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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Dec 18, 2022

#English #英語フレーズ "A little bird told me." 内部から秘密を明かした。A cute phrase for having some kind of "secret informant" tell you something. The modern journalism equivalent is "an anonymous source", but the expression can be used for gossip, not just pro news.

Of course sometimes the person using this phrase *is* the secret informant, but chooses to imply someone *else* divulged the secret... that can happen too.

From Shakespeare.
Henry IV, Part 2:

As far as France: I heard a bird so sing,
Whose musick, to my thinking, pleas’d the king.

This is believed to be a passing reference to "a little bird told me", but it's interesting to me regardless.

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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Dec 10, 2022

#英語 In the context of "tacit endorsement of Ukraine drone strikes in Russia," a blogger asked "What in the heck is “tacit endorsement"?" <- This is where more knowledge of ＃日本語 (Japanese) would have helped. 黙認 <- If I may, literally "silent consent/ assent"? 1/

So other cultures have an easy time understanding. The Pentagon didn't say out loud "We endorse this," but they declined to say "We DON'T endorse this". That is tacit endorsement. #English idiom: What you don't say speaks volumes. 2/

In the first place, Ukraine doesn't need anyone's permission to hit back against Russia with home-grown drones. The weapons weren't provided by the Pentagon, so the Pentagon doesn't get to say no. It's just better for everyone involved to come to a... mutual understanding. 3/

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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Dec 5, 2022

#English #英語 Of relevance today: the two versions of "conventional". A convention is actually a reference to something like the Geneva Conventions i.e. our current version of "the laws of war". A missile that "can" carry a nuclear warhead, or some other form of WMD... 1/

...but which has been modified to carry high explosives (a high amount of them because nuclear warheads weigh a lot by nature), we will call this "a conventional missile" in that state. It's the same rocket, it's usually the same guidance system, but = "non-nuclear" *here*. 2/

"Conventional" has been stretched to mean "ordinary", to the point that "unconventional warfare" is considered "warfare of an unusual nature". The element of surprise, ambush, and using maneuverability against a larger, slower force, doesn't make it illegal. 3/

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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Nov 30, 2022

I'm going to make a video summarizing this later but I've wanted to reply to a while re: a video saying "Stop translating English in your head!" to foreign English learners. I know it's with the best of intentions... but this is a goal, not something you achieve right away.

"Not translating in your head" means you have all of the building blocks for sentences pre-loaded in your mushy brain like computer RAM and can call them up at will. It's a goal... not something everyone will be ready for. I don't want people to lose heart and give up!

If you don't have all of the building blocks ready, you make them. You learn more. You find out what you don't know and build upon where you are already strong. It's a process. At the END of that process, you "stop translating in your head". In the middle, you translate some.

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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Nov 28, 2022

So just to mention, I was one of the Westerners brought into anime by a "shoujo anime", none other than Sailor Moon (western dub). I had no warning, had no idea what it was and no idea why it was surprisingly good. That's when I found out what "anime" was.

What I didn't know was that many of the cartoons I found to be higher quality than the rest were actually anime in disguise, with the animation done by an Eastern studio while the other elements were Western. I only found about that part relatively recently, decades later.

So to put it simply, my childhood's appreciation of visual stories was heavily shaped by Japan. I just didn't know it yet. It's not simply an issue of culture, I saw something in the storytelling technique that appealed to me over and over again - but under the surface, hidden.

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Jeremiah Bourque

@jbtutor

Nov 25, 2022

So today I did more help for this Ukrainian English learner... he can't afford paid tutoring but it's good practice for me. The final question he had to go through was a pretty tough reading comprehension one. I read the question out loud and worked it out in my head. 1/

So when I was done all that, I had done process of elimination to rule out which of the choices applied to none of the "three people" involved (four choices of "job ads", it was matching 3 to the 3 people). I'm a smart English native and I found it required serious thought. 2/

So I looked at his answers and he had picked the same ones I did. I complimented him, and then I was briefly explaining my logic behind my choices. I was 80% done that when he wrote...
"I found it difficult so I randomly filled in the answers."
......😄3/3

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