Asking for directions in Tokyo

Almlost nobody knows English here.. and of course Hindi . These are the 2 languages I know, so its a lot of sign language and still no understanding kind of movie that playes everyday( its been only a few days yet).

Still, people seem to be very helpful and often embarrassed when they can not understand what we are tyring to ask. We travel by the city subway or JR ( Japan Rail) for commutation. I learned from my japanese colleague how to buy the tickets from the machine. There is no manual ticket window. Here are some of the incidents of languge problem kind:

1. I put 3 coins in the ticket machine, The ticket machine keeps one and returns the other two. I try again, again it returns 2 and keeps one, third time also the same thing. The machine beeps and shows some message in (can you guess?) -Japanese, so I have no way to know what is happening wrong. I try a coin of larger denomination and it works. Later in the day I found out that the coin I was using was not Japanese yen, it was Singapore dollar coin that stayed in my wallet from Singapore airport. The machine must be telling me , but how could I read ?

2. We have a map which shows the station in English and Japanese. But we are trying to find out the ticket amount, which is only available in a big board in japanese language. There are a lot of stations all over the board, all in japanese. So I try to take a "mental" snapshot of what was written there in my hand map and try to match it with the pictures in the board, 15 minutes of struggle but I and my friend do not see anything which matches the station name that we have in the map in our hand.. finally one helpful Japanese who was standing near us and knew english tells us what we were looking for.