JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- English Instructor (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe)
- Berlitz Japan, Inc. (ベルリッツ・ジャパン株式会社), Kansai
- Salary: ¥125,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month
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- FT English Teachers for Kids - Osaka
- Kohgakusha Co., Ltd. （株式会社興学社）, Osaka
- Salary: ¥255,000 ~ ¥275,000 / Month Travel Expenses, Encouragement of Japanese learning*
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- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
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Betzee
How did they conduct their investigation? A simple look at the photos that have been released of her as a young woman make it apparent she had a nose job and either lip implants or injections to pump up her plucker (no doubt for the cameras).
Posted in: Octuplets' mom says she's not living off taxpayers' money
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Betzee
If it were used that way, the objection would have to be muted. But often the person then abruptly initiates a whole new line of discussion, more like a haiku poem! I'll never hear the phrase again and not listen to where it's leading, usually it some totally unforeseen and completely unrelated direction.
Sometimes when people have a great deal of education, they really can't deal with mere mortals who are mixing metaphors and misusing sacred concepts. When "impact" became a verb, someone else I know took similar offense. If you live that way, however, it seems like such a joyless existence to me. And that's how I perceive the study of English in Japan.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
That's a monthly payment of course. The comparisons to Angelina Jolie are based not just on brood size but also looks. It appears Ms. Shulman invested her worker's disability payout in plastic surgery.
Posted in: Octuplets' mom says she's not living off taxpayers' money
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Betzee
Wonders never cease, it's the Chinese who are flooding the market and their steel is no doubt cheaper than than that made in Japan.
Posted in: Steel coils
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Betzee
Cleo,
I used to date a mathematician, way back when, who always rolled his eyes in disgust when he would hear someone say, "Then he went off on a tangent..." For those with an academic pedigree in math, or maths in British English, this is a vernacular corruption of a specific geometric function. (I'm not sure that's the technical way to express it but you get my drift.)
Nonetheless, while specific phrases and words may be offensive to some, imagine how boring it would be if language didn't evolve. For me, one of the joys of learning a second language has been to speak the vernacular, which usually doesn't appear in textbooks. Based on the voluminous posts on this thread, it appears the Japanese take a very tedious approach and it's hardly surprising that the results are so poor.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
Hope they are not planning to export that, there's already too much steel on the world market.
Posted in: Steel coils
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Betzee
Every time I go onto the LA Times www site there is another update about this woman! First it was her claims she was not receiving public assistance. When confronted with evidence her family receives food stamps, she then said it was not something she wanted to do and it was "temporary." That was when she had six children, now she has 14! But she is confident she can support them once she gets a graduate degree, an endeavor that has caused her to take out 50,000 in loans.
Moreover, three of her older children are disabled; enabling them to receive close to 1,000 each from Social Security since they are legally fatherless. It's likely the younger eight will also suffer disabilities as well. Kaiser, her HMO, has already applied for MediCal, California's state health care program for the indigent, to cover the costs of their care which has run up a tab so far of 160,0000. They will remain hospitalized for twelve weeks.
Now Ms. Shulman has created a www site asking for donations. Someone responded, "I wouldn't give her a dime but where can I send money to Protective Child Services to remove them from her care?" According to her own mother, who claims ignorance of her worker's comp disability award, Nadya never contributed to the essentials for the older six, occasionally buying a toy was apparently the extent of her financial contribution.
I doubt she will be able to keep the children since she obviously cannot care for them. However, I doubt she would consent to their adoption either, leaving them in foster care limbo, a cruel fate. To have her parental rights terminated would be a lengthy legal battle and one she would no doubt enjoy since it would prolong her 15 minutes of fame and all the comparisons to Angelina Jolie.
Posted in: Octuplets' mom says she's not living off taxpayers' money
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Betzee
Cleo,
That's a different "go" implying everything was going swell until he engaged in some physical action to express displeasure (stomping feet, rolling eyes, etc) which had the effect of ruining it (the mood whatever).
It's common to hear Americans say something along the lines of, "We were talking but hadn't decided anything and then he goes 'I have to go now.'" The first meaning "says" and the second "leave."
Upon occasion I have suffered the humiliation of being made fun of by my compatriots for my more grammatically correct English. But if you want to write for a living, and that's what I do, you've gotta be able to operate at a more formal level than conversational English requires.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
I disagree. Knowing you love someone is your ability to accept the things you don't like about them. Love may bring out a person's better qualities, and hopefully it does, but it won't remake them.
Posted in: How do you know when you are really in love?
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Betzee
As past participles of get, the words got and gotten both date back to Middle English. In North American English, got and gotten are not identical in use. Gotten usually implies the process of obtaining something (: he has gotten two tickets for the show, while got implies the state of possession or ownership ( | he hasn’t got any money).
There's the one which used to drive my grandmother nuts, hearing someone say, "Then he goes, 'I haven't got any money.'" "Goes" is substituted for "says." "Going" indicates physical movement of a person or object but in this usage has been reduced to merely flapping the jaws.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
The landscape of Silicon Valley is littered with start-ups. They may have good ideas but what they lack is savvy marketing people. The deal they typically offer is a modest salary and stock options. If someone buys the product the stock will make you rich once the company goes public. But most don’t and everyone knows that and therefore good marketing people are difficult to sign on for those terms.
