Comments by "alukuhito" (@alukuhito) on "Oriental Pearl" channel.

  1. That's true. Being from Canada, I hear a lot of people in Canada put down others due to their job. Like, it's just automatically assumed that a janitor is of less value to society than a businessman. The attitude is so mainstream that it's not even questioned. "Go to university and get a good job."
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  2. One thing I love about living in Tokyo is the assumption that I (as a caucasian, western, native English speaker) speak Japanese. Almost everywhere I go, people will speak to me in Japanese. I've heard a lot of westerners talk about how living in the countryside is the best for their Japanese, but from experience, the best Japanese speakers live in Tokyo. Of course there are always exceptions, but I think a lot of westerners in the countryside like to think that it's good for their Japanese, but it's not as good as they think. Also, because there are less westerners in the countryside, there are way less chances to compare your Japanese skills. You end up getting a false sense of being good at Japanese, but it's only because there are no other non-native-Japanese speakers around. Anyway, wherever you end up, use it to your advantage, because there are benefits to any situation.
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  3.  @OrientalPearl  Thanks for the reply! I agree. I'm impressed by how much Japanese you learnt in just a few years. I can't speak more than a couple of Chinese words (Mandarin or Cantonese), but your Chinese sounded good. 日本語で話すのは楽しいと思う。
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  4. You're more interesting than the more popular J-vloggers or whatever you want to call them.
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  5. It's unfortunate when people fool themselves into believing that they can speak a language well, when they can't. I had a friend like that in Japan. He had been in Japan many years, like me, yet he made really super basic mistakes. He lived in a small town and instead of using it to his advantage to really immerse himself in Japanese, he took advantage of the fact that there weren't many other native English speakers around, so he stood out. He liked to stick out. His Japanese wasn't totally bad, but his assessment of his own Japanese was way off. He had even promised his wife that he would be in Japan to really immerse himself in the language and culture so that he could come out as a professional translator or college professor of Japanese in the USA. His poor wife was waiting for him in another country while he just sat around, taught low-level English classes here and there, got on the phone with his family and friends in the USA, hung out with some of the lowest forms of native-English-speaking life in Japan, etc. He wouldn't even touch a video like this. It would offend him too much. "How dare they talk as if they understand language learning! I know language learning." He was so egotistical. Glad he's not been around me the past couple of years.
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  6. That one jealous loser that thinks that marketing or whatever is a language in the sense of Japanese and English being languages... You can tell that he came to Japan, failed at understanding anything beyond simple Japanese, but has to somehow make his ego feel like he's just as good as all of his fellow westerners in Japan who speak Japanese much better than him. Most people who speak two or more languages also have job skills, buddy. And they don't call them "languages".
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  7. I still find it weird that there are people in this world that say "y'all" without joking.
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  8. Katie's hair really suits her. I wonder if she's the kind of girl that goes for older guys, because she's smoking.
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  9. I had a manager many years ago, and she told me that she started college wanting to be a Spanish translator. She was an English-speaking Canadian with maybe just a little French from school, and no other languages. She told me that she quit college because she realized learning a new language to the extent that you can be a translator would take years. She wasn't upset about that part though. She was actually upset at her professors who didn't tell her that. She thought it was the profs' faults that she was wasting her time at school, even though she was only there a few months. Needless to say, she was also a bad manager. Where are you now, Lynn, you cranky person?
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