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Word of the Day: Bell pepper
Most North Americans will call the vegetables in the above picture bell peppers.
However, the Japanese use a different word: paprika.
By the way, paprika is from the Dutch language.
But the Japanese only call the brightly coloured bell peppers paprika, and they call the green bell peppers pīman, which is from the French language, by the way.
Why?
This is an excellent time to prove that reading a newspaper is one of the best things you can do in life.
Clicking this link will take you to a Japan Times article titled “History of the vegetable most hated by Japanese children.”
In this article, they explain why the Japanese language has different names for differently coloured bell peppers.
Etymology, the history of words, is very, very interesting.
If you are Japanese and you read this article in English, you are learning about the etymology of your language and using English as a tool to learn—two birds with one stone, as they say.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 62.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.