Victory Manual

(Image showing a Korean national showing his…erm…disregard for China)
Inspiration from an article posted at Japan Probe

Here’s a rather ironic example sentence that I came across in the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar:
私は日本語が話せるどころか、一度も勉強したことがありません。
Translation:
I am far from being able to speak Japanese; I haven’t studied it at all.
That’s a pretty complicated sentence for an absolute beginner with no experience studying the language to be saying in Japanese. It reminded me of [...]

I just discovered this as I sailed the high [internet] seas:
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath.
This made him. …
A super-calloused [...]

While it’s easy to imagine that our counting systems are generally based on 10 digits because we have 10 fingers, and that calculating in increments of 5 is also easy because it’s half of our total fingers, I wonder why numbers are read from left to right and not the other way around.
Even in Hebrew, [...]

Calling Will of NihongoJouzu.com. Will of NihongoJouzu.com to the white courtesy telephone.
What happened to NihongoJouzu.com? It just disappeared!
I just thought I should point that out, since I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in the “Japan blogosphere”. Admittedly, my exposure to the Japanese blogging world is very narrow.
***Update***
It seems that it was just [...]

‘Sesquipedalian’ is a sesquipedalian term! Only the grandiloquent would use such a term, just as they use ‘grandiloquent’.

The solution to Japanese farmers’ bind of not selling any rice because of its high cost is simply to not grow any rice at all! With protectionist policies, they could make a fortune out of growing nothing!
“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government [...]

One of my pet peeves is when options to change languages in programs are only listed in the language that the program is currently set to. So, for example, if you were currently in Japanese mode and attempting to change it to English, here’s the menu you are presented with:
日本語
中国語
韓国語
英語
イタリア語
フランス語
If you don’t understand Japanese, [...]

My wife brought up an interesting point while we were talking about nationalism in Asia. I like hearing her take on things as she’s a Korean living in Japan studying alongside Chinese. She feels that, based on China’s long history of power in Asia, many Chinese today still consider Korea and Japan as [...]

A protest to protest a protest.
Torch protests could hurt Japan’s ties with China
I might need to begin a protest of my own. A protest to protest the protest of a protest. All I would ask of you, dear readers, is that you kindly protest me afterwards. A protest to protest the protest [...]