Kirk here with a screenshot from a news segment about an exhibit at the local museum (Kumamoto Hakubutsukan) about Lafcadio Hearn. The image you see is from a lesson Hearn gave to his son, helping him learn English. I was interested in how the standard English of the time was different from English today.
–> No, I do not have a dog. Do you have a cat?
I can’t think of a good example off hand but I occasionally bump into English in dictionaries that may have be OK at one point but that is obsolete now. I suspect that good scholars of English taught their students what they learned in the Meiji period and that, in some cases, those lessons have been repeated without going back to check contemporary usage.
Anyone with concrete examples of outdated English that continues to be taught in Japan?