Again, Engrish is not exactly my preferred way of referring to “Japanese English”, but getting bored with the same ole blog post titles and probably still at least four to go until I finally get to Z! Am also writing two more serious articles on the topic hair make (hea meiku) – hair and make [...]

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One of the intriguing aspects of learning a language is how much one learns about the culture the language emerges from. One obvious example is how different British English is from North American English.

Each of those traditions….

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Reading and blogging about Japan, of course! Recent questions that I have kind of answered on JapanExplained (after a long hiatus) include: - Why would anyone coat a park in grey dust? - Why do Japanese companies pay more as you age? - Why are Japanese companies so obsessed with quality? - Why do the [...]

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I love the English language for many reasons. One of my favorite characteristics of my native language is that it draws from every language - or even from sources that are not languages. The English language, especially the American version of English…

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That New in the post title is just part of the name of the book, because all this stuff has been up for a while but only just got round to doing the obvious thing and arranging it by module (= unit) and so the new stuff that I do put up soon should, uniquely for [...]

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Just when you least need them, I’m sure, but have a backlog of ones I’ve been writing and using since June who’ve been patiently waiting for my holiday to see the light of day.  As I’d half forgotten that some of these existed, I think you can trust my judgement for once that some of [...]

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Teaching and learning English can be difficult, complicated and - at times - isolating.

Sometimes all we need most is a sense of how other people are handling similar situations. The problem often however…

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My post on this classic and long lost site wasn’t supposed to be a campaign for its return as I thought that Simon Barne had done a Jim Thompson on us and so made it impossible, but the man himself ended up there with messages to give us hope and yesterday announced that almost the whole site is back up here. [...]

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Apparently many prospective TEFL teachers nowadays think that 4 weeks is too long to study to become a teacher. Luckily, there are also the dedicated few like Jo Gillespie who decide to make the whole CELTA thing longer while also properly learning how to control, and maybe even teach, the shorter of our students (in both height [...]

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To say that learning English is difficult just might be the ultimate understatement. We, as teachers and learners, struggle…

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