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In article >,
ps says...

>Many Japanese are fluent in English, and many more aren't but
>love the chance to practice. Same is true throughout Asia.

I know this is what a lot of people say about Japan (they also say a lot
of Japanese don't speak English...depends who you ask!). But we didn't
really experience this. Most Japanese didn't speak English....they
understood a a number of essential words in English, but didn't speak
the language. The ones who did speak it were a rarity. We did find that
people in service jobs spoke it more often than people in stores or on
the street though. We had good luck in most restaurants as there was
usually at least one person in each with decent English skills (or
enough to get our order across).

We did have some schoolkids try to speak to us to practice English, but
that was it really. The funny part was that some old people on the
street would start talking to us in Japanese every so often. Even though
we'd tell them we didn't understand (in Japanese), they'd keep going on
and on. I think they thought it was a novelty to see westerners.

J.C.