Him being Japanese doesn't automatically make him an authority on Japanese grammar. The small Midwestern town I grew up in is chock full of white-as-bleach European Americans whose ancestors have exclusively spoken English for several generations. Most of them couldn't tell you the difference between an adjective and an adverb if their lives depended on it.

The same goes for many of the foreign (read: white) English "teachers" in Japan. Most of them barely graduated from college, couldn't find any other work, and so they decided to go to Japan to teach English. In actuality, they should be going back to America and spending a couple years in middle school remedial English classes.

In fact, just to confirm, I got out my copy of Koujien (an authoritative Japanese dictionary comparable to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary) to look up 「わかり」. And sure enough, there it is:

> わかり【分り】

> 　わかること｡さとること｡のみこみ｡会得えとく｡了解。

> And his second statement was a joke. And funny IMHO

Well, that went over my head. If so, then his first statement was probably meant as a joke as well.