I don’t know that JASBSB was really fun. But on the other hand, Morris Day and the Motherfuckin’ Time!

And that’s why the USSC dunked on the Trump admin by rejecting the request without issuing a comment. Even with half the bench staffed with Republicans, they’re not going to put up with that sort dick-waving bullshit from the executive branch.

It’d be great to see Mark Hamill on the big screen doing something lighthearted and fun.

I keep hearing the ‘slippery slope’ argument against additional gun control laws, but I haven’t seen anything yet to make me believe that will happen. It’s been 32 years since the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act outlawed new automatic firearms, and the current legal environment for gun ownership hasn’t really changed…

After 20 years of road trips to New York and Philadelphia, I can’t imagine the wingnuts are going to say anything Chipper hasn’t already heard before.

Does your vegan lifestyle include putting a lot of tomatoes in your face?

Someone sure has egg on her face after that typo.

Maybe his balls are bigger than yours?

Ahh, the Ken M school of linguistics!

Yeah, makes sense to me - post was a very conversational rather than formal way of writing, but the point was clear.

Haha, I hadn’t heard that one before, but my kid has so much damn energy she might well be on cocaine :D

Hah, yeah, it’s funny how cultural things like that are so much more telling than language or ethnicity. Being a white guy in Japan, the expectations are so low that it’s like a free pass to screw up. If I’m hungry on a train, I’m gonna eat that candy bar, dammit. I know how ‘incorrect’ that is, but I’m still taking…

I can believe it. English sucks anyway, it’s got more exceptions than it has rules. I’ve got a little kid I’m teaching to read, and she’s always asking me why words aren’t pronounced like they’re spelled, why “knight” isn’t “nite” or “phone” isn’t “fone.” You can’t really give a 5-year old a comprehensible lesson on…

I mentioned this to another poster, but the trouble I have in hearing and speaking Japanese is in using pitch correctly. English just doesn’t do that, so it does often feel like I have to use context clues to identify a word as I instinctively dismiss the pitch of a sound as just being used for emphasis rather than…

Coming from the other side of it, I’d say it’s more or less exactly halfway between L and R, but (speaking just for myself here) I start with an R sound and move my tongue up to pronounce れ rather than start with and L and move it back. The difficulty for me was in judging just how far to push that sound toward an L,…

Yeah, isn’t it crazy how that works? In the first year of life, babies have the neuroplasticity to pick up any sound they’re exposed to, but their brains quickly figure out which sounds have meaning (the phonemes of the languages they hear) and then kind of ignore the rest after that.

In Japanese, the thing I find the…

I’ve never heard that kana pronounced with a hard L sound. I don’t have time to dig around for more detailed pronunciation guides, but the wikipedia entry for れ describes it the way I learned it, as “re.”
If you look at the kana chart on the right, none of them use the consonent L.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_(kana…

And a quick note, any Japanese who can communicate effectively with you in English ought to be applauded for their success, because that shit is hard. I picked Japanese as my third language (après le français) and trying to add a completely new phoneme to your skillset as an adult is just ridiculous. You see the…

Yep. The R/L language difficulty is ironically perhaps one of the less offensive aspects Yunioshi character, as it at least has a grain of authenticity with actual native Japanese speakers. But god damn, I just can’t watch that movie it’s so awful...

Something that makes this especially dumb is that the stereotypical difficulty with this happens with Japanese speakers much more than it does Chinese. The Japanese language doesn’t have an equivalent of the English “L” sound, and the Japanese “R” (which also differs from English) is used as the substitute. The…