lindt is being sued in a class action in the united states because they are one of MANY brands of chocolate that tested high for heavy metals. and this is despite lindt claiming their chocolate is "expertly crafted with the finest ingredients". no recall was issued after the tests came out. lead and cadmium can fuck the body over BAD.

lindt's genius defense is that they are going to stop saying the whole thing about being expertly crafted with the finest ingredients, so nobody can complain about the heavy metals in their chocolate anymore! and that makes it okay. source: trust me bro

(now please drop the lawsuit thanks)

consumer reports test results of a bunch of different chocolate brands <- original report being referenced

even more chocolate brands that were tested for heavy metals

imagine this. you advertise yourself as "the coolest dude around". your whole persona is being "cool" and "chill". and then one day, you burn someone's house down on purpose. they inevitably sue the shit out of you. and your defense is that you will stop calling yourself "cool" or "chill" so nobody can reasonably expect that you will not set things on fire, because fire is hot, which is the opposite of cool and chill. and therefore everything is fine now and nobody can be mad at you anymore.

that is lindt's defense here.

Can someone explain the difference between としたら and なら for me? I think I get it but I'm not sure if there's grey areas where either one can be used or if it's quite clear cut.

My textbook gives the example:

その話が本当だとしたら、うれしいです。

But I could also use なら here, right?

The other example is:

飛行機で行くとしたら、いくらぐらいかかりますか。

Could I use なら here too? I feel like the answer's either no or technically yes but it's not very natural. The textbook suggests you could use "行く場合は" instead.

I also tried to write my own example:

ね、えみちゃんは振られたことになったそうだ。それとしたら、おそらく日中泣き通する。

Is it correct? Is it natural? (Not just the use of としたら but all of it.)

yay conditionals!! i love conditionals!!! (i'll try to keep it brief though haha)

let's do なら first because this is the one that i personally feel is not made very clear by textbooks and such.

なら = "if, as you say..."

sometimes なら is called "assertive" なら, but personally i don't feel like that's a very helpful qualifier...for me, i like to think of it as a conditional based on assumptions. the gist is often something like, "assuming what you say is true/will happen..."

so, we can see now why なら doesn't exactly fit with the example from your textbook:

i don't think this sentence is grammatically incorrect or unavailable; however, it means something different than what i believe your textbook is going for. so let's go to 〜としたら to see the other option.

〜としたら = "if it were the case..."

there's waaaaay more to be said on the 〜たら form than i'm going to write in this post (rest assured i've written about it extensively elsewhere LOL), but i'll say that anything to do with 〜たら has the potential to be "unreal," meaning you can use this form to talk about things that haven't actually happened.

the phrase 〜とする means kind of like "to assume" (in this case), so in that sense it is similar to なら. however, the assumption that comes from 〜とする is often an imaginary one:

see the difference? 〜とする has the ability to deal in "unreal"-ness, which なら doesn't.

so, if we tack a conditional ending onto 〜とする, we get this kind of sentence:

hopefully the nuance comes out with my translation here. using 〜としたら puts the conditional squarely in the realm of unrealness, i.e., things that can't be confirmed (at the time of speaking) to be true or false.

examining the 例文

so, probably at this point we can make a judgment on op's practice sentence. our goal here (i believe) is to get a sentence that means, "it sounds like emi got dumped. if that's true, she was probably crying all day." here's the original that was proposed:

what do you guys think? for my part, i think なら is our better option here! that's because of the first sentence: since there's a 〜そうだ ("i heard") clause, we have evidence that the situation is actually true. that means we don't have to relegate ourselves to unrealness or imaginging that the situation might be true.

by using なら, we can show we're relying on external evidence to make this if-then claim.

on the other hand, we might find 〜としたら in a situation more like this:

in a case like the above, we don't have much good evidence to suggest emi has actually been dumped; rather, we're speculating on the cause of her bad mood. so, we can use 〜としたら to talk about that unreal situation, i.e., a situation that can't be confirmed.

phew, that was a lot! i hope it was helpful, and as always anyone can feel free to chat with me/ask me questions about grammar whenever :D

tummahko = darkish

pienehkö = smallish

nuorehko = youngish

-> In English you can add "ish" to the end of just about any adjective, this "hko/hkö" form in Finnish is much rarer. I could only think of these few examples (but let me know if you know of others!)

confession: every single time I've used the ～というわけです grammar construction has been a COMPLETE shot in the dark

People have been comparing Israel's atrocities in Gaza to slavery to explain why they're not voting for Kamala Harris ("her position on Gaza is so unacceptable that I can't vote for her even though her opponent is worse on nearly every other issue I care about"), so here's a relevant history lesson.

The 1844 presidential election was between Henry Clay and James Polk. Clay had what we would now consider an unacceptably moderate position on slavery: He thought that it should be allowed to continue where it was already legal but that it shouldn't be expanded to other parts of the country. Meanwhile, Polk wanted to see slavery both preserved and expanded.

