babelhut.com

Rikker at Thai101 has published a fascinating post about Thailand’s first printing press. The owner published a newspaper called the Bangkok Recorder, and advertisements seemed to confuse some of the readers. Here’s an excerpt: I, the owner of this newspaper, have heard that those who purchase the Bangkok Recorder wonder, “Why are so many things [...]

Last chapter I talked about mumbled Japanese and how it is difficult to pick up with an untrained ear. This time I’m going to look at another sticking point for me: katakana loan words. Katakana Loan Words When Japanese borrows words from other languages, naturally it changes those words to fit the Japanese sound system. [...]

“Al rescate” is Spanish for “to the rescue.” Some of you may have noticed my lack of posts in the past couple of weeks. My work life and my home life conspired to consume any free time I had so that I could not even study new Spanish or Greek material, let alone write about [...]

These days Pali isn’t often spoken. But it is chanted quite a bit. I imagine most readers haven’t heard what Pali sounds like, so here’s some Pali chanting for you to listen to. Below the video I’ve pasted the actual sutta so you can follow along (they chant it twice). Karaniya Metta Sutta (Loving-kindness) 1. [...]

Last chapter I talked about some of the interesting differences I found between the English and Japanese versions of Fight Club. This time I’m going to do more of the same. I mentioned before that watching Fight Club in Japanese was difficult for me because my listening comprehension skills are poor. That’s true, but already [...]