What I get from Super Mario

During my travels, in 2005, barefoot walking and cycling the length of Japan, I once met a Spaniard. His name was Mariano, but after a few days' of his company my wife and I began to think of him as Super Mario.

Super Mario - the Spaniard-in-the-works - had minimal Japanese. His English was minimal too, but that didn't stop him from making full use of every word that he half knew, every gesture. Super Mario was, without doubt, the most active language user - if you plot the frequency of his mistakes and correlate against his grammatical knowledge - I've ever known.

And so I take from him (or would wish to) the fearlessness and recklessness of forging blithely with foreign languages. Not give grammar a thought!