To some abolitionists, Clay's position was effectively no better than Polk's, as the Missouri Compromise had set a policy on slavery west of the Mississippi River that prohibited it north of 36°30′ north latitude (with the exception of Missouri itself), and slavery was already legal in every state south of 36°30′. Many voters, unwilling to vote for either Clay or Polk, found someone to support in a third-party nominee: James Birney, representing the Liberty Party, who wanted slavery abolished entirely.

At the time, this position was outside of mainstream politics, and Birney was seen as a fringe candidate with no chance of victory. Sure enough, Birney came nowhere close to winning any state, but he did get 15,812 votes in his home state of New York. Incidentally, the entire election came down to New York, where Polk defeated Clay by just 5,106 votes. Had Birney's voters voted for Clay instead, he would have been elected the 11th president of the United States.

Instead, Polk went on to be the most pro-slavery president in American history, starting a war with Mexico to gain new land that would be open to slavery. A situation that Birney voters thought couldn't get any worse, Polk had found a way to make worse.

Now, 180 years later, people driven by fury at Harris's support for Israel and a belief that Donald Trump can't make things any worse for Palestinians are at risk of making the same mistake. Trump absolutely can make things worse, most clearly in the West Bank, which multiple members of the Israeli governing coalition would love nothing more than to annex completely, something Trump's biggest donor reportedly wants him to allow. Given Trump's transactional nature, it's likely that he would give Israel the go-ahead to fully annex the West Bank, which would destroy hopes of Palestinian statehood for the foreseeable future. Surely those who support the Palestinian cause can't countenance that happening by refusing to vote for Harris, the only candidate with a chance to defeat Trump?

As infuriating as it is that both major candidates are so unconditionally supportive of Israel's actions in Gaza, the fact is that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be elected president in November. Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist governing partners very much want Trump to win. It seems safe to say that the vast majority of Palestinians who happen to be paying attention to US politics want the opposite: a Harris victory. Please don't let them down.

Please read this - then please reblog it? People really need to understand what's at stake. There are only 5 reblogs at this time and this lays out really well how things can go from bad to worse when the people choose a hardliner on the Right to a moderate who isn't Liberal enough on a human rights issue.

crying laughing at this tweet bc theres like 50 japanese people in the qrts calling them a fucking moron

"don't try to justify your stupidity with a half-baked understanding of japanese"

literally crying 😭😭😭😭😭

For those who don't know, Japanese has a fuck ton of first person pronouns, and gender is only one of the many things they can communicate. They can also communicate a level of politeness, social hierarchy, and also the relationship between those involved in the conversation (and probably a ton of other shit). You don't just use one (although you could stick to one specifically, but to my understanding few people actually do this), you switch between them as needed based on these factors.

Here's an article about them that goes into more depth about this whole system that covers a lot of the more common ones and some of the less common ones, it's aimed at learners so it doesn't write them out phonetically in English/romaji, but it still might be helpful in trying to understand this whole system (that honestly makes trying to work out how to refer to yourself as a learner a little bit of a nightmare):

HEY GUYS!!

GUYS!!!

FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!

ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!

We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.

As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:

So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!

Signed! (Belgium here)

In the EU? Please sign and share!

Not in the EU? Please share, for reach!

🎌 Little Tokyo in Düsseldorf 🎌

Finnish is not "difficult to learn" because it has a lot of cases or because it's not a Germanic language (unlike Danish and English which are my other two languages)

It's difficult because it is so logical that us normal mortals cannot comprehend it. I was at the kielikoulu website to check words that I had learned since last time, and to also check words that I could recognize and guess based on my knowledge of vocabulary and grammar in general. So I came across the word "maapallo" and I had not seen or heard it before, so I had to use my knowledge of Finnish to dissect the word. So I did and got "maa pallo" and my brain went "country ball" And then I thought: "Country ball? What the heck is that? Is that a type of sport? And if so, what sport is so specific that it is called 'country ball' in Finnish?" Then I clicked on the word to see the translation. It means a fucking globe...

Cute translation moment from Karakida-ke no Koshogurashi aka "the Jimbocho Book Store Manga":

Obviously it is Big Weeb to not translate "suzuki" as sea bass, and "hijiki" as seaweed, but you have to for the joke to land right? The suzuki-as-company pun requires the original word, and the word seaweed is too literal to confuse with insects (hijiki is at least a subtype of the food). For the latter you just gotta let the pun ride on context, and for the former they slipped in "seaweed" into the follow up - I am too lazy to check but I bet the original Japanese says something like "it's a plant, not an insect", since saying "seaweed is seaweed" wouldn't track. Sometimes being a weeb is the right call!

旧弘前市図書館

Former Hirosaki City Library,Hirosaki City,Aomori Prefecture