By thomas on Jan 23, 2008 in Thai | 5 Comments
Inspired partly by this article, Rikker at Thai 101 has posted a great article about how the Thais remember the months. I thought the Japanese had it easy, but the Thai way is much more elegant. In Rikker’s words: In Thai it’s extremely simple: the number of days is encoded directly into the names of [...]
By thomas on Jan 22, 2008 in English | 26 Comments
The other day I was thinking about the words bullshit and horseshit. Where I am from, these words are used almost interchangably in situations where you think a statement or assertion is false, ridiculous, a lie, etc. I thought it was interesting that we have two very similar words to use in the same situation. [...]
By thomas on Jan 19, 2008 in Japanese | 7 Comments
Do you know which months have 30 days and which ones have 31? I don’t. At least not off the top of my head. If I need to know how many days are in a month, and there isn’t a calendar around, I use the knuckle-counting method. It’s not as fast as having them memorized, [...]
By Peter on Jan 8, 2008 in Spanish | 3 Comments
Earlier this evening I was reading a book to my five year old son as I do almost nightly. He and his brother are blessed to have a large collection of children’s books, many of them they have not read yet. A significant portion were given to them by a family friend who is a [...]