In Japanese, 朝飯前 literally means "before breakfast," or (even more literally) "before the morning meal" - but is used to refer to something that's really easy, a bit like "a piece of cake." The idea is that something so easy that it can be accomplished without the sustenance provided by a full Japanese (rice, miso soup, natto, grilled mackerel, etc ( Read more... )

There are many difficult aspects to learning Japanese as a native English speaker, but I think one of the hardest is word order. Japanese is a language with left-branching syntax, whereas English is most the other way round: think of the difference between "the woman who stole my jacket" and "the my-jacket-stealing woman." While the difference in ( Read more... )

I just learned something rather cool about kanji surnames. One of the main characters in the anime I recently watched has the family name "Takanashi." The "natural" way to write this might be something like 高梨, where the first kanji (taka) means tall, and the second (nashi) pear tree. However, in the case of the anime the name is written "小鳥遊": ( Read more... )

I occasionally watch Richard Osman's House of Games with my dinner. The other day they were doing a round where one contestant has to fill in clues (as best they can) to help another contestant guess a thing, person, event, etc.

In this case the answer was a person, and the clues were:

He was born in the ... century ( Read more... )

Remember that bit in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston Smith tries to see O'Brien's four fingers as five? It's especially hard, I think, because fingers are countable objects. Had fingerness been a graduated quality, it would have been relatively easy to move from seeing a small degree of fingerness to a larger one, just as the boiling frogs of ( Read more... )

In the previous entry I mentioned a distinction that English has but Japanese lacks. Here, to redress the balance, I want to do the opposite, by thinking about the multiple meanings of the word "should ( Read more... )

First, a brief word from our sponsor...

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I had no idea until today that the word "Anglo-Saxon" was in any way controversial. Apparently it's because I hang out in the wrong part of the internet ( Read more... )

Being made to think about the hidden rules of English is a major side-benefit of learning Japanese. The other day I watched a helpful Youtube video about the passive voice. Now, I'd learned the grammatical form of the Japanese passive a while ago, but I hadn't taken in how differently it's used ( Read more... )

In honour of the rugby World Cup, Cardiff is full of trilingual posters, indicative of gutsy determination:


( Read more... )