Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@NEStalgia Well actually in Japanese the word ポテト - "potato" refers to french fries. So they usually want to eat considerably more than 4 french fries. They know the English word refers to the potato itself but we both kinda just enjoy the irony. Also it's a running thing that whenever I need an easy word to throw into an example sentence, I use potatoes.

It's better than my old method, of making jokes in English about my coworkers. XD

[edit] Perhaps not irony, but the joke, anyway.

@Tyranexx - You know what they say, those IL winters are long and cold, and they make Spring time real nice, liberating even. Seriously, your bday is close to mine? Why didn’t you say something when we were all tossing around “happy bdays” right and left to me and NBN? Happy belated birthday then.

@NEStalgia There's a reason why I stay out of a lot of the Pokemon articles here those days. The Sword & Shield forum topic seems to be filled with less whining, thankfully.

@Heavyarms55 I know very few people who want to eat just four French fries. Particularly kids. XD Love the example case there.

@bimmy-lee Thanks! My bday was last week on Tuesday. I normally don't make a big deal out of my birthday these days. It's lost a lot of the appeal compared to when I was a kid lol. It was a pretty decent week overall, though I wish I'd taken some time off. Had plenty of good food, got some decent t-shirts as gifts, and even both Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Extraneously Long 3DS Title and Final Fantasy IV (DS).

@Tyranexx like bimmy said happy belated.
@Heavyarms55 not totally relevant but In high school we had an older German teacher who would never learn from his old ways of doing attendance. He would pass around a notepad to sign in for attendance. While childish yes, I would always sign my name then random ones like Donald duck, Indiana Jones, etc. It was rather funny when he'd go thru roll call and hearing those names pop up. Was I being foolish? Probabaly. But it was harmless fun that he never tried to correct. So i rolled with it.

@NintendoByNature I did similar things in school too. I had a biology class with a teacher I really didn't like. Every chapter she made us write out a full packet worth of definitions, the vast majority of which we REALLY didn't need to bend over backward to remember. But I learned quickly that she only bothered checking the first page. So I just did the first page every chapter and stapled the previous chapter's pages to it. Still aced my tests just fine. I had another teacher who was anal about making kids write out their process in Algebra - which I fully understand is to show you aren't just copying the answers. But she demanded we do it for every problem. My friend and I would stick random bits off nonsense in, just to see if we could get a reaction out of her. Like "If Mrs. X reads this, I'll buy her a 6 pack of beer." She never gave the slightest hint she read them.

@Tyranexx Right? And thanks!

@NintendoByNature Thanks! Brilliant story by the way. I have no problem with pranks as long as they're good-natured and aren't dangerous or malicious.

Was the teacher of German nationality, or was this an actual German language course? I had three years of German in high school. I can still read and spell quite a bit of it, but my speech has suffered with time. XD

@Heavyarms55 No prob! The math thing sounds sucky; I always hated having to spell out how I got from point A to point B (especially with proofs in Geometry; yuck) even though I clearly knew how to arrive there mentally. My sister just dealt with this in an online college course.

@Tyranexx Eh, like I said, I understood the reasoning for it. It was years ago now so I just look back and laugh. Now that I am sort of a teacher I can understand it a little more. Still, if it were me, I would only make students do their proof once for each type of problem. But I don't teach math. I just teach Japanese kids how to say silly things in English.

That story wasn’t quite what I expected from the opener...

And I’m still hangin in there. My wit is being dulled by my sleepiness. Audit prep done in 3 days.

@Heavyarms55 I also understand the reasoning for it, but I also agree that having to spell everything out ad nauseum for the same type of problem is a waste of time, especially if someone clearly grasps the concept.

How early do kids in Japan typically start learning English? I certainly wish I'd been exposed to much more than a few words in Spanish as a kid.

@Heavyarms55 i thought consensus in Japan was that the texture is potatoes was gross and they were pretty unpopular..... Not sure about fries, mind you, but i assumed it applied to all potato products

@Tyranexx my math teachers never explained process... They just solved problems by themselves at the board and you were expected to understand....... Then again my math teachers were really really bad in grade school (basically grammar teachers that just doubled as your math, science, and history teacher even though they knew nothing about it.... In grade school we only had 2 teachers each year for all subjects but gym.) Then of 4 years in high school 2 of them had serious anger management issues and we're incapable of teaching, one was nice but simply average which didn't help you recover from the former, and one was fantastic and i got above "almost not failing" for the first time in a math class in my life.

Then college started with one really good one, one that really spoke no English, one that didn't care as long as she clocked the hours for tenure, and one that should have been dragged out in chains and shot at least 200 years prior.

My first introduction to languages was high school. They made you pick a language and were really pushing their new Japanese program. I knew nothing about Japan except "Yoshi" and therefore took French. I ended up with the teacher that just spoke French the whole time and seemed to not notice that class had any males at all. If only id picked Japanese then.

@Heavyarms55 haha yea ive had teachers other than this one like that. Just slap some stuff on the page and hope for the best.
@Tyranexx he was American but of Swedish descent. I can still read some and understand some but not speak it it in the slightest bit. It's been far too long lol.

