steepholm

In my lifetime, British English has succumbed to American influence in numerous ways. Who now uses the good old British billion, for example? Floors are another area in which I've noticed some linguistic drift. As you know, in Britain the bottom floor is the ground floor, from which (going up) we reach the first floor, second floor, third floor, and so on. In the US, the first floor is the bottom one.

I've noticed the British practice wavering for a while now. For example, large buildings such as hotels often number their rooms using the floor number as the first digit, and those numbers are usually number American style. Naturally this causes confusion.

Anyway, just as paleontologists particularly value those fossils that show an organism caught midway through an evolutionary change, I was interested to see this barber in Clifton the other day. First, let me show you (courtesy of Google street view) what it used to look like:

As you can see, this three-storey building mentions a first floor (upstairs) and also a top floor.

More recently, an extra sign has been added:

Now, the building is divided into Ground Floor, First Floor and Third Floor.

Whatever happened to the second floor? I suggest that it has been lost in the crack between two numbering systems. The barbers knew that the bottom floor was the ground, and they knew that the floor above that was the first floor. But, rather than extent that system indefinitely, they thought, "Oh, that's three floors up, so it must be the third floor."

I don't say this is interesting, let alone important, but I think it's kind of neat.

To learn Japanese (or any language) is also, of course, to learn one's own. I think this was first　borne in on me at primary school, when I realised that "new" could be translated as "neuf" or "nouveau" depending on whether it was "brand new" or "new to me." A bit later, the difference between "aber" and "sondern" in German made me look at "but" in a whole new way (it's the difference between "I'm tired but happy" and "I'm not tired but happy").

And, of course, I've had many similar experiences in Japanese, for example with distinctions that don't exist in English ("watasu" versus "tsutaeru" for "convey," depending on whether the object is a thing or a message, for an example that came up very recently), or indeed ones that don't exist in Japanese ("ashi" means both "leg" and "foot," to take one of the more mind-blowing ones).

Today my friend Mami was telling me how someone had stolen her friend's bag when she was travelling. I can't remember what she said, but it was slightly off, grammatically, and I corrected it to "Your friend had her bag stolen."

This confused her, as well it might, since the construction looks exactly like the one we use when we purposely arrange for someone to do something to something for us, e.g. "I had my kitchen rewired." I'd never noticed the similarity before. Indeed, it only works when referring to the subject's own property: "I had your bag stolen" sounds as if it's spoken by a criminal mastermind.

Are there are any other verbs that allow a similar construction to "I had my bag stolen" (i.e. someone stole my bag)? I can't think of any right now.

A few years ago, John Boyne had a hit book, later a film, in which he told the story of an oppressed group from the point of view of a member of the group doing the oppressing, and made the latter's suffering the centre of the story.

This device clearly worked so well for him that he has apparently done it again, in a different arena. His latest novel (which I won't name here, because even the title is pretty horribly transphobic) has caused quite a flurry on Twitter, I gather. I suppose I'll have to read it at some point, because I'm meant to be giving a lecture on this kind of fiction later in the summer, but it can certainly wait until I get back to England.

What I want to mull about in this post isn't his novel, which sounds terrible, so much as an article he recently published to promote it, in which he joins the ranks of those disavowing the word "cis." The reason he gives is a familiar one, and one that has some superficial plausibility: one shouldn't foist labels onto people who don't wish to accept them. He doesn't "identify as" a cis man, but simply as a man.

The obvious riposte is a tu quoque: how would Boyne (who is gay) feel if straight men refused to be described as such, despite being attracted exclusively to the opposite sex? If they said, "How dare you call me a straight man - I'm just a man!"? At best, it would seem a rather strange thing to say. More likely, he would hear it as a way of dividing the world into gay people and "normal" people.

Or, let's take a different kind of case. How would Boyne feel if someone described him as six feet tall? (Let's assume for the sake of argument that that is his height.) Would he say, "I'm not a six-foot man, I'm just a man! How dare you foist that label onto me when I don't identify with it?"

I very much doubt he would protest in those terms. But why not? What is the difference between that and calling him cis?

It's an obvious point, and trans people and allies have been painstakingly making it for years, but otherwise-sensible people have been curiously resistant to it. Somehow, it seems that certain things (being six feet tall, being Irish) are harmless adjectives, the use of which, assuming they are true, would cause no one to feel infringed upon, even where - as in the case of nationality - they might have a real connection to one's sense of personal identity. Other things, no less accurate, are regarded as "labels", the application of which is "foisting". For an adjective to be applied felicitously, it just has to be consistent with fact; a label, by contrast, also has to be something one "identifies with."

