I’m guessing some of you have seen this before, since it’s not that new, but I still think it’s funny. A very Hunglish telling of the story of the Three Little Pigs.

250 forints ($1.50) will get you a beer glass fight, apparently, but chip in another 100 forints or 60¢, and you’ll get a proper battle. And they say everything is expensive these days in Budapest!

Dave Chapelle has a funny bit about the differences between “grape juice” and “grape drink” that I don’t think a lot of people here would get. You see, although Japan abounds in fruit both fresh and tasty, it’s very difficult to find any juice that’s not either from concentrate or grossly exaggerating its fruitiness like a newly uncloseted freshman at Berkeley. Anything sweet liquid that’s not soda is essentially “juice” in Japanese. And by “in Japanese”, I mean the borrowed word “juusu”(juice with triple the syllables), not the Japanese word “kaju”(actually fewer syllables, making me question the wisdom of borrowing the English word). I suppose it could just be part of the soft drink manufacturers’ marketing strategy to obfuscate the nature of their product by giving them lexically ambiguous (to non-English speakers) names, which would make the moms feeding their kids “juice” which is essentially Gatorade the victims of a linguistic hoodwink. Still, the only reaction I can muster to the whole situation is the same academic righteous indignation I feel when another English speaker says something like “I was literally shocked”. When it comes to English language issues in Japan, it’s very hard for me to get over the injustice being done to English and hence also to me as an English teacher and see things objectively.