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Originally Posted by Crownedinterror
I understand what you are saying and it's probably true. But even if my vocabulary is still poor in Japanese but I can speak. I know enough Japanese to live in Japan right now. I have been studying Japanese for 3 years now. And when I didn't understand one particular word they would use their cellphone to search for the English equivalent.
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Knowing enough to get by in life, and knowing enough to be treated as a Japanese speaker by others are completely different things. I am guessing that most likely everyone spoke to you as simply as they could - which is an incredibly stressful endeavor.
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But while laughing? You don't laugh in English? And she studied in US. I don't think she wasn't confident about her English skill level.
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Yes, you DO laugh in English. If she was in English speaking mode, with her "English voice" - switching out of that just for laughing would be pretty hard. It really has little to do with actual English ability. But even if she studied in the US, that doesn`t mean that she was confident. In fact, it could have made her LESS confident as there would be more pressure for her to be a good speaker. But really, English ability itself has nothing to do with the weird "English voice" phenomenon.
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And I'm not the western-type guy, I live in Canada but I was born in Nicaragua. People fail at guessing where I'm from usually.
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That really matters a lot less than you may think. The "western-type guy" doesn`t have to be white. You just have to not be
Asian and be from an English speaking country. In your case, if you answered a question about where you`re from with "Canada" - you fit.