Soon after I arrived in Japan, I dated a Japanese co-worker who spoke very little English. You can bet that we carried our dictionaries around with us! We later

Soon after I arrived in Japan, I dated a Japanese co-worker who spoke very little English. You can bet that we carried our dictionaries around with us! We later got married (another, less cheerful story). One drawback was that I mainly learned household Japanese and not business/politics Japanese. Also I apparently spoke like a woman because almost all the people around me were women! (Japanese has very distinct versions for men and women.)