The second set of new JETs arrived yesterday. They’ll spend today and tomorrow in Tokyo at an orientation conference and then will ship out on Wednesday to small towns and big cities across Japan. For the next month or so there are no classes, so they’ll putz around on the Internet, help the students practice for the English speech contest, and get used to life.

At the end of August, classes will begin and they’ll all be shocked at the low level of English at Junior High School. One particularly deep-rooted annoyance is the overuse and misuse of the word “interesting.”

Anyone who has taught a class or two will know what I mean. In Japanese, おもしろい means both interesting and funny. It means interesting as in “curious,” not as in “I’d like to research that thouroughly.”

So you end up with sentences like this:

Shin is an interesting boy.

or

I like volleyball. Volleyball is interesting.

Both perfectly normal grammatically, but a bit off, especially the final one, with the usage of interesting.

The funny thing is that while English teachers spend all their time griping about how narrow the vocabulary of their students is, their own Japanese vocabulary is probably equally if not more narrow. 好き is clearly the biggest offender here. This 好き, that 好き, beer 好き, Japan 好き. Yada yada yada.

An easy way to vary this expression is the word 大好物 (だいこうぶつ). As you can tell from the characters, it means, starting from the end, “thing-like-a lot” – something you really like/love/enjoy.

The usage is simple – Xが大好物です。Something is a 大好物 (to you). So next time you’re considering throwing out a 好き or 大好き, remember those annoying students who misuse interesting and use 大好物 instead.

UPDATE: This pattern is used strictly for FOODS that you like. Sorry for any inconveniences. Remember, making mistakes = good.

Today’s cool kanji isn’t actually a kanji! I’m so excited about this! Aren’t you!? It’s called the 米印（こめじるし） and it’s used in Japan as a marker of clarification/warning. It’s called 米印 because it looks like the 米 character if you rotated it 45 degrees. You often see it below a chart used to explain something. You also see it on instructions warning you to do something a specific way. I just bought a desk and had I paid attention to the 米印, I would have realized I didn’t need to hunt down a weirdly shaped screwdriver – one came with the desk.

One of the coolest things about this character is that if you type in こめじるし and then 変換（へんかん, change from kana to kanji） it,  ※ will be one of the options. On Windows, it changes the whole thing, but on my Mac it only changes こめ. I need to experiment further on Windows.

Another cool character is the Japanese post office mark – 〒. Also not a kanji, but like 米印 it can be accessed by typing in equivalent kana, in this case ゆうびん.

I was at elementary school on Monday. There’s one sixth grade student who doesn’t go to class. He sits in the office making papercraft all day. They’ve actually given him his own desk. I take over the desk on Mondays. This past Monday this is what it looked like:

One of the teacher’s has put out a lot of stuff for him. In the middle, next to the pens and slightly behind the laptop, you can see times tables sitting there in the hopes that he will absorb them. I looked closer at the chart next to the Pooh mug:

It’s a science chart. It may or may not be helping him, but it sure helped me. I knew 根（ね） and 葉（は）, but hadn’t learned, or maybe couldn’t remember, 茎（くき）. It just goes to show what you can learn from keeping your eyes open.

I remember this kanji because when we learned it, one of my classmates made up a sweet mnemonic to remember the word 条件（じょうけん）. He knew that it had the 人弁 (にんべん, person radical), so he gave both of the characters names – Joe and Ken.

条件 is a useful word. It means conditions, as in the conditions on a contract or the conditions/prerequisites for an application.

件 by itself is also pretty useful. My teacher in Tokyo used to make us use it in the subject lines for emails, e.g. 期末テストの件 (a subject I used back then), 小学校訪問の件 (a subject line I actually use now), or 田舎ビール種類不足の件 (a topic that I would like to raise now). Basically it is the “RE:” that you see (or used to see…has this died out?) in the subject lines for emails meaning “regarding such and such.” It’s an easy way to make your Japanese emailing more professional.