guess? I expect to have to do a bunch of training to be able to occupy a gigai efficiently, so that will take some time. Also technically we're five people sharing one body."

Tessai nods.

"I'll have to ask you to let me know if one of you is struggling with something then, since I won't be able to check body language. Do any of you have familiarity with any writing systems or languages?"

"American English, and some French."

"Then you're going to want to start out with reading hiragana. Writing - especially with kanji - can come later, ideally once you can actually read a dictionary and can use it to learn unfamiliar symbols on your own."

Tessai produces some notecards from his desk, and jots down a handful of hiragana and their phonetic equivalents:  あ a   え e   い I   お O   う U

"Try and find something visually memorable to associate them with, like that one looking like a sideways U, and practice sounding them out. Make a note of where you see them in writing, so you can learn to recognize the symbol in a sentence or word, and then once you feel comfortable you recognize them in context you can move on to the next set."

She examines the cards, nodding. "Hmmm. Person walking across a bridge over a hole, person dabbing, flint and steel, person falling into a hole, sideways U or a talky mouth."

Tessai looks politely baffled at the descriptor of 'dabbing,' but will then guide her through the pronunciation - vowel sounds in Japanese don't change based on context like english - and get her a second notecard with her first set that includes consonents (か けき こく, which mirrors the above pronunciations but with a k affixed to the front) to go through once before going back and checking how much of the vowel memory they maintain.

They retain the vowels pretty well, it turns out. Languages and writing systems are fun.

That's a good start; this is much faster than for first time readers. He can expand her list of characters to practice to include the s and t strings, which if she masters them will put her on track to recognize all the Hirigana in a few days, and walk her through the pronunciations a few times to make sure she has everything before telling her she can stop by whenever she has questions or finishes the list, but he won't always be in and if the door is sealed he's not interruptible for anything except an emergency.

She thanks him with an appreciative smile and heads back out to the front of the shop.

She gets back just as Jinta is setting the sign to what by context probably says 'out for lunch' and locks the door.

"You've got good timing, new girl. Or, new girls? Whichever - you're not a vegetarian, right?"

"Either works, and no we're not vegetarian. Lunch time?"