Trans people tend to use the word "cis" as an adjective, but many cis people hear it as a label - as a political act, not a neutral description. The reason, I suspect, is that this is also the way they hear the word "trans." Just as any trans person who opens their mouth is automatically called a "trans activist," so to mention that one is trans is to be parsed as making a kind of political point. That, I think, is why disavowal of "cis" is basically transphobic.

Still, all that said, the distinction between "adjective" and "label" is not a sharp one, any more than that between constantive and performative language generally. If I had time, and were not on a train to Kobe, I would spend a couple of hours maundering that, but for now I will refer you to my friend Mr Derrida.

I was looking up the ancient anthology Manyoshu (万葉集 = collection of ten thousand leaves) just now, because it is apparently the source of the new era name, 令和, and I came across a Wiki entry for "makura kotoba" or "pillow words." Pillow words seem to be a bit like (Wiki's own comparison) standard Greek epithets such as "grey-eyed Athena" or (what seems to me a bit closer, since "grey-eyed Athena" still contains "Athena") Old English kennings such as "whale road" for "sea". Anyway, this bit intrigued me:

Some historical makura kotoba have developed into the usual words for their meaning in modern Japanese, replacing the terms they originally alluded to. For example, niwa tsu tori (庭つ鳥, bird of the garden) was in classical Japanese a makura kotoba for kake (鶏, chicken). In modern Japanese, niwatori has displaced the latter word outright and become the everyday word for "chicken" (dropping the case marker tsu along the way).

That gave me a "now it all makes sense!" moment, as "niwatori" had always struck me as slightly odd.

I feel there must be quite a few words in English where a poetic term has replaced the ordinary one, or at least because as common, but I'm having trouble coming up with them. "Robin" for "redbreast" by way of "robin redbreast" is one, I suppose, and you can trace a similar route for some rhyming slang: it only occurred to me the other day that "Use your loaf!" involved rhyming slang, for example. But surely there must be other/better examples?

Those of us of a certain age will remember Ridley Scott's famous Hovis ad, which shows a flat-capped baker's boy pushing his bicycle up a steep hill to the accompaniment of a brass band playing the New World symphony, while the voice of the (now grown) boy reminisces fondly about the old days. But where is the ad set?

I've always mentally put it up north somewhere, and I'm not alone. In this article, written in 2006 to mark the ad's being chosen "the nation's favourite", the writer places it in "a northern town". And this evening, one of the pundits on Radio 4's Powers of Persuasion twice mentioned the north in general, as well as Yorkshire in particular.

I'd read somewhere that the ad was actually filmed in Shaftesbury, Dorset, but I never wavered from my belief that the fictional setting was the north. [EDIT: As Kalimac points out below, even the website for the hill in Shaftesbury where it was made mentions that the setting is "a northern industrial town".] After all, there's that brass band, and the voiceover is in a Yorkshire accent.

Except - it isn't. It's a West Country accent - quite possibly a Shaftesbury one. Listen for yourself:

"Hovis 'Bike' advert 1973 (Britain's favourite TV ad)" (Watch on YouTube)

I was only ten when the advert aired, and until they played it on the radio for the documentary this evening, I hadn't seen or heard it for years. Somehow, in the interim I grafted a northern accent onto my memory of it. That's a little odd, but what's more extraordinary is that the entire nation seems to have done the same thing. Even tonight, experts on the advert were talking about its northern setting, despite just having heard it.

Why? Is it the flat cap? (But people wore those in the south, too!) The brass band? That must have a lot to do with it.

Perhaps too there's a sense that a certain style of working-class nostalgia belongs properly to the north of England - or even that there is no southern working class at all?

"He sometimes works in the pet shop next door," I said to my Japanese teacher, referring to the man who had approached us in the cafe where we were sitting to say hello. "We got to know each other a bit because we came to the same cafe quite often."

"It's a good job you said that in Japanese," she replied (because I had). "What if he overheard you?"

