Victory Manual

What’s up with this Engrish I found in the dictionary?
I was checking out a few example uses for かつて, and these grammatically horrid examples popped up:
彼女のかつての友達 = her sometime friend.
What’s a “sometime friend”? I’d have translated it as, “Her on-and-off friend.” At least it’s something you might actually hear being used.
Then there was,
かつての友 [...]

As a foreigner in Japan who currently teaches English, it’s impossible to avoid having an opinion on a policy of mandatory second-language education. Deas from rockinginhakata.com commented on bilingualism (particularly of English and Spanish in the States), but I want to take one step back, towards second-language education in a general scope.
In terms of [...]

I continue to realize the existence of problems in English the more I study Japanese.
Of course, I’m sure everyone already knows the problem with the sentence, “The boy watched the girl looking through the telescope.” Was the boy using a telescope to watch the girl? Or was the boy watching a girl who [...]

My wife and I went out to see Charlie Wilson’s War after dinner last night for our wedding anniversary. When we watch movies in English together at home, we usually have Korean subtitles on for her, and the result is that when I describe the scene I watched in English with the same scene [...]

Sesquipedalian. I don’t think I’ll ever fall out of obsession with that word. The definition is itself. It is its own definition. There’s something so satisfying about that. But that’s not what this is about.
Sesquipedalian is far from being a common vocabulary term. The same holds true of its [...]

Let’s see what happens when I try to use 25 target vocabulary words in one short composition in an attempt to solidify the terms into my long-term memory.
Jack, our redoubtable leader
It was the accolade that Jack had been aiming for; the reason he had been so meticulous in maintaining his magnanimity. A fortuitous sequence [...]

I’ve got a goal of going through a list of 6,500+ English vocabulary terms over 261 days (comes out to about 25 words per day). Of course, this project is running parallel with Japanese studies, so my head feels like a mashed-potato-filled beach ball. The English terms themselves are in the incipient stages [...]

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

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, [...]

I’m a fan of creativity, even in advertisements. I won’t necessarily buy a product because of a well thought out commercial, but I appreciate their efforts. One thing I can’t stand, though, is contradiction in advertising, whether intentional or mistaken.
I absolutely couldn’t stand* the Sprite campaign, “Image is nothing, thirst is everything.” [...]