There are several methods of learning a foreign language, including Grammar-Translation (learning grammar and example sentences), Total Physical Response (“Simon Says” type activities), the Natural Approach (mimicking how children learn), and so on. Added to this is the always-fun “do anything that gets you attention” approach, which I’ve named the Social Feedback Method since that sounds better. Looking back, I can see that I’ve enjoyed surprising my Japanese hosts by doing things they didn’t expect a foreigner to do. Japanese are used to gaijin not being able to eat some of their more unique culinary dishes, but with very few exceptions — natto and the pickled fish guts called shio-kara — I have surprised them by eating everything, including the time I was served whole baby octopus. I also go out of my way to count pairs of chopsticks with the proper counter of zen (e.g. ichizen, nizen, sanzen for one, two, three pairs of chopsticks), rather than the more common counter for long objects hon (which would be ippon, nihon, sanbon). In my heyday I was even able to write a few esoteric kanji that my Japanese wife couldn’t write, although use of computers has killed much of that.
I found I had no problem eating the stranger foods I encountered in Japan.
