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Duolingo gets worse (two peeves in one!)

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The new interface has particles attached to words a lot of the time… but they have attached them to the front of the next word, not the word they belong with/are marking… OK, if it is a transitive verb, you could argue that the を that goes on the verb’s object* is only there because of the type of verb it is**, so it should be on the front of the verb, but… Sugawara sensei drilled us endlessly that if we really absolutely desperately must pause after a word, to gather our thoughts or whatever, if we were going to pause after a word, to say the particle first and then pause, so particles obviously belong with the word that comes before them, the word they mark; &  Some verbs are complicated enough that they can be generating multiple particles - verbs to give and to receive tend to generate に &/or から as well as the を particles, for just one example; &  You can have other words after that を or が particle and before the verb, like adverbs, or numbers and counters and ...
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Tankas, comparative winters, plant biology, and a tanka (in English)

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Dammit, tankas are addicting!  I already wrote one about a squirrel in my garden this morning, while I was pouring my tea.  For anyone counting & keeping score, in England, squirrel is two syllables - squi and rel.  I have had problems with people in the US understanding the word, because they say it “squirl” in their local accent and couldn’t understand the two syllable version to be the same word.  Since syllable count is important for tankas, I just wanted to point that out, lest somebody nitpicks syllable count. For anybody that doesn’t know, a tanka is a form of Japanese poetry & it is blank verse - it doesn’t have to rhyme.  It doesn’t even (in English) need to have a particular meter, no battling with iambic, or dactyl or trochee or any of the other patterns that we had to do for English homework back in the day - although I do still remember some phrases from when we were being taught linguistic tricks for emphasising your language, like allitera...
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Ethnography: Greetings & Introductions

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  I’d assumed that I would talk about business cards, because that was the topic that I knew the least about, and I still read a lot about that and bookmarked things, took screenshots of the useful phrases associated with it, but I did learn from the cultural atlas the terms in Japanese for family name and given name and I recognized them from the kanji practice I have been doing - for family name, you can use 上の名前 - ‘ue’ (上) means over or above, so I loved seeing it in this context and that the ‘above’ can be metaphorical/social/hierarchical too.   The given name takes the corresponding opposite direction, 下の名前 - ‘shita’ (下) means below or under, and this evidently extends to hierarchies and social position too.  In fact, jisho.org (which I love and highly recommend to anyone who isn’t using that for their Japanese word look ups), listed both superior and elder in the additional meaning of 上, and vice versa for 下.   The reason that this is so interesting t...
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