I don't think he would have cared, frankly - his work as a part-time pet shop assistant is hardly a secret - but it got us talking about the way lesser-known languages are sometimes used as a secret code. My teacher's daughter, for example, has been known to make personal remarks about the appearance of people in the street, safe in the knowledge that she won't be "overheard" because she's making them in Japanese.

I can certainly see the appeal of using a language this way, but it's not something an English monoglot can ever do, given how widely English is understood. Even in Japanese it's a risk: who knows whether the person whose big behind you've just dissed may not also be studying for her JLPT1? Even if you're prepared to take the risk with Japanese, what about, say, German or Italian? How obscure would a language have to be for you to be publicly catty in it?

My friend Miho once told me how she and her husband were on a train in central Europe, going to a language conference. The only other person in the compartment was a European man, travelling alone. She and Hiroshi chatted in Japanese, naturally; but when they came to their destination, their companion surprised and (more interestingly) shocked them by making a polite remark in perfect Japanese as they disembarked.

What interests me about the story isn't that Miho was a little retrospectively embarrassed at being understood (though, knowing her, I don't suppose she had been poking fun at their companion), but that she felt quite strongly that the man should have made it clear that he could understand them much earlier. Apparently he felt it too, because later at the conference (where it turned out he too was a delegate) he found her and apologised for not speaking sooner.

To be honest, I find that quite hard to get my head round - but then, it would never occur to me to assume that no one could understand my native tongue.

Remember these lines from the theme song to Cheers?

You want to go where people know
People are all the same.
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

Or perhaps it was actually:

You want to go where people know
People aren't all the same.
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

The weird thing is that they both work as feel-good messages - either about our shared humanity, or our individual uniqueness. I guess there's no real opposition there, but it still feels kind of odd that they both make sense when they appear to contradict each other. And I still don't know which version is correct.

This is so typical of the way that Japanese slang works that I had to share.

English speakers often use "lol" to indicate laughter (except when it means "lots of love", but I gather this has almost died out - David Cameron got lolled at for using it that way, I recall). The equivalent in Japanese is the kanji "笑", which comes from the verb "笑う/warau", "to laugh".

However, later, some Japanese - thinking that English was cool - decided to use the English letter "w" - the first letter of "warau" - instead. Hence you will sometimes see "wwww" being used to indicate laughter.

More recently, some other Japanese looked at those rows of "w"s and decided they looked a bit like blades of grass. So, the new way of indicating laughter is to use the kanji "草" (kusa), which means "grass."

Three classic Japanese slang-making methods in one: a) abbreviation; b) borrowing from English; c) pictograms.

Interesting linguistic fact. Because as a child I associated the expressions "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" (I know, I know), for a long time I heard "sous-chef" as "Sioux chef".

Because the logical connection between "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is one of "A causes B", I heard "Feed a cold and starve a fever" the same way. It was confusing.

"Don't let good food go to waste" teeters perpetually on the brink of "Don't let good food go to waist", thus almost reversing its own meaning.

Any others?

Most, if not all, kanji have their origins in pictograms, some much older than others. The oldest were scratched onto turtle shells and other surfaces in ancient China, then baked so that the pattern of the resulting cracks could be used for oracular purposes. Some were invented as recently as the last century, but the vast majority have a long lineage. Over time they've changed shape reasons of style or simplification, the cultural context has altered and rendered certain features opaque, errors have crept in, phonetic elements have become mixed with meaning elements, and so on, each change taking them further from pictogrammatic clarity.

This year I've been using this book to learn kanji, and one of its charms is that it gives a brief history of each character's forms at various points in its history, plus a selection of modern scholars' attempts at interpreting what it represents. Being scholars, of course, they generally disagree.

Still, when you start learning Japanese you are usually lobbed a few kanji that offer a tantalising pictogrammatic promise. Yes, 木 does look like a tree; 川 a bit like a river, and 口 sort of like a mouth. If you take into account that circles are hard to draw with a calligraphy brush, I think it's easy to see 目 as an eye, too, with the two inner lines being the top and bottom of the iris or pupil.

Before long, though, things get harder. As a random example, here is 縮 (shuku), which means "contraction" or "reduction". It's made up of elements meaning "thread" and "lodging", if that helps? No, didn't think so.

That and a couple of thousand others I'm still in the process of memorising, and will be for the foreseeable future. But for this post I'm interested in another group. For example, here is 月, which means "moon". Back in the day, its pictogram ancestor was a relatively realistic portrayal of a crescent moon, but it's changed a lot since. I think I'd have trouble making a case for the current character as a pictogram, in Western terms.