@NEStalgia @Tyranexx That seems to be a common thing internationally, expecting grade school teachers to just know everything because it's simpler at that level. Japan has started making grade school teachers teach English they themselves don't know, it's silly! Japan is pushing to have more English in grade schools but they need to push more trained English teachers into them for that to really work... As a general rule they don't really start studying it until JHS.

Also naw potatoes are pretty popular here, just not cooked in the same ways. I see them most often in a popular soup called nikujagga. I don't know if there is an English name. But it's like potatoes, carrots, beef or chicken and onions. They also end up in curry a lot.

Wow that PETA article on the UGG got taken down really quickly. Almost as quick as the one on Nick Robinson from a month or two ago.

@NEStalgia Overall my math teachers have been fairly decent, but I did miss some algebra in high school when the school switched around the math curriculum. Those missing links made trig and precalculus classes a living nightmare sometimes.

I would have loved the option to learn Japanese. While I liked taking German, it was also the only foreign language my (small) high school offered at the time. I think Spanish would have been more useful. Learning Japanese here outside of universities or by yourself is almost unheard of.

@NintendoByNature Yep, sounds pretty much like me. XD I still retain a few spoken words and phrases and can still construct the odd sentence. If you don't use it, you lose it! I keep meaning to brush up on it again, but a lot of my language learning has been going into a new coding language for work lately.

@Heavyarms55 My mom is an elementary teacher and definitely can relate to situations like that. The district had to make some cuts a few years ago and fully cut the art program at the time. The normal teachers had to work in an art period once or twice a week. Mom definitely tries her best, but she didn't ever specialize in things like that. Good news is they now share an art teacher with the high school, so there's some reprieve.

Nikujagga sounds a little like my mom's recipe for crock pot beef roast, only that isn't really intended as a soup. The ingredients are pretty much the same.

Curry....I've gotta try that sometime. My interest in it has grown ever since the camp portion of Sw/Sh was revealed.

@Toy_Link Weird, you're right. The comment I left still exists - at least at the time of writing - but navigating to the actual article leads to a 404.

@Tyranexx Well fair warning, curry is not one thing, there's a whole bunch of different ways to cook and eat it. The most common way in Japan is mild curry and rice which is delicious! But spicy India curry and nan flat bread is even better in my book. There is also curry soup, curry udon and even curry bread.

Or if you hate yourself, curry ice cream and soda... (I think someone was high when that got made...)

@Heavyarms55 Sounds like curry might be more popular in Japan than China. Here it is mostly at Cantonese style “greasy spoons”, and as a sauce for fish balls at convenient stores.

I like mild curries, but love the spice level of some of the curries in India and Malaysia. You’ll pay for your enjoyment 🥵, but it is delicious while you are eating it.

But yeah I think curry is just a catchall term for a variety of dishes with different spice mixtures. I guess it’s similar to the way people use the generic word “noodle” or “pasta” to describe a variety of foods that people in Italy/ Asia eat.

The PETA/UGG article came and went so fast that I didn’t even see it. I assume they’re upset with how awful the goose is to that poor little nerd boy in the town square? I was horrible to that poor kid. I almost feel bad about it.

I had a nice bowl of chicken curry soup last weekend. It didn’t have much spice, but still enjoyable. The spicier the better, and I probably prefer Thai or Indian curry dishes for this reason, though they can quickly go from fun, delicious spicy to face melting agony.

@Tyranexx - Sounds like a nice birthday then. I’ll not forget next year. I thought of another wooly worm incident last night. I knew a guy who had one fall down into his shirt collar while he was chopping a tree down in the winter. It was in there all day. He said it was minorly irritating, but thought it was just a tag or something in his shirt. Later, when he went in to get cleaned up, he had a massive, puffy skin rash down his neck and chest. It got so bad that he eventually had to go to urgent care for treatment and actually has visible scars from it. It looked like a gnarly patch of Freddy skin. I’ve been more cautious with them ever since.

@NotTelevision Curry is ridiciously popular in Japan. It is one of the most popular dishes because it's comparatively easy to make and hits almost all major food groups. Some recipes actually do have meat, grain, dairy, veggie and fruit! Though most don't have the dairy or fruit. Almost everyone in Japan I've spoken to about food is not a fan of spicy food. But you can get spicier curry in most restaurants and you can buy the spicier mixes in stores. Though I have found that on average on a scale of 1-10 where 1 isn't spicy and 10 is ghost pepper, if a Japanese person calls something a 5 an American will call it a 3 or 4. They just aren't used to it.

The other day went I to a pub with one of my older coworkers, and he was blown away that I put some habanero sauce on my bar pizza. He put a tiny 3 drops on his and said it was too much, I put like, 10 times as much and thought I could have put a little more. XD

@Heavyarms55 - There are two traditional Japanese restaurants in my town (not fused with another Asian cooking style), a sushi house and a noodle shop. Both of them put little fire symbols on the menu next to dishes that contain crushed red pepper flake, and it’s only a light sprinkling at that. The ice water at the Thai restaurants is spicier in comparison.