Recently in Asian Blog Category

When I was living in Japan, it was virtually impossible to avoid Nova advertising; they were all over the subway, in my newspaper and on TV. For the last few months, the company, the largest of the eikaiwa schools in Japan, has been in free-fall, ever since they got into trouble over their refund policies. The company now seems to be in its death throes.

An extremely lengthy thread about Mark Smith and Smith's School of English, Japan on the AACircle ESL Blacklist was closed by the administrator on the grounds that he had seen 'indisputable documentary evidence' that Mr Smith was innocent of all the accusations made against him.

I have recently started trying to learn how to read and write in Khmer. I don't have much free time for studying and it is slow going. Fortunately, I have a very patient teacher, who doesn't seem to mind when I forget things.

We have a TV channel here that seems to specialise in playing DVDs on air; you can see the DVD screens with options before and after a film. The other day they had Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on, which I watched as I had heard so much about it. They show the English language version along with English subtitles, which I presume is to give as much help as possible to their viewers as there isn't a Khmer language subtitle option. However, the subtitles for this film were so full of errors and weird English that I can only hope it was a pirate DVD.

I was reading a book about how people use the internet and it said that the average search length has gone from 1.1 to 2.8 words in the last few years. The numbers may not seem to represent such a huge change at first look, but the more I think about them, the more astonishing the change seems. I have also just finished teaching on a pre-sessional course in a university in the UK where I have taught for many years and there have been similar changes that display a very profound change as I see it.

I read the label on my bottle of drinking water, which has undergone reverse osmosis, and Ozone and UV treatment to make it drinkable. The latter treatment, apparently, ensures that the water is 'disenfeced', which strikes me as one of the most unfortunate and off-putting misspellings I've come across. At least, I hope it is a mistake.

In an interview on ELTNews on a recent visit to Japan, Professor Henry Widdowson says that the most obvious example of a conceptually flawed theory in ESL teaching is "the current precept that English teachers must only use real or authentic English in their teaching ­ that is to say the English that naturally occurs in the contexts of native speaker use. This directive comes from corpus linguistics and as such has no necessary pedagogic validity whatever."

The toilet in my hotel in Kyoto had the following warning:

When you sit on the seat the cold water automatically flow. Wait for the 'off' lamp to wash.
When you get on the seat 'standby' lamp starts flashing. If you press button upon seating you may have cold water spray.

A student contacted me about the phrase 'quantum leap', which she had seen in a text she was reading at work. Her sense told her it meant a big step, but her dictionary only told her that quantum was the smallest discrete quantity of a physical property. She had run into a dreaded contranym.

I went with a friend to one of Tokyo's many beautiful parks at the weekend. We bought our tickets, which carry a magnetic date and can be endlessly recycled. To help me insert the card in the reader, they had helpfully translated the instructions for me:

Please put in the card upside this face as a pointing sign.