[GoNative]

Somewhat amazingly if anything my Japanese got worse the longer I lived in Japan. I had done close to a year of study before going and a year after arriving went and did a 3 month intensive course in Sapporo. All in all I was getting pretty good at general conversation. Living in the Niseko area though I rarely got to use much Japanese. All my Japanese friends spoke good to excellent english and I had a lot of foreign friends where english was the main language used. All of the tourists I dealt with spoke english and in the workplace english was the main language. So as the years went by I only rarely spoke Japanese and lost a lot of what I had learned.

In the area I lived though not having much Japanese didn't mean you couldn't live a great life. There was a very close and vibrant community of people who did a lot of things together throughout the year. We all lived pretty active and exciting lives working hard and playing hard. Of course if I hadn't lived in the Niseko area my life would have been very different and I would have used and improved my Japanese greatly. I do regret not leaning more but there just wasn't the need to do so to have an enjoyable life.