Listen to a radio broadcast by a foreign journalist in Japan talking about some of his experiences there.

ANNOUNCER: Language is taken for granted unless, of course, you're trying to learn one that isn't your own. Commentator James Fallows has discovered that living in another country can create barriers to communication that are limiting in some ways and liberating in others.

FALLOWS: Right now, you're listening to the radio, but I bet you're doing something else, too - getting dressed, finishing your breakfast, leafing through the paper, driving to work - that is, you're enjoying the luxury of operating in your own familiar language, which your brain can handle so easily that it has plenty of power left to supervise the other things that you do.

Here in Japan, I've been in exile from that comfortable world. If I want to make any sense whatever of the sounds coming out of the radio, the TV speaker, or someone else's mouth, I have to concentrate my complete attention on that task. There's no brain power to spare for anything else, including walking or chewing gum. I've become a man who can do exactly one thing at a time.

This predicament has its good and bad sides. The bad part is a certain narrowing, to put it mildly, of the information flowing into my life. You take in information as if you are drinking from a big beer stein; for me, it's like sucking through a tiny clogged straw. But the good part is the same enforced need to concentrate. I may do only one thing at a time now, but I do that thing very intently. One of the things I've begun doing most seriously is to read books all the way through. Of course, we all read books in America, too, but precisely because of the other distractions it's often hard to stick with them. Reviews, excerpts, TV interviews take the place of actual books.

But here with my one-track mind and my exhaustive need to retreat into English, there's nothing to keep me from finishing a book once I get started. I have the added plus of spending three to four hours each day on the Tokyo train system which, when it's not so crowded that I can't raise my arms, lets me go through several books a week. Indeed, thanks to the train, I am the only person on Earth actually to have read Paul Kennedy's famous Rise and Fall of the Great Powers book. This whole-book environment changes your world view, making you more deeply but more spottily informed. I find that I have become more patient with long-winded explanations, and less likely to cut somebody else off and make him get to his point. There are problems with this perspective, too, I'm sure, but right now my brain can't handle thinking what they might be.

ANNOUNCER: This report was originally broadcast on National Public Radio on Morning Edition on March 23rd, 1989, and is reproduced with permission of National Public Radio. Any unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

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