And this is my theme music as I roll out to face the enemy. Here’s hoping this year is an epic win!

I’m taking the level 2 again after just barely missing the cutoff last year. This time I’m actually feeling pretty confident about it, as last year my familiarity with a lot of the kanji was pretty suspect and I still came close. After a full year of reading manga almost exclusively in Japanese, I think I’m much better prepared, although there’s still always those horrible trick questions with really ambiguous contexts to confuse you.

Once this is over Epic Win will officially be off hiatus, assuming the test and/or Los Angeles traffic doesn’t kill me, so check back later this week for some new postage. I still have a lot of catching up to do for this season of anime, but I have a couple interesting posts cooked up in the meantime.

Ugh, I’d almost forgotten what a pain in the butt it is to cram for exams. Well, good luck my fellow examinees! And, uh…posthumous good luck to those overseas who already took it, I guess.

/salute

That’s right, Ghetto Happy Dining…and
of course it’s a really posh restaurant.

As a nation, Japan is absolutely fascinated with the English language. They give their products English names to make them sound foreign and exotic, they brand them using Roman letters to give them that distinctive trendy look, and they wear T-shirts with phrases that look as though they were produced by having a blindfolded person point to a series random words in a dictionary.

It wasn’t that long ago that learning a foreign language was looked upon with a great deal of suspicion. During Japan’s more isolationist days, anyone who spoke English too well was viewed as un-Japanese, something of a renegade. Now that the Japanese have really opened up to the west, however, they seem determined to make up for lost time by using and abusing the language in every way conceivably possible.

If you’ve ever traveled in Japan, you have no doubt seen the way English is plastered all over signs, advertisements, and T-shirts. The free-spirited brazenness with which it is used, unhindered by such petty things as “grammar”, makes linguists and English teachers around the world cringe in dismay, but it also provides plenty of entertainment for gaijin like myself.

Below is a sampling of a few of the things I ran into during my time in Japan that made me laugh. Read the rest of this entry »