However - and this is the point of this post, I suppose - I now cannot look at that character without thinking "moon". This is a result of rote learning of the most crudely Pavlovian kind, of course, but I feel it goes further than that. I no longer experience character and meaning (and the various readings that go with them) merely as a coincidence of arbitrary associations, linked only by increasingly well-trodden neural pathways; subjectively, I have begun to feel that the 月 character actually looks like the moon.

It's an interesting mental phenomenon, which applies to other characters, too. Does 女 look like a woman? I'm pretty sure that it does so now more than it did when I first learned it a few years ago. As I internalise more kanji, perhaps this sense will spread to more complex characters as well. Perhaps there'll come a time when 縮 really does look like a mimetic picture of the concept of shrinking? I'm not there yet - but if so, it explains why Japanese people sometimes insist that the kanji are pictograms, when (with relatively few exceptions) they aren't, to Western eyes. I always assumed that such assertions were a kind of (slightly dishonest) attempt to encourage rookie learners, but perhaps it really reflects their subjective experience? After all, these are people who can look at a green traffic light and call it blue.

Those of you who learned French - do you remember the lesson where they taught you about the third person plural pronoun? To recap: if you're talking about a group of males, it's "ils"; if a group of females it's "elles". But if it's a mixed group? Well, of course it's "ils", even if there's just one male and 999 females, so humiliating would it be for any man to have "elle" slapped on him. Besides, the rules seem to declare, men are simply more important.

I'm sure many have raged against this very patriarchal piece of grammar - including my daughter. However, today, my Japanese teacher told me that when she was learning French, her teacher (a man) had a different explanation: "If you have a glass of water and someone pees in it, it doesn't matter whether how much. Even if it's just a drop - you're still not going to drink from that glass."

Yes, I know it's problematic in its own right, but what a useful corrective to an age-old unfairness! (When I told my daughter this, she laughed like a drain.)

Olyotya!

I'm ashamed to say that that's the only word of Lugandan I know: it means "Hello there!", or similar. If Haawa, my mother's helper, greeted my that way I would understand her, but she always does so with the words "You're welcome!". This sounds a bit strange to my ears, as if I had just thanked her for something. Similarly, when I have a small mishap (e.g. dropping a potato I happen to be peeling), she'll say "Sorry!", which of course prompts me to assure her that it was my own clumsy fault. But in Ugandan English, "Sorry!" is just an expression of sympathy, apparently.

All this I knew already, but only yesterday did I learn that, almost 60 years after independence, Ugandan schools teach exclusively in English. Children are punished for speaking Lugandan, either in lessons or indeed any time they're on school property.

Shades of the Welsh not, as I remarked - and then I remembered that, only two days ago, while travelling on the Cardiff-bound train from London, I overheard a young Welsh woman discussing with her friends what to call her forthcoming (if that's the right word?) baby. "I don't want to give her a name like Sian or Blodwen, because with a name like that you're always stuck in Wales."

I wanted to tell her it was a shame, but then I remembered a passage in The Owl Service - a book almost as old as independent Uganda:

“There’s nothing wrong with the way you speak, except when you’re putting it on to annoy people.”

“But I’m a Taff, aren’t I?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alison. “I like it. It’s you, and not ten thousand other people. It doesn’t matter, Gwyn!”

“It doesn’t matter—as long as you haven’t got it!”

I don't really want to be like Alison, now, do I?

Bore da!

1. Denial
There are how many kanji in everyday use? Over two thousand? With tens of thousands more after that? And they almost all have more than one reading? That just can't be right!

2. Anger
Japanese has such a stupid writing system! Why can't they just use the alphabet like normal people?

3. Bargaining
If I just learn hiragana, katakana and a hundred or so kanji, that’ll get me by in most situations, right?

4. Depression
I’ll never do it. I may as well give up now.

5. Acceptance/Hope
Finally it’s starting to make sense. Sometimes these kanji are actually pretty useful…

I think I'm finally making it to 5, but with frequent relapses to 4 and 3.

I mentioned on Facebook the other week that one of my pet marking peeves this year (they operate on a strict rotation basis) is the habit of saying "it could be argued that X", rather than simply "X". It always strikes me as evasive, a way of saying "I'm going to float an idea, and if you agree with it I'll take the credit, but if you don't then I wasn't advocating it, okay?"

