Glad to hear your students have done well. But dude... put down the dictionary and books. Get out there, hang out with Japanese people who speak bugger all English and socialise! Seriously, that's how I learnt most of my Japanese. Learning a language is like learning how to swim or ride a bicycle... sure, you can study theory from books and stuff (yawn), but nothing beats just doing it! More fun too.

You'll be amazed at how quickly and efficiently you can learn just from regular spontaneous conversations with native speakers. And try to find Japanese speakers who don't speak English -- which is really easy in Japan! If anyone asks to practice English with you, just politely decline -- simply tell them that you only speak English in class, but otherwise you didn't travel thousands of kilometres to live in Japan just to speak a language that you could be speaking back home! Another tactic is - if someone keeps speaking to you in English. And it doesn't have to only be with Japanese people -- you can also speak Japanese with other Westerners too. When I was living in Japan I frequently had contact with other Australian students -- and at one stage, most of us agreed that we would just stop speaking English with each other and just speak exclusively in Japanese. It was weird at first, but we got used to it. One person didn't want to do it -- we tried to talk to her in Japanese, but she kept replying in English. Result: her Japanese improved the least amongst all of us.

I know that it's hard when you're required to speak English at work -- but when you're outside of work, just treat the English language like plague and try to avoid it as much as you can. Surely most of your work colleagues don't speak English. Even if they do, just speak to them in Japanese.

Another difficulty for you too is the "hidden linguistic racism"... by this I mean, Japanese people often speak slower and more clearly to Gaijin like you than they do with Gaikokujin like me. I'm sure that they don't know that they do this, but I find that they do (have you noticed this?). I think it actually comes from them being too polite... they see a white person and think, "Aww look, he's trying to speak Japanese... I'll be nice and speak slowly and clearly to help him understand." -- which may feel really useful at first, but in the long term it actually delays your learning of the language because, let's face it, native speakers don't speak methodically slowly or clearly! They speak fast and slur lots! But as your Japanese improves, and once Japanese people realise that you are fluent and capable of understanding what they're saying, they'll soon stop patronising you with slow and overenunciated speech and just talk to you normally. And to be fair, not every Japanese person does this... but some of them do.

I sometimes encounter the reverse of this in Australia where I meet some white people who try talking to me slowly, overenunciated pronunciation and worse of all, loudly! Even if my English was no good, why shout?? I do find that at least Japanese people are good in that they don't think speaking louder and louder is going to make themselves more intelligible. It's a language deficit, not a hearing impairment!

Have faith in yourself dude. I have faith in you, and I'm serious when I said that you'll be ぺらぺら by next year! You can do eet!!