I have some experience.. I recently went to Japan but some people, like the staff in the hotel ( who were all young women ) seem to speak really fast, like young women in UK, so I couldn't really keep up with what they were saying.
But I am not just learning from books, I am also getting help from my fiancee (who is a native speaker). We always try to speak to each other in Japanese to help me learn, but I often have to fall back onto English words or sentence structures.
