Language Poll #2: Good Morning

Does this exchange make sense to you? What are your thoughts?

Language Poll #1: Good Night

Does this exchange make sense to you? What are your thoughts?

Social media language study suggestion

I think it would be cool if a bunch of people studying a language would go out and take photos of signs written entirely in that language and upload them somewhere (probably Flickr, people always use Flickr for this sort of thing) and tag them so others can find them. Then we would have a huge group of real-life flash cards that we could use on our computers to familiarize ourselves with the vocabulary found on signs. It could be place names, common warnings, business names, sales, things like that. Basically, the idea is to give vocabulary (and how to write it) relevance.

I put some rather mediocre photos from 2001 up to start.

Have you seen Detective Conan 238?

Are those native English speakers? Because wow. I don't think I've ever heard English spoken that well in anime before. And they have accents when they speak Japanese, too, and not the normal "I'm a Japanese person trying to fake an American accent" type of accent you usually hear.

I'm impressed!

Damn straight

This just reminds me, yet again, how much I want to take a year off, and road trip around the US.

And I have always hated the term "flyover country" :P

Japanese(?) in Smallville

In episode 18 of season 5, Lex and Lana are coming back from their first date, if you can call researching various and sundry classified documents about space aliens over Japanese food a date. Lana tells Lex he could have warned her about the squid brains.

Lex responds, "Oh-EE-SHEE kara DAY SHOW", which I am guessing was supposed to be おいしいからでしょう, though I'm not sure. A quick Google search reveals that that is in fact a phrase. I've never heard anyone say it, but I'm guessing it could mean something like, "Because it was good, right?"

(おいしい = delicious, から = because, でしょう = kind of a copula with an opinion connotation, I guess. Jim Breen sez "(I) think; (I) hope; (I) guess; don't you agree?; I thought you'd say that!")

Lex's next line is "Come on, you can't fool me. You loved it," which is sorta-kinda a translation.

It occurred to me that he might have been saying 塩辛, but I definitely hear an "o" at the beginning of the phrase. Besides, what would 塩辛でしょう mean, anyway? "It was totally entrails, man"?

Anyway, I'm not knocking Michael Rosenbaum, who is a fabulous actor (not to mention totally hot). It's hard to get the pitch inflection of Japanese down right. You have to work to overcome the natural tendency in English to put stress on the penultimate syllable.

I just always find it interesting when people speak a language I'm somewhat familiar with :)