In Hot Water...

Almost no one has hot drinks during class anymore! It's too hot to drink coffee now. Maybe we should just serve ice cubes...

In English, you can say "I'm in hot water" when you mean "I'm in trouble". Maybe because of the hot weather, everyone is "in hot water", and so no one wants to DRINK hot water. That makes sense.

Phoenix Wright: Attorney at Law

I recommend this game to anyone who wants to study casual English. The first two games in this series, which is called "Gyakuten Saiban" here, have both English and Japanese text, which you can choose. I'm playing the fourth one right now in Japanese, and it's full of good vocabulary. Beginners might think it's too hard, but Intermediate and Advanced students can probably enjoy it and learn from it.

Rain, rain, go away...

It's raining cats and dogs every day now! I'm glad I don't have to commute very far to work.

California is basically a desert, so it doesn't get much rain. Actually, many people think California is too dry! Many people use skin cream and lip balm. If you don't, your skin might start to itch! Hawaii's weather is more like Japan's. Take vacations in Hawaii if you don't want itchy skin!

Curry Soda?!

Yesterday, we got a very unusual gift from one of our students: curry soda! It looks like lemon soda, but it smells and tastes like Indian curry. I can't say it's absolutely delicious, but it's definitely interesting. According to that student, the company that made this soda also makes wasabi and tofu-flavored soda. I'd like to try them. I'm curious!

Greetings!

They say you can learn a lot about a culture by its unusual vocabulary. There are many words in Japanese that are difficult to express in English - including most 挨拶, which itself is hard to express in English. Of course, English has common words to use as greetings too, but most English speakers don't feel any pressure to use the same ones other people use. In other words, they're not really standardized like Japanese 挨拶. Therefore, words like ご苦労様 or お願いします don't have single, direct translations. In fact, one fun part of speaking English is finding your own way to say those things.

If I drew some kind of general conclusion from this, I'd say that Japanese society is more formal than most English-speaking societies.

I Love Rock 'n Roll

There are many rock fans among our students. I wonder why? I like rock too, but I didn't know it was this popular!

Recently, I've been listening to Deep Purple. Their guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, is excellent. He has a new band now, which plays Renaissance-style folk music. They're interesting, but they're not as good as DP!