Before the Coffee Gets Cold

A small café in a Tokyo back alley where you can travel back in time, as long as you return before your coffee gets cold. Four quiet stories, no special effects — which is exactly why the language is worth stealing.

Why these words

I read this one in English and highlighted every chunk that I understood but would never have produced myself. That is the useful kind of gap: not vocabulary I am missing, but wording I keep walking past.

So the cards below are chunks, not single words — avert your eyes, not avert. A word on its own tells you a meaning; a chunk tells you how the word behaves in a sentence, which preposition follows it, and what register it carries. The back of each card gives a learner’s-dictionary definition plus the sentence with the target knocked out, so you have to put the phrase back yourself rather than nod along to it.