1) From some list on smart.fm, there's this following sentence.

会社はつぶれるものだ
A company is a thing that can go bankrupt.

Is this translation accurate? I would have thought it'd just have meant "the company's bankrupt" with the もの adding an explanatory tone...

2) Secondly, from a conversation today with my penfriend

(15:31) Me: この国には、インタネットはちょっと遅いが、改善されつつあるらしくない　＞＜
(15:33) Her: I think you mean 改善されつつないらしい＾＾

As far as I know, らしくない is used for saying that something doesn't appear to have a certain quality, so why was it wrong?

dizmox Wrote:1) From some list on smart.fm, there's this following sentence.

会社はつぶれるものだ
A company is a thing that can go bankrupt.

Is this translation accurate? I would have thought it'd just have meant "the company's bankrupt" with the もの adding an explanatory tone...

Not Japanese, so take my answer with a grain of salt. But I'll try my very best.

From what I understood when I read that sentence, it means something along the lines of "Companies are things that can (possess the potential/quality to) crumble (go bankrupt)." もの in this case means "thing", つぶれる is a quality, that this "thing" possesses.
A fairly accurate translation from my point of view.

1) The translation is correct. "The company is bankrupt" would be 会社はつぶれている。

2) I guess it's a question of naturalness. You said "There doesn't seem to be improvements being done" and she said "It seems it isn't being improved". While one might be more natural in one language, the other may be more natural in the other.

ありがとう, those replies helped a lot.

You need to watch out for もの, it has a wide range of usages including some grammar 'set phrases'; "thing" is often not the best choice. The grammar reference I have here splits it into 30 subheadings over ten pages. (a large part of JLPT2 grammar is I think sorting out the various possible もの、こと and わけ constructions...)

I think that for 会社はつぶれるものだ "A company is a thing that can go bankrupt" is a bit too 直訳 -- for learning purposes I'd rather have an SRS-card answer which had a brief note about the grammar than a 'translation' which just reinforced the もの=thing link. It's not that "...is a thing that..." is wrong as such, I just think you're better off going directly from "XはYものだ" to "Y is a general property of objects of type X" without going via the direct translation of もの to "thing". (Feel free to think about it that way if it helps convince your brain it makes sense long enough for it to sink in -- I'm pretty sure I did at first. I'm just recommending against putting it in your SRS.) It's like the idea of the particle は and "as for" being kind of equivalent -- a useful idea, but don't hold onto it too long.

(If you actually want more natural English phrasing of the idea then I'd be tempted by "Companies do go bankrupt" or "Companies can and do go bust".)

Yeah, I rembmer way back from Genki 1 that in Japanese they have the paradigm of saying "I think not X" instead of "I don't think X". ^^