There they go, gliding through conversations in flawless Japanese with ease, catching the locals' jokes, even making their own. It all seemed so effortless for them and there I was, struggling away trying to string together a semi-coherent sentence. Just as I had aligned all that tricky grammar into some semblance of order, and was about to unleash it on the world, the entire conversation topic had moved on. I was again frustrated with not being able to express myself at all, let alone fully.