Celebrating Grammar in Style

It’s National Grammar Day today, and to celebrate I really wanted to wear my grammar shirt. Alas, it is too cold here to go around in a t-shirt, so I’ll show my pride here instead.
My other favorite language nerd shirt is this one.

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Japanese Placement Test

Hmmm, the Olympics appear to be over, removing my main excuse for not blogging. I have some catching up to do. I thought I’d start with something from just a few days ago, since it’s fresh in my mind.
One of my professional development goals/suggestions from my boss for this year was that I consider taking [...]

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English Education on the Train

As a brief break from my trip log, I would like to report (and complain about) an ad I saw on the train in Tokyo. First, some background for those of you who haven’t been spending any time on the Yamanote line recently: Above the doors in all the train cars, there are two small [...]

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Shocking Rudeness

A very bizarre conversation happened last night after karate class ended. The subject of my upcoming trip to Japan and China had come up, (since I’ll be missing the next 3 weeks of classes, but also because people were interested and jealous, neener, neener,) and the conversation took a turn that went like this:
Nearly College-Aged [...]

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On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen

From Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, by Veronica Chambers. I knew I was going to like this book before it ever got around to discussing the actual topic of the book, because by page 3, I already found myself saying, “Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s what it’s like.”
I grew up in [...]

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Subjective Volume

One of the faculty members I work with is responsible for doing phone interviews with students who will be going abroad with our program in China, in order to establish language proficiency. She does parts of these interviews in both English and Chinese. The last time she did it, she complained that one of the [...]

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Word Tracker

At some point, while looking at TESOL research on students’ reading habits, and later when looking at website usability information for my last job, I was made aware of a research method that allowed researchers to track readers’ eye movements across an area of text. For TESOL purposes, researchers were looking at speed of reading [...]

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On things that are wrong

One of the longest standing country music stations here in the Raleigh area is now vigorously advertising a new… um, I suppose one might call it a service? They have installed a “Holla Line” for people to send “shout outs” to their friends, family, etc. They did not go so far as to suggest that people might [...]

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It’s so true

From Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler, who was a foreign journalist in China:
[Background: Hessler is being told the story of why Mr. Xu, the owner of the cornstarch plant he is visiting, started a second plant after being forced out of his first one.]
I was growing more interested in meeting Mr. Xu. I wanted to see exactly [...]

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Sumimasen

If you live in Japan for even a brief time, you quickly learn that probably the most useful word you know is “sumimasen.” It means “excuse me” and “I’m sorry,” often both at the same time, and is used constantly. I’ve been feeling like I should be saying this at karate all week.
I was sick [...]

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