Since I became a member of TM, I've been thinking how I can explain things clearly and let people understand my speech with easy. I bought the book,
The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand
and visited their site.
WOW, It's developed many functions and they now have transcript to each free video.
Some of you, learners of English, might find their speaking a bit fast, but with transcripts, you'd be able to grasp the main point of each video. Enjoy! commoncraft
(To show the transcript, click "Video Info & Transcript" button just under the screen)
those who've been coming to my blog now and then might remember that this year's my resolution is that i'd keep writing a blog entry every single day. Well, when I came up with that resolution, I was thinking it might not be so difficult to keep fulfilling the task. Just spending a few minutes with PC, then I'm done with it. But it didn't go as I was planning... Something is wrong with my PC and it suddenly stops working. Sometimes the same thing happened while I was writing the entry, so I was frustrated and began to loose my enthusiasms to keep working on the resolution...
But do you know what happens if you don't use English everyday? After quitting the every day writing, I often find myself struggling to come up with the words and phrases I want to use during online conversation sessions. To make the matter worse, I was not able to have even an online conversation because of the abrupt shutting down of my PC and it got worse and worse that I can't use English smoothly...
Anyway, I learned a very important lesson for the last a few weeks that there is nothing you can do other than using English every day if you want to be a good use of it. It doesn't matter much what you'll do with English. I've got to do anything I can manage to do EVERY DAY...
Here is my friend singing Fuji-san. She sings so beautifully and she often says she can because she didn't give up halfway...
Since a few days ago, I began to feel weak pain again in my lower back and buttocks, so I'm trying to spend time in a relaxed mind frame. It's anime time today. I bought three anime Blu-ray at amazon.com. Isn't it amazing that we can buy DVD or Blu-ray quite easily and cost-friendly directly from amazon in US. I used to order those material in other online shops, but there is no need for it. I can buy not only books but other materials in one place.
The article is about a coming out story of a famous basket player, but the topic I'm talking about here is some English expression which is known to be WHALES structure in Japanese education of English, I found in the article.
(Excerpt) "But I don't let my race define me any more than I want my sexual orientation to."
Students learning English in Japan are taught this structure as something important and usually overwhelmed with complicated explanations from teachers, who believe that they have to teach this structure simply because they're on a textbook. I bet many of them have never encountered the structure used in the real world other than in textbooks, thus they don't know how necessary/unnecessary they teach it. It's nothing difficult if you read the sentence from the beginning to the end, as the sentence is written, but since many Japanese teachers believe that if students can't translate sentences into proper Japanese it's a sign that students are failed to grasp the meaning of the sentences, so they ask them to translate. That's where a problem occurs. It's easy to understand the meaning, but hard to translate. That's all...
For the last couple of weeks, I've been doing some writing in Japanese, which may not be a difficult task for those people who are required to do some formal and descriptive writings on business or in education, but it totally made me reluctant to write in English. I'm not versatile enough that I can think both in English and Japanese interchangeably according to topics. I thought it'd be easier to write in my notebook, but that's not particularly fun... I'm keep writing the same thing repeatedly. I'd need to do something other than free writing. That is what I'm pondering these days. What if I pick phrases and sentences I was fascinated with during reading a book and write them down in a notebook. It'd be much practical and effective to stock more expressions I can use in my writing from the books whose usage of language or messages I appreciate.
