Naughty Children (Feedback)

Thanks for all your comments. I suppose that as so many of you are mothers, it’s not surprising that this was one of the more popular topics.

YU and Biwa, I think you are overanalyzing the “precisely / exactly” distinction. When you meet a pair like this, my advice is to check a dictionary to get the basic meanings, and then just look out for examples of the words in use. If you want, you can also do a search for each of the words in a corpus like the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the British National Corpus. This will give you hundreds of examples of how each word is used in real English.

Here is some feedback on your comments.

I suggested to my sister and my two brothers to give “sodas” to our uncle.
I suggested to my sister and my two brothers that we give “sodas” to our uncle.

I have been encountering a lot of mischief by my children
I have a lot of experience of children getting into mischief

Here are some incidents that happened to me.
Here are some things that happened to me.

We had to buy electric fan every year because they sat on the neck of fan and broke it.
Do you know this structure? “We kept having to buy a new fan every year because they kept sitting on them and breaking them.”

Luckily, he just ended up strongly hitting his tailbone,
Luckily, he just ended up hitting his tailbone hard,

So I’d been wondering why I have to do the work exactly now, before my son enters kindergarten, too.
I would remove “exactly” from this sentence altogether.

I still have to do 隣組班長, though…
I think that Japanese people use “have to” in a very different way from Westerners. If someone tells me to do something that I don’t want to do, I just refuse. Of course, Japanese people say 断れなかった, though. It’s just a cultural difference.

Hi Kattie,
Thanks for the comments. There were lots of useful expressions in there, and I’m glad to see that people picked up on them.

You used to be a tomboy. So do I.
You used to be a tomboy? So did I.

Looking back those days,
Looking back on those days,

I could not imagine that he was interested in my makeup
I never imagined that he would be interested in my makeup. / It never crossed my mind that he would be interested in my makeup.

my friends and I used to climb over the fences and sneak into each others dorms when we were in university.
Nice sentence.

Yes, but you have to bear with the countless jars all over the house.
Yes, but you have to put up with …

>It’s a real pity (and also funny) that they gradually lose those minds because their schoolwork gets busier.
It’s a real pity that they gradually lose that curiosity as they get busier with schoolwork. (Call me cynical, but as I have said before, it seems to me that the whole purpose of the Japanese education system is to destroy children’s curiosity. That is why they overload them with so much work and so many tests.)

I am afraid but the site is still something wrong,
I am afraid there is still something wrong with the site.

and also they carry their plans into action.
and also, they put their plans into action.

I thought that my children might have the game “egg toss”,
I thought that my children might have been playing “egg toss,”

I went up to see if everything was okay
Nice sentence.

I’ve worn false eyelashes only once in my life
Some of my students wear false eyelashes. I think they look ridiculous.

in short, mothers have to do some volunteer work
I think you mean “volunteer” work!

I’m sorry now I have a guset.
I know you meant “guest,” but this typo made me laugh. Check “gusset” in a dictionary if you don’t know what it means.

Your discussion about “よりによって”is interesting.
Yes, but remember that there are many possible translations depending on the context.

No wonder why I didn’t get what she meant!
No wonder I didn’t get what she meant!

Thanks for your explanations – it certainly sounds a lot more involved than it is in the UK.
Most things here tend to be a lot more involved than they are in the U.K., especially anything to do with schools.

Thank you for sharing lovely stories of David and Peter. I can easily imagine how David used his toes of his shoes!
Don’t believe a word of it. I was an angelic child who never did anything wrong at all.

We feel like working at the kindergarten,don’t we?”
I think you mean “We feel as though we are working at the kindergarten, don’t we.”

That’s it for today.

Have a great weekend.