Was listening to the "Learning Japanese" tutorial again. I was beginning to understand why Japanese always speaks so fast. Simple phrases like "My wife would like to drink water", in Jap would be (sound something like) "Watashi no kanai o Mizu o nomi tagade irun desu ga". Given the same time frame, one would really have to speak at almost twice the speed of that than in English ... =.=
I guess one would really need to drink a lot of water after completing that sentence in Jap :P