Thanks to

stormdog I just saw the perfect illustration of this tactic, although not using that exact phrase, from Nigel Farage - who I bet scattered "It could be argued that" all over his school essays. It's in this article about the reaction to the London bombings on Fox News. Were internment camps a good way to go, mused the incisive analysts of Fox? (For the benefit of those reading outside the UK, no mainstream British politician - by which for this purpose I mean a politician from a party with more MPs than zero - has suggested it.)

Who better to ask than Nigel Farage? Like one of my bet-hedging students (Farage was a professional bet-hedger when he worked in the City, trading commodities, and the instinct is still strong) Farage doesn't call for internment. He says (of people on police watch lists) "if there is not action, then the calls for internment will grow" and, "unless we see the government getting tough, you will see public calls for those 3,000 to be arrested".

Did he just call for internment? Of course not - how dare you suggest such a thing! He was merely acting as a commentator! (Unless it happens, and then he'll be able to say he was brave enough to float the idea.)

And then of course, along comes Katie Hopkins of the Daily Heil like the organ-grinder's monkey, repeating his sentiment but minus the hedge, proving Farage's words true in the process: “We do need internment camps.” What a double act!

A few people on Facebook were bemused by my dislike of "It could be argued that", implying that it was perhaps a bit over the top. This is why I try to drum into people that it's a cowardly and dishonest tactic, whether you're talking about the date of a sonnet or the best reaction to an atrocity.

Nigel Farage uses it, for heaven's sake!

Japanese words often have a wide range of meanings. For example, there's ataru (当たる): I've cut and pasted this from my flashcard program (Memrise - I recommend it). I could have inserted punctuation in the relevant places, but I think the effect is conveyed more feelingly without it:

ataru = to be hit
to lash out at to be affixed to apply to to be a hit to be afflicted to be selected (in a lottery, etc.) (in baseball) to be hitting well (of fruit, etc.) to be bruised to be equivalent to to lie (in the direction of) to undertake to be applicable to be assigned to face to go well to be successful to be stricken (by food poisoning, heat, etc.) to be on a hitting streak to be in contact to confront to be right on the money (of a prediction, criticism, etc.) to treat (esp. harshly) to be unnecessary to be called upon (by the teacher) to touch to spoil to win to strike to check (i.e. by comparison) to probe into (in fishing) to feel a bite to shave to feel (something) out

I especially like words where the meanings include ones that are antonyms or (better still) near antonyms of each other, such as hitting and being hit, or to be successful and to be stricken. Of course, it sends my mind back to English, which has no shortage of similar artefacts, even in this semantic area. To be touched or struck could be a good or disastrous thing, depending largely on who's doing the touching - a god, the heat, elves (as in elf-stroke), genius.

As ever, a big part of the appeal of learning Japanese (and no doubt any language) is to make oneself more aware of the peculiarities of one's own word-weathered mind, carved as it is into eccentric peaks and whorls by the constant swirl of linguistic currents.

The other day, I imagined (or remembered?) an Addams Family cartoon in which Morticia is discovered sprinkling dust over the furniture, and responds to an enquiry, "Oh, I'm just doing the dusting". "To dust" is one of my favourite auto-antonyms, perhaps because it's such a simple-looking, common word. Who cares whether "cleave" means the opposite of itself, when we don't often use it in either sense? But dust? That gets under one's skin.

Or, to transliterate that: 警察の生活は嬉しくないですね！ "A policeman's lot is not a happy one"

That popped into my head as I walked by Romsey's suitably Trumptonish police station this morning. I was interested to find how neatly Gilbert's pentameter converted into an iambic fourteener - although the translation isn't perfect, "生活" being closer to "way of life" than to "lot", which ought perhaps to have some overtone of being a hand dealt by fate. Oh well, shouganai...

Translating random sentences is fun, and probably also a useful exercise, but it's not the same as original composition. Today, I tried to put my ambivalence at being here in early spring (my favourite season) yet not being in Japan as I have been for the last two years into haiku form:

庭を見て
桜と水仙は
変な出会い

niwa wo mite
sakura to suisen
henna deai

Look in the garden
Cherry blossom and daffodils:
A strange encounter.

#1: when you give blood at Antwerp University, you get free entertainment from a giant drop of blood, who dances around in front of your already-dazed eyes:

I can't decide whether or not this is a good thing.

