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“Have you two heard about Japanese language structures before?” Martin says over dinner one Friday night; ignoring his son’s expressions of boredom and confusion, he adds, “I mean, using those intricate Kanji and Hiragana and Katakana, not to mention numbers and Romanji (which is when they write using our alphabet), and you’ve got to think about how all these types of writing are mixed together, so you’ve got to be pretty fluent or it’ll get really confusing and—”
“Martin, are you talking about a banned topic again?” Jackie asks as she walks back into the dining room, prompting sighs of relief from the boys (for the record, Japanese language has joined physics and his other favourite rambling topics on Jackie’s ‘banned dinnertime topics’ list).
“Of course not,” Martin says, and Jackie sighs fondly.