YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
WotD: Wolf down
Working as an assistant language teacher (ALT) in Japan is a great way to expose yourself to the grassroots of Japanese culture.
You’ll see how students in sports clubs wolf down their food with unbelievable speed.
When you wolf food down, you eat as much as you can as quickly as possible without regard for table manners.
Yeah, many people have the image that Japanese table manners are impeccable.
They think that everyone eats sushi or noodles, and meals are all about the presentation instead of the portion.
While that may be true if you are eating at a fancy Japanese restaurant, but not if you are at a high school.
Kids will be kids, and Japanese kids can wolf down their food with the best of them.
From my experience, the kids in baseball are some of the roughest eaters, while the ones in martial arts clubs are much more polite.
However, when it comes to speed, they are all the same.
Except, that is, for the sumo club guys.
They take the cake in more ways than one.
Those guys can put away a lot of food.
I’ve seen the biggest sumo athletes eat karage (fried chicken) pieces in one mouthful.
They wolf it down like they’re drinking water.
While chopsticks are great for eating Japanese sticky rice, they don’t let you wolf down your food.
Unless that is, you hold them together, bring the rice bowl to your mouth and then use the chopsticks to shovel the rice into your mouth in giant gobs.
Don’t be fooled by Japanese dining culture.
They can wolf down their meals like the rest of us.
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 78.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.