That title reminds me of a gaffe I made in my first days as a student in Beijing in 1981, when I walked into the campus bank and confidently announced I wanted to open a window - the word for 'window' (窗户 - chuanghu) being confusingly close to 'account' (帐户 zhanghu), at least to my young foreign brain. "Oh yes?" said the teller with a tired half-grin. Some time later, I went to the clinic with a fever: "I want to see some clothes", I said - 'clothes' (衣服 yifu) sounding like the love-child of two words for 'doctor' - 医生 (yisheng) and 大夫 (daifu).

I suppose the knack when learning a language is to ignore the risk of making this type of mistake, and just (in the words of Radio 4) 'go for it'.

Stuck here in London, sans Japanese family or environment, that's quite difficult to achieve. My 'all angles' strategy is perhaps partly a con. I think that by going to a concert of Japanese music, something will permeate into my brain, something of the lilt of Japanese even if not words. Or perhaps it's more of an encouragement and reward. I would almost certainly not have gone to the concert last night in LSO St Luke's (keep up, folks, it's been on my events page for like days already) if I'd not been looking for something Japanese to do - and I'd have missed a great event.

The koto player Etsuko Takezawa played a wonderful and varied set. I've never seen the koto played live before, and was entranced. The opening piece, Midare by Kengyo Yatsuhashi (1614-1685) was everything I could possibly hope for.

There was an interesting comparison with the Chinese 'guqin' (古琴), which I'd seen in the previous night's performance. The guqin has no bridge; notes are changed by pressing the string against the sound-board. Although the two instruments must have a common ancestry, the subtleties and flexibility of the koto seem greater.

Anyhow, that's where windows came from: that learning a language opens you to all kinds of experience, a different understanding of how things are. Even if we make fools of ourselves along the way.