But it also turns out that we are way ahead of them in some important areas, such as pizza. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan. The result of my language-training program was that I arrived in Tokyo speaking Japanese at essentially the same fluency as cement. I never did get much better while I was there.
Many Japanese people know a little English.
But it's often very little. Japan is not like, for example, Germany, where everybody seems to speak English better than the average U.S. congressperson. In Japan, you will often find yourself in situations where nobody speaks any English. And the weird thing is, English pops up everywhere in Japan. You constantly see signs and advertisements with English words in them, and you constantly hear American rock music being played in stores and restaurants.