[opergolon]

I took four years of college Japanese and hang out with Japanese friends. When I did an internship in Japan, that was enough that I could usually make myself understood and get the gist of what was going on around me. Except in the dojo. Trying to understand "old man kendo" Japanese is worse than trying to understand "drunk with his mouth full" Japanese. As far as I can tell, during keiko, all Japanese words and phrases are pronounced as "chuh!"

When it comes to remembering and understanding technique names and other phrases, knowing Japanese helps quite a bit. Many times the translation doesn't convey some of the more subtle meanings of the original. I remember once a visiting sensei was explaing foot work in Japanese. The translator described the motion of the back foot as snapping it up to the right, but the Japanese explantion contained the idea of keeping it attached to the right.

And to pick up on what Confound wrote. Very few people in Japan speak English well. The annoying thing is that those very few people arn't the same as the very few people who think they speak English well. I was at a party and this man kept trying to tell me a story in very bad English, and I kept asking "Did you really mean ... ?" He never got the clue.