alt Hacker NewsI did two years in Lausanne without speaking French and 9 years in Beijing with…maybe 2nd year proficiency in Chinese (better than most foreigners, but hardly fluent!). You can totally live in society without fluency, Switzerland being harder only because I never studied French before.
If you are doing work with a world market, you are kind of expected to speak the language of that work and not necessarily the country you are in.
Sounds like freetime2 is taking personal responsibility for his deficiencies which is a pretty japanese way of thinking. YMMV in the rest of the world.