ランチ tends to be a word I see that restaurants use to describe cheaper lunch specials.

Most Japanese I talk to call lunch お昼, 昼ごはん, or ごはん.

Just a little phrase thwon in the whole discussion :)

About 子ども. Nagoyankeeさん explained in a thread why always more people tend to write 子ども and not 子供 (which is the same reason Kyle explained).
I can't find the post anymore, but if I well remember he said that the conversion to 子ども from 子供 is rather recent, thus people still write it as 子供. But I might remember it wrong...

I've only ever seen 昼御飯 when I've been doing kanji practice. When I've been reading emails from friends or playing video games I've only seen 昼ご飯. I guess its like learning the stronger words in Japanese. You need to know it for when you see/hear it, but you shouldn't really use it?

Thats a new one on me - I'll be sure to remember that! Thanks :)

Still on topic, how would you choose to pronounce the number 0?

I got a couple of question regarding lunch. In a work enviroment, Japanese people use 昼食 or they actually use the word 昼休み or maybe the latter is more a scholastic terminology? And for overnight workers? I work overnight and I was telling a Japanese person something happened to my lunch break...I used 昼休み, but I was not sure if it was appropriate also due to the fact that it was at 2am.
Thank you.

I'd say it's just about as correct as calling a 2am break a "lunch break" in English.

When you work overnight all your times are changed. So yes, if you talk to overnight workers we say lunch for our lunch at night. We say goodnight when we go home in the morning and good morning when we go to work at night. And it is not only me who I am not native English speaker, other 50ish co-workers do the same (I learnt from them actually).

That's actually my point. Natives know "lunch" is wrong, but they call it that anyway. I don't have any experience with midnight crews in Japan, but I would default to using vocabulary as if we were a daytime crew just like I do with English.

Does your native language not do this? ...was it Italian? I forgot. :/

It is kinda hard to say I am having a 2am snack meal LOL.
Yes, I worked 3 years overnight in my country too (you are correct it is Italy) and we do the same thing there. Actually, there we have community groups that work on creating daily entertainement activities (like people who work day shifts have when they have evenings free) just for overnight crews (like bars, pubs, restaurant, theaters...).
My father worked 36 years overnight (I guess it runs in the family LOL) and trust me when he spoke about supper it was 7am :)

I've only ever really seen it as 昼ご飯 from text sources I've read, but I haven't read that many.

Also, in response to Kyle's post. Some of those overuses are ridiculous, I forgot about 有る and 出来る. Although I've only been exposed to them by means of other Japanese learners.

And don't forget 御目出度！http://www.webdico.com:8080/kanji/ma...code=SHIFT-JIS