User blog comment:Omega natsu2/Episode 182: The Burning Earth, Review./@comment-24748439-20140517125916/@comment-4829046-20140518033104

What Tristan said. Even my Japanese teachers messed up on occasion, though that was due to mistranslation mostly since like I said, we learnt in mother tongue not English and fun fact, people are generally weak in mother tongue around here, even those that speak it like all day, so that much is granted but that's cause there is a difference between written language and spoken language, in spoken you don't have formal complicated words all the time and you don't have to worry about sentence structure. Education system should learn that you need to teach foreign languages in a language that people are more fluent at. The only people that did Japanese for O/Levels were people that were good in mother tongue, no one else could learn it. Also my mother tongue has a wide array of terms for relatives unlike English or even Japanese for that matter but we use the term akin to "Nii-chan" or "Nii-san" like every other day to refer to those of higher age or rank. We also use uncle in place of big brother as well. Depends on circumstances. If the person looks young, then the term for older brother but if looking older, then uncle. However if you want to show more respect, you could use the term for uncle even for someone looking younger since that would make them happy. Truth be told, if you are good at my mother tongue, then you could be good at Japanese too since they share many similarities. Only difference would be kanji since we don't have an equivalent for that.