Australian Election
The new Australian prime minister just declared an election for August 21. She has only been prime minister for a couple of weeks. She became prime minister because of a coup in her party, so now she wants to seek a mandate from the Australian public and win a general election. It looks as though [...]
Posted by Aidan under Culture, Culture - Western | Permalink | 2 Comments »Sausages
When a food is popular in a country there is usually a wide variety of that kind of food. For example, seafood is very popular in Japan and if you go to the supermarket, you can find a wide variety of seafood. In Australia, barbecues are a popular way of cooking and sausages are very [...]
Posted by Aidan under Culture, Culture - Western | Permalink | 2 Comments »Australia’s First Female Prime Minister
Last week Australia got its first female prime minister. The previous prime minister, Kevin Rudd, had been very popular in Australia. Then he made some decisions, such as delaying an emissions trading scheme (designed to reduce climate change) and this disappointed many people. In recent polls the government had lost a lot of its support, [...]
Posted by Aidan under Culture, Culture - Western | Permalink | 2 Comments »Teaching Osaka-Ben to Foreigners
A lot of the people I met in Osaka were very proud of the Osaka dialect (Osaka-ben). The Osaka city government has a web site that teaches some basic phrases from Osaka, such as maido and metcha. http://www.city.osaka.lg.jp/contents/wdu020/english/osaka_dialect/index.html In Australia, there aren’t many real differences in accents in different regions. Some people can sometimes notice [...]
Posted by Aidan under Culture, Culture - Western | Permalink | 2 Comments »Pronouncing Names
Pronouncing Western names can be difficult because many English letters have multiple pronunciations. When Japanese people see my name: Aidan, they often think it is pronounced アイダン。 But it’s pronounced エイデン。 Sometimes there is no way to know how to pronounce a name other than asking. HearNames.com is a web site that lets you listen to [...]
Posted by Aidan under Culture, Culture - Western | Permalink | 2 Comments »