Originally Posted by
pdxkankuu
My best recommendation regarding communication: assume your japanese will be complete garbage, assume that nobody can speak english, and you'll be quite happy when you invariably manage to communicate better than the folks who don't know any japanese at all. =D
This is definitely a good mindset to adopt. I'm not under any illusion that two semesters of college Japanese plus a steady diet of subtitled anime qualifies me to communicate on any sort of intelligent level
.
I know several versions of "I'm sorry", "please", and "thank you", with varying levels of politeness, as well as a few dozen verbs and nouns. I anticipate sounding like a very well-mannered caveman.