Today I finally did what I should have done a long time ago. I took my first Japanese lesson (admittedly I took my first real Japanese lesson in high school in 1995, but I was uninterested back then). I've been trying to learn Japanese on and off for the last two or so years. On a trip to Japan in 2003 I had enough skills that I was able to fumble through my phrase book in order to tell a bus driver "I will forget my ticket in Obama". Since then I've progressed enough that I know some basic vocab, the odd verb, and some basic sentence structures - but at the end of the day I can't combine it all to make any attempt at communication. I'm hoping the lessons will give me a lot more structure around my learning. The lessons are actually very interesting - there is no english in the classroom, instead, meanings are conveyed through images and body language. I'm really impressed with how much we managed to cover in the first lesson and hope it continues at this pace. Having a native Japanese speaker in an almost one on one environment really helps. I'm also considering just how far I can go to immerse myself in Japanese outside of lessons. I'm already running the Japanese version of Media Player 10 and MSN Messenger 7. But what's really tempting is the Japanese version of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition available on MSDNAA.