Google, by contrast, can hire anybody they want. Working there has a cache that say, eBay down the road, doesn’t. That gives them an enormous advantage in the marketplace. I lived in Mountain View, where Google is headquartered. It was clear they ran the town. When some firm nobody had heard of offered the community free WiFi, which was going to be paid for through pop-up advertisements for local businesses, Google countered they would provide it to residents without the annoyance of pop-up advertisements.
City Hall went with Google but then they were very slow in actually making good on their offer. It was clear the community was going to be a guinea pig for some new product. Most residents just wanted to get online. Finally, with a great deal of PR about giving back to the community it was launched in the summer of 2006. I was gone by then, however, and never got a chance to use it….
Posted in: Free Google email synchs with mobile phones
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Betzee
This is a standard criticism of Asian languages, they are indirect and therefore meanings can be difficult to catch. This only happened to me once. It occurred when my suitcase got separated in transit. I went on to my next destination only to receive a phone call in which the person said, "arrived." Oh great, that's my suitcase I thought. In fact what he meant was "you've arrived," a standard opening line.
The misunderstanding, which was cleared up immediately, resulted from my desperation to get my suitcase not problems with the language itself being unable to convey that.
If you go the Philippines, where English is the language of education, people nonetheless utilize it in the same "indirect" way. American bluntness, which reflects a "cut to the chase" mindset is quite alien and offensive to them.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
The same thing is true for Chinese, but it doesn't impede learning. "Long time, no see" might have been translated directly from Chinese. Yet native Mandarin speakers are able to master the English equivalent, "I haven't seen you for a long time," without undue difficulty.
That's quite a lot, it enables mutual comprehension of signs, for example. Obviously it wouldn't allow for much conversation (but I've never been sure the Chinese and Japanese have much to say to each other anyway).
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
Getting behind the wheel is a dress that short requires some "vanity cover" for the legs unless you want to listen to endless tooting from truck drivers admiring the view from on high.
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Betzee
Having been impressed by the proficiency of students who've gone through immersion programs, I know it can't be completely credited to the teaching. Supportive parents who endure the hassles of getting their kids in such programs are also key to foreign language acquisition. And you don't have to be manipulative about it, like the above example.
By contrast, if the parents don't think it's important, the child won't likely either.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
There's an American teenage boy in Shanghai who's become somewhat of a celebrity owing to his fluent Chinese, learned in a SF school immersion program (for which waiting lists are a mile long). In addition, his father sought out opportunities for him to practice what he'd learned:
“We would go to tourist sites like Fisherman’s Wharf or Golden Gate Bridge and have a race to look for visiting Chinese delegations,” [the father] said, referring to group tours from China. “When we found them, I would walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, I found this kid on the street. He only speaks Chinese. Can you talk to him? Find out what he likes to eat? Can you take him back to China?’"
The reaction was usually the same: “What? How? Wow!” Then everybody would have a good laugh as the visitors marveled at the little redheaded American boy speaking their mother tongue.
The father is also teaching him deception is OK in pursuit of some higher objective. But in reading this I couldn't help but think of the number of kids I'd met in poor countries who were trying to get ahead in just this way.
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
Sometimes it's possible to go too much the other way and acquire an "English is everything" mindset.
Specifically, I remember traveling in Vietnam where I stayed in a guest house run by a man who was trying to settle up a school for street urchins to learn English. His heart was in the right place but I couldn't get it through his head, these kids needed a set of skills. English would only enable them to hawk postcards to tourists or create more pitiful stories to tug at the heartstrings of visitors who would dig deeper into their pockets.
If you have a trade or vocation, English will enable you to utilize it in front of an international audience. That can increase your marketability. But English in itself doesn't offer much to a non-native speaker in the absence of other skills.
To improve the quality of teaching, one really needs to ask, "What are your objectives in learning a second language?"
Posted in: What's wrong with the way English is taught in Japan?
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Betzee
This was exactly the mindset of those who criticized Ronald Reagan's overture to Gorbachev in the 1980s. "He's no different from any of his predecessors, don't be taken in."
Such a mindset really limits our options. In the case of Iran, it forced us to settle on a hardline approach, i.e. we won't talk to you until you stop enriching uranium, which yielded no results.
Posted in: Khatami to run again for Iran presidency
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Betzee
That insight came from watching Jaws again.
When they are looking for food. But if they feel threatened snakes, which are deaf, rely on a sense of motion or perhaps vibration (though it may not be as acute as that of sharks) to ascertain what the suspected predator will do.
Sooo, in dealing with both sharks and poisonous snakes, remain still (which is exactly the opposite of the way most humans react).
Posted in: Tiger shark
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Betzee
Yabits,
Iranians look down on Arabs as heathens. Persia, after all, has historically been a contributor to world culture, most recently through films.
I love Offside which focuses on the onsite detention of a bunch of sophisticated urban girls seeking admittance to a sports stadium, a male-only venue, to watch a World Cup play-off game. Their minders are several country yokel soldiers. This was based on the director's own daughter's experience. Yet it becomes much more in his hands. The detention serves as a metaphor for the contradictions, restrictions, and injustices all citizens of the Islamic Republic navigate in daily life.
Posted in: Khatami to run again for Iran presidency