It's surprising how little of the local language you learn when you work in English all day. The Korean we learned was purely functional: deciphering menus, ordering food, directing taxi drivers. Our Japanese has been going that way, too. You learn what you use, and you lose what you don't--and up to this point, we really haven't had many opportunities to practice anything but the most basic Japanese.
That's why Nana and I have signed up for some weekly lessons at a local language school here in Fukuoka. We're hoping the shame of coming to class without having done the homework (teachers seem to be more afraid of this than students) will get our butts in gear. Then in August, if all goes well, we'll take a couple week-long intensive courses between the time we get back to Japan and the time school starts up again.
With luck, this will mean we don't go through our second year in Japan as haplessly as we went through our second year in Korea. We'll see!
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