Can you read Japanese? The problem might not be the characters themselves, but the fact that you can understand what&#x27;s being written. I was working at a cafe in a foreign country a while ago, and I really enjoyed the background noise because I couldn&#x27;t understand anything anybody was saying. It wasn&#x27;t distracting at all. If somebody was speaking English though, I&#x27;d be unintentionally using some of my brain to process whatever they were saying.