I'll never forget the first time I went to city hall in Japan to talk about the national health insurance plan. The man behind the desk explained the whole scheme in perfect Japanese, which at that time was perfectly unintelligible to me.
As a matter of fact, when you don't understand any Japanese, it's similar to listening to a dog barking. I knew he was trying to tell me something, I just couldn't quite figure out what.
"Woof, woof, woof," said the nice man at the city hall. He went on for several minutes like this before saying, "Wakarimasu ka?"