To a T

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Phrase: To a T

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I used this phrase last week during a lesson and suddenly realized the student I was talking to may not understand what it meant.

I explained it to her, and now I’m going to explain it to you.


To a T means perfectly or exactly.


Some personalities on Japanese TV can impersonate other TV personalities perfectly.

For example, there’s a guy on TV who has IKKO’s どんだけ〜 down to a T.

If you’re not looking at them, it’s impossible to tell for sure if it’s the real IKKO or the imitator.

Then we have the topics that I choose for lessons.

They say you can please some of the people most of the time, most of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Some lessons suit some students, but not others.

That’s just the way it goes, it’s always hit or miss, but just because the topic isn’t their cup of tea, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn something.

Come to think of it, all of my students want to be able to choose the right idiom at the right timing in a conversation.

It takes a lot of practice and even more reading, but eventually, they get it down to a T.

There you have it.

When you can do something correctly, you can do it to a T.

Whether you are impersonating someone else, choosing English lesson topics or just trying to decide the right thing to say at the right time, when you get it perfect, you have it to a T.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100



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