hightext

Pretending to understand?

Some great commercials from Nintendo promoting their English teaching games for the Nintendo DS, showing Japanese doing 'wakatteru furi' (pretending to understand)
For those who can't read Japanese, there are four clips, accessed by clicking the links with the arrows next to them under the frame. The first you'll see automatically download is the hotel lift, the second the hotel lobby, the third at a party and the fourth is at a concert. You'll be able to understand them even if you don't speak Japanese.

Hat tip to Justin Hall at Chanpon.org.

Le mot pour les fenetres

From BBC Radio 4's The Now Show (April 9th edition, about 19 mins, 27 seconds in), a sketch on the development of the Entente Cordiale between France and the UK over the decades:

"In the 1980s, French national identity comes under threat, so the French decide to develop their own computer operating system, Le Mot pour les Fenetres, featuring a little paper clip that pops up and says 'you appear to be writing a letter, can I stare at you and offer no help at all? And just force you to ask for help and then pretend not to understand and then just grudgingly shake my head and go oooooggggghhhh?' "

Global M$ Glitches and Glories

One good thing, one bad I've noticed today about using Microsoft Office from an intercultural point of view:

A. When mail merging from Outlook to Word, it seems impossible to get the job title of the person into the address part at the top of a letter - which I believe is the polite thing to do in Europe. And when you enter it manually, the wizard makes it disappear if you turn your back for a few seconds. American egalitarianism at work?

B. When writing a letter in Japanese in Word, with the Japanese IME patch, a glorious series of drop down menus for greetings, for EACH month appears, as part of the letter writing wizard. For April there is a seemingly infinite number of permutations on the subject of cherry blossoms(lovely photo from Antipixel).