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But then a colleague introduced me to a local Japanese language teaching volunteer group. A government program recently helped provide training for thousands of Japanese with some free time and an interest in helping foreigners, and these people are now linked to local volunteer groups, providing lessons in Japanese language for free or a nominal cost. In many groups, the teaching actually takes place one-on-one, allowing everyone to progress—or not—at their own pace.

A large proportion of these volunteers are housewives, with school-aged or grown children, who give up hours of their time to sit with those of us slowly struggling to read a word written in hiragana or trying to wrap our minds around the muddled rules of Japanese sentence structure.

My angel came in the form of Nakagawa-san, a tiny woman in her fifties whose enthusiasm and encouragement showed no limits. Patience, too, proved her forte as I made the same mistakes week after week, asked the same questions and wrote the same characters wrongly. Nakagawa-san's English was about as limited as my Japanese, which actually helped my progress a lot.

Conversationally, Japanese is not such a difficult language, and before long she could ask me about my weekend and receive a reply, even if a little disjointed. Add doses of green tea and Japanese sweets during our mid-lesson break and my Thursday morning class soon became a highlight of my week.

I never meant to learn Japanese—I never even planned to stay there very long. But I soon found I never wanted to stop learning. Not only did I learn a new language, I also learned how much more enriched your experience abroad is if you can have at least a short conversation with everyone you meet.

Not least of all, that includes the smiling sushi shop man. My sushi was soon half-price, and I learned more about the ins and outs of the sushi business than I ever thought possible.

Amanda Kendle is an Australian addicted to traveling who has lived in Japan, Slovakia and Germany. She works as an English teacher but says she probably learns more from her students than they do from her.

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