Xamuel.com

So I programmed a page to randomly generate names of Japanese restaurants. It’s pretty cool, check it out here: Japanese Restaurant Name Generator. Not only does it come up with randomized names, but you can even vote on them
So far it’s been a fun quick little project to give me [...]

Japanese grammar is famous for being so out-of-order compared to English. Or is it the other way around? Maybe English is the out-of-order grammar! Just for fun, let’s imagine WWII turned out drastically different, computers were invented in Japan, and they got to make up all the syntax. [...]

The cool thing about comparing languages which are as distantly related as English and Japanese, is when you dig deep enough, you’ll uncover little linguistic quirks which blow your mind. Here are a few examples.
1. Raccoons are Bears
Japanese people consider raccoons to be small bears, in the same way English speakers consider lions to [...]

To an adult language learner, the first language is always the hardest. It makes a lot of sense to pick an easy language from the start. That’s absolutely fine if you’re interested in learning, say, Spanish. But maybe you don’t wanna study Spanish for a year. Maybe you want to learn [...]

This is a very long-delayed continuation of the Goldmine of Engrish I published previously. I wasn’t planning on posting an Engrish sequel, but the original was so popular, people are practically demanding an encore, so here we go These are some of the most horrifically badly translated subtitles ever put forth [...]

One of my favorite poems is the Kubla Khan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the same poet who penned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, previously featured on this site). In fact I like this passage so much that, back when I was in high school, I memorized the whole thing. So instead of [...]

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). It’s a very long poem, so it’s split into seven parts. The spelling of its name varies; sometimes “Rime” is spelt “Rhyme”, and sometimes “Ancient Mariner” is spelt “Ancyent Marinere”. There is a lot of archaic English throughout [...]

Language maintenance is just as important as second language acquisition (SLA), and yet, while the latter is hammered into us in school and many of us pursue it in our free time, a lot more attention could stand to be given to the former. Maintaining linguistic knowledge is a skill, and like any other skill, [...]

Here are the Japanese sound effects for animals. These are the cries animals make. In Japan, it’s common to speak of an animal’s “voice”– koe (声). Some of these, such as the turtle, merely convey the animal’s “mood”, since obviously turtles don’t actually make any noise!
I got these from my girlfriend, who speaks Tokyo dialect. [...]

If you’re going to be giving any sort of complicated lecture where you refer back to things you’ve mentioned previously, be aware of how you use pronouns. One of the biggest cardinal sins of lecturing is overusing words like “this”, “it”, and so on. The point of teaching is to transfer knowledge which the professor [...]