You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters".
来週は学校に行きません
For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above?Except with names, Japanese writing will have a bunch of Chinese characters with many "simple" Japanese characters sprinkled in between. To someone who doesn't read Japanese, both are "unintelligible" but I find people can identify the more complex Kanji from the more simple Kana quite easily and can point them out with pretty good accuracy, even if they can't read any of the kana.
The above example without Japanese characters if you'd like to see if you guessed correctly:
来週学校行