#2: when the Belgians decide to erect a monument to the characters in a book hardly anyone there has heard of, they make a very good job of it:

#3: When this monument precipitates Korean and Japanese tourists, the Fish and Chip shop round the corner takes on a new dimension, offering panko and tenpura options, and a kimchi side.

#4: When they want to advertise the university, they dress the academics as superheroes (centre-stage is my friend Vanessa, who invited me to talk to her conference on Wednesday):

#5: In Luxembourg, if you're too tired to boil and decorate your own Easter eggs, you can buy them ready-boiled and painted. Probably someone will eat them for you too, for a price:

(Also, there is almost certainly a charming story behind this statue in Luxembourg City, but I've no idea what...)

#6: Finally, it turns out that my brain will only hold a maximum of two languages at a time. Since arriving in Abroad I've done my best at least to make an effort, language-wise, although Flanders and Luxembourg both being notorious nests of polyglotism it was never going to be more than a token one, and it's not as if I knew any Dutch to begin with. However, whenever I try to pull my school French out from the lumber room of my mind I find it's buried under a huge pile of conversational Japanese. I can get at it eventually, but it takes time - rather too much time in a country where everyone's already on a hair trigger to switch to English at the first sign of linguistic ineptitude. I've already thanked someone in a supermarket with 'Arigatou' and, truth be told, a few 'Hai's and 'Daijoubu's may also have escaped the fence of my teeth.

Still, the main business - being patron for a travail de candidature (don't ask) - went off smoothly, though in circumstances that were also rather tragic, for reasons I can't go into here, because it's not my story to tell.

#1: when you give blood at Antwerp University, you get free entertainment from a giant drop of blood, who dances around in front of your already-dazed eyes:

I can't decide whether or not this is a good thing.

#2: when the Belgians decide to erect a monument to the characters in a book hardly anyone there has heard of, they make a very good job of it:

#5: In Luxembourg, if you're too tired to boil and decorate your own Easter eggs, you can buy them ready-boiled and painted. Probably someone will eat them for you too, for a price:

(Also, there is almost certainly a charming story behind this statue in Luxembourg City, but I've no idea what...)

I've been trying to remember (without looking it up) at what point in my lifetime certain kinds of takeaway restaurant became commonplace in the UK. By "commonplace" I don't mean "available somewhere in the country" but "available in a typical mid-sized city" - say, a Derby, a Southampton or a Swansea.

This is my impression (but remember I lived my first 18 years in a small market town, so my knowledge is limited):

Common from before I was born: Fish and Chip shops, Chinese takeaways

1960s on: Indian takeaways and other curry houses

Around 1975-80: American-style hamburger and pizza places (Wimpys had been around longer than that, but seems a bit different in my mind, and not that commonly encountered)

1980s: Kebab houses

1990s on - everything else.

Is that reasonable? Have I left anything out, or got anything badly wrong? Remember, I'm not talking about London or the other really big cities - and of course cities with large immigrant populations from a particular country would probably have that country's food ready in takeaway form earlier.

Also, when did people start saying "to go" instead of "to take away" in this country? My impression is that this Americanism started in coffee shops like Starbucks and spread from there, which would put it the early years of this century. Do you agree?

And, on a different topic, have you noticed that "tsunami" has now almost entirely replaced "tidal wave" in common usage? It was not always so! On the other hand, I sense that "rickshaw" is being edged out by "tuk tuk", so the tide of Japanese-origin words is not entirely unchecked.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

There is No Second Floor

Japanese Diary 39: Having Something Stolen

When is an Adjective a Label?

Pillow Words for a Pillow Book

The Hovis Delusion

Tongues of Confusion

Contradictory Lyrics

Japanese Laughter - a Thee-for-One Deal

Unstable Expressions

Japanese Diary 37: My Salad Days, When I Was Blue in Judgement

Glass-Half-Full Grammar

The Lugandan Not

Japanese Diary 36: the Five Stages of Learning Kanji

A Teachable Moment

Containing Multitudes

Japanese diary 35: Keisatsu no seikatsu wa ureshikunai desu ne!

Japanese diary 35: Keisatsu no seikatsu wa ureshikunai desu ne!

Things I Learned in Antwerp and Luxembourg

Things I Learned in Antwerp and Luxembourg

A Takeaway Memory Test

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