Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

One of the greatest merits of East Asian languages is that much information can be packed into short standalone phrases that are easily remembered by even the laymen without the need for detailed explanations.  The ability for information to be communicated so concisely and densely means that it is possible for the phrases to be used as new concepts themselves, without the need to create alternative shorter codes that have equivalent meanings.  The idea of densely packed phrases acting as linguistic codes is so common that people in this part of the world do not even think about it.

Valentine's Day, in contemporary popular culture, is supposed to be romantic.  Couples, young and old, reserve seats for two in nice restaurants and profess their love once again in moody atmospheres appropriate for the words and occasions.  Or perhaps the singletons will gather and denounce the holiday for being pretentious and talk about the difficulties of getting hitched in foreign lands .  Either way, the keyword is "romance," a concept that is hard to escape on Valentine's Day, whether one is full of it or completely devoid of it.

The microbrewery in the center of Takayama city felt a bit out of the place.  Despite being surrounded by wooden buildings from more than century ago, the clientele of the little bar and restaurant is distinctly un-Japanese.  When I visited the location for dinner at 8pm on a Saturday, none of the people inside were Japanese.  Perhaps attracted by the reputation of their brews, white couples in the fifties and sixties occupied most of the tables and the counter, trying more than half a dozen unique beers the microbrewery had on tap.

It is a brilliant message on the part of business English-teaching schools in Japan everywhere.  In a bid to target regular people who are nervous about the prospect of using English in their jobs, despite having zero experiences with the language in their daily lives, the schools strive to lower the hurdle for English learning.  They do so with the uniform message about how English is simply a tool for business communication, and learning to speak better English does not necessarily mean one has to give up some part of Japanese identity and acquire foreign values .

A professor at the prestigious Duke University in the US found herself in hot water last week after social media broke the story of her telling Chinese students in her department to not speak Chinese while in the department building.  While the professor merely emailed the students of the department after receiving complaints from other professors, the subsequent outrage to the email focused solely on her wording in the emails, eventually with the professor issuing an apology and the school getting involved in the investigations.