Tag: Teaching English (ESL)

My daughter is pretty smart. The other day I was getting on her case for watching too much YouTube at ...

When a member of one language group learns to speak another language, the laws of phonetics decree that he or ...

Japan's transformation into one of the world's foremost industrial nations has been quite an achievement, especially when you consider the ...

Recently I talked about "fake dialects" of Japanese that are often heard in anime, which can add much to the ...

This weekend was the opening of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, and since I'm one of the few people in ...

Because the Japanese generally study six years of English during junior high and high school, there's a tendency for English ...

If you want to watch a Japanese person count mentally, ask them how many years they studied English. The answer ...

One of the themes I cover a lot is how there always seems to be a "right" way of doing ...

The next time you utter the phrase "walk to work," you've just done something that's very difficult for Japanese ESL ...

The other day my son took a standardized test to measure his academic ability compared with other students in Japan. ...

This week J-List's own Tomo, the employee who keeps our site well stocked with interesting DVDs, Hello Kitty shoulder massagers ...

When I was an ESL teacher, I worked hard to find innovative ways to teach my students, which was always ...

When I first got to Japan, I was determined to get out and see the country, but it was difficult ...

Last night my son needed a hand with an English essay he was writing about the different kinds of engineering ...

My wife reads the Japanese version of Newsweek, and sometimes I thumb through it to see how it compares to ...

Is it possible for a person to lose the use of their native language? Studies in linguistics (which I did ...

All things considered, laughter only belongs in a foreign language classroom if it helps build confidence in language skills, and ...

It seems that the skill of translation can be quite separate from the ability to communicate freely in a language. ...

I talked a couple weeks ago about how the Japanese language lacks definite and indefinite articles like "a" and "the" ...

For whatever reason, there are certain subjects I never managed to study during high school or college, including chemistry, philosophy, ...

An era has come to an end in Japan: the "0-Series" Bullet Train, first launched back in 1964, has made ...

One concept you eventually bump into when studying about Japan is nihonjinron (nee-HONE-JEEN-rone), a word which literally means "theories on ...

One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means "self introduction" but ...

Back when I was teaching English, I found it interesting to observe how my students perceived my own native language. ...