very much agree, lived in tokyo for 1 year, i even had a private japanese tutor, but could hardly even order stuff from mcds, sure you could point to the pictures, but the follow up questions would be something along the lines of do you want this as part of a set or individually ordered, would you like it super sized, and/or would you like to swap coke for sprite or something along those lines. the funny thing is that i found out a lot of chinese students worked those menial jobs, so i could use mandarin to order. the machines were the best, just follow the pictures.

i love japan in general, had a lot of friends luckily that spoke great english, but the cost of living for me was 1700 usd per month (this was back in 2006, of course i lived in high flying shinjuku), and the english barrier was difficult to get over. probably if i was a bit younger and didn't need to seriously advance my career, i would have stuck it out and learned the language. you could probably find a decent apartment for 800-1200 usd, not sure what the rate is now.

i do think the high-tech scene is good in tokyo, the food awesome, the culture one of a kind, i just wasn't patient enough to learn the language.

Yeah, English ability in Japan is really limited overall. My mom (who's a Japanese national) was surprised/disappointed at my cousins' English ability after taking six years of English classes (the norm, I think).

From what I understand, part of it is just English being vastly different from Japanese, and the other part is the Japanese school system being really terrible at language teaching.

Agreed. For a long termer, you need to make a 5-6 month full time investment in learning the language. From then on, being immersed means you’re gradually improving and your options and understanding of the everyday expands considerably.