Originally Posted by MMM (Post 790979)

akemashite omedeto gozaimasu = is the phrase "Happy New Year" if you were saying it to someone.

mikan = tangerines.

Originally Posted by chryuop (Post 791051)

Trust me, just like Japanese people have to have a lot of fantasy in understanding our mails (only someone above us knows how much my penpals must be talented in understanding my Japanese LOL), so we need to keep an open mind when they speak English.
Try to see in the way they write the Japanese structure patterns and think that they might translate a word bad or use a word that in Japanese might have a double meaning and they assume it has the same double meaning in English. So when you see "Tangerine Eating", try to see it more like a ミカンを食べて. And just like we tend to translate with a ing verb everytime we see a て form, try to see their ing form as て forms...thus sometimes they might try to use and ing form as conjunction...like I think she might be trying to do here.

As per the Tangerine, not sure if it is tradition or just someone's habbit, one of my penpal told me that in Japan there is a music show (contest?) for the last day of the year and she likes eating tangerines (or it is a tradition? not sure coz that part was not clear in her English...not even sure if the music show is something traditional or a MTV show LOL).