I'm always up for a good challenge. This one is of the language variety. JD at the I Do Things So You Don't Have To blog challenges readers to use three words properly in a sentence. The only problem is JD's a professional editor and it shows. I've never heard of the three words before, and so it's taking me days to come u

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There's been a lot of talk on BloggingZoom lately concerning grammar and grammatical errors in certain postings and such (not naming any names - lol) so I thought it would be nice if we all took a moment to read up on a few things that are VERY common mistakes when it comes to grammar.  Before we criticize others we sh

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"Horseshit" and "Bullshit" are two words that have a similar meaning. We use them when we think some statement is wrong, ridiculous, a lie or just plain stupid. So are they interchangeable? Not quite. Believe it or not, there are some differences between these two adorable words. This article examines these differences

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Actually, I should say "neologists wanted." What's a neologist? It's someone who mangles words together until a new and sometimes bizarre, but usually funny, word is born. Illustrator Michael Kline collects these funny neologisms, and you can win a copy of his entertaining illustrated book if you succeed in coming up with the best neologi

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For some reason, a lot of Web terms have multiple versions. This is partly because Web-related words are relatively new and haven't had a chance to settle into standard, agreed-upon forms. Another reason is that American English words in general have a tendency to morph over time. Proving that America really is a democracy, unacceptable word

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You can use Google to help you learn a foreign language. Google Images can help you get a visual picture of an unknown word. Just plug in the unfamiliar word and you'll get thousands of pictures showing you exactly what it is!

Plain old Google works too. If you don't know a word, plug it into google and you'll get millions of hits wi

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The Nintendo DS is a great tool for learning the Japanese language. It has a variety of games that can help you learn kanji (Chinese characters). This is a short review of one such game that my wife bought for me for my birthday last week. It has over 47,000 questions that cover all 12 levels of the Kanji Profiency Exam (Kanken).

I'v

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Reading comics is a good way to learn language. Since every word is dialog, you can use what you read in daily conversation without having to worry about whether or not you are mistakenly using formal literary language or not. Pictures are great for context clues and cool onomatopoeia words are everywhere. In this article, I take a look at

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Going monolingual is an important step in learning a language. As long as you are looking up words in a (target language)-English dictionary, you are thinking in English. Once you make the switch to a monolingual dictionary, you are only thinking in your target language. Today I made the monolingual switch. No more Japanese-English dictio

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Is the way we read years in English consistent? Is there a reason we say nineteen eighty-four but not twenty oh seven? This article explores our naming conventions for years in English and tries to make an algorithm out of it.

This is the #2

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I love language. It doesn’t matter which language, because they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Many Asian languages are incredibly well suited to convey how we feel, but are horrendously unwieldy when discussing technology or science. English, on the other hand, is just the opposite. But why do so many of us rely on spell check?

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This is an article that links to another article about the first newspaper in Thailand. The first printing press came to Thailand in the early 1830s. The owner published a newspaper called the Bangkok Recorder. Readers were confused to find that some articles were repeated day after day. These articles were actually advertisements, but 19

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I was reading this article on Arstechnica about how people are using English in business today. With the incredible amount of globalization going on, as well as the ease of instantaneous communciation with almost anyone on the planet, it’s easy to not only mis-communicate, but also offend.

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A look at the third chapter of the Japanese version of Fight Club. Topics include:

Japanese men are mumblers. What the hell are they saying?
Astronomy terms are interesting in Japanese.
How to say "cafe latte enema" in Japanese.

Project

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Many parents naturally use these everyday activities to enhance their child's development of new words. But many parents do not. This article provides a simple list of words and concepts that you can incorporate into your everyday routines and your child's everyday activities in order to encourage language development and th

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Learning another language can be quite tough. You have to learn a lot of words, then form those into coherent sentences. That in itself can be very difficult if the sentence structure is very different from your primary language. Example, you are an English speaker then you have to learn Japanese which has a different sentence

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It's high time we all did something to save the awesome language!Or, there are chances that the language would become extinct(nearly) in the near future. I request everybody out there to write a post on this and spread the "Save English" Campaign!The rate of deterioration is fast and we all must do something about it before

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A look at Chapter 4 of the Japanese version of the Fight Club DVD.

Topics include:

Swedish furniture.
Katakana loanwords are hard to hear.
Demanding medicine from your doctor in Japanese.

Jack orders some Swedish furniture from his IKEA catalogue, which is a really difficuly scene due to all the loan words and technical furniture

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