[brianobush]

True, but you can go at it backwards too. I met my wife in grad school and decided to learn the language afterwards; probably better route IMO. The hard part has been using English as a crutch - it has always been hard to go all out in Japanese.

[ahoyhere]

My husband is a native (Austrian) German speaker and when we met, his English wasn't great. But he was just rusty… meanwhile, because we're DOING things together, we've given up on speaking German because it gets too frustrating and slow.

Now, even if I start a conversation in German, he responds in English. Bad habit. :)

I've absorbed as much as I can absorb from listening to people, language CDs & trying to read the free daily papers. I have pretty good but imprecise reading comprehension. I can have a basic conversation but I get tenses wrong sometimes and cases wrong often. (Farking cases.)

This winter I'm going to pay for a few weeks of one-on-one immersion at the local Berlitz school and hope that gets me over the hump!

[brianobush]

You might want to try Listening-Reading method. Requires a book in both languages and audio in the target learning language. Google "Listening-Reading method"