happylife

Fast food education

I visited a large book store the other day to do some marketting researches about English textbooks for Japanese students. I'm not a English teacher and I know my English is far from perfect, but I had a business offer to write a book about blogging in English and I accepted it. I have been thinking about what to write and actually written some pages of scripts, but I threw them away because I couldn't be satisfied with them. More than a half of one floor of the book store was occupied with so-called English textbooks for Japanese; most of them are written in Japanese though they are English textbooks.

Phrasing bias

I have been keeping this English blog almost every day since May in 2004 and I have written more than 130,000 words in it. If we pay attention only to its volume, it is equivalent of one thick paperback or it takes more than ten hours for a CNN professional announcer to read aloud all of them. It is quite a volume and I can't forget about the importance of keeping it every day. Anyway, I made the other day a small program so that I can analyze my vocabulary. It sums up how many times I have used each English word in my blog and compares the result with the LDOCE defining vocabulary list. LDOCE stands for Longman Dictionary Of Contemporary English and it is a very popular English dictionary for ESL students all over the world because all the words in it are defined only with the 2,100 words in the list. To my surprise, 400 out of 2,100 words in the list I have never used in my blog. It's not that I don't know most of the 400 words, but I couldn't use them until today. 400 out of 2,100 comes to almost 5% and it is quite a big bias because I have written more than 130,000 words. I'm now trying to use all of the missing words and I think it's a good training for my English.

Canadian English

In Japanese compulsory education system, we have to learn English at least for three years in junior high school. Most people keep learning it for more three years in senior high school, and some more years in university or college. Plus, it's very popular in Japan to learn English after graduating schools. I think the average total years we spend for learning English comes to ten years. Anyway, most English we read or listen in Japan is not Queen's but American. We are not used to original English. It sounds strange like a dialect such as Indian, Australian, Philippine and so on. What makes it difficult is that English of English people is really fluent. It is not only strange but also fast. I think that Canadian English is between American and English, and it is closer to the former just like the geographical location. It is almost the same as American English, but we sometimes smell the flavor of Europe just like in this signboard.

Signal color

In my flight test last year, the examiner asked me what to do in case of radio failure. Of course I know the answer but I made one mistake because of the strange use of Japanese language. It is about the color - we call green as "MIDORI" and blue as "AO" in Japanese. The Japanese strange custom is that in terms of signal color we call green as "AO" which usually means blue, so we call this green signal as blue in Japanese. In case of NORDO (no radio), we have to check the tower signal to be steady green before landing, is the right answer, but my answer was "steady blue!" The examiner gave me a questioning look when I answered and I looked at him again after my answer because I was confident of it.

Satsuma

In English, Satsuma means a small orange or tangerine without seeds and with loose, thin skin that comes off easily. It comes originally from Japan. We call it Mikan in Japanese and it is a very popular winter fruit in Japan. But we never call it Satsuma. Satsuma is an old name of a province in the south part of Japan. The area is famous for the sweet potatoes, a kind of taro, and we call the potatoes Satsuma in Japanese. The area of Satsuma is not famous for tangerines and so it's very strange for us Japanese that Satsuma indicates tangerines in English. I think there must have been a kind of mistakes in translation relative to the Japanese tangerine. This kind of mistakes sometimes happen; the literal translation of Meriken-ko in Japanese is American flour, which indicates just flour. If we knew some words mistranslated, it is difficult to correct them after they have spread. I think that the responsibility of translators is very heavy.

Twilight?

This is the sky which I saw at first soon after waking up this morning. I was happy because the weather seemed to be good after the long rain. Anyway, when I was a high school student, I was taught that the word "twilight" originates from two lights, that is the sun and the moon, however according to my dictionary, it means the faint light after the sun has gone down. If I believe my dictionary, this morning sky was not twilight because it was not after the sun has gone down. Thinking about the origin, the former idea which I was taught in my school and had been believing for years, seems more natural, but not only one dictionary says it is after the sun has gone down. I wonder which is the correct definition of twilight.

The 500th anniversary

I have been keeping this blog almost every day since I first started it last May, and this is the 500th memorial post. Of course I still have a lot of mistakes in my blog, but I feel much more comfortable when I use English. I would say "to use English" rather than "to write English" because writing requires reading skill and improve speaking and listening skill at one time. I think this is an excellent way  to improve practical English skills for most Japanese people who have learned much about English for a long time and who can't still use English like me. The only one problem while keeping English blog was that I often felt uneasy about my English sentences; I wasn't sure whether each English sentence in my blog was correct or not. This is why I made a native correction system which is now running as a commercial service and more than 100 Japanese students have experienced by now. There are a lot of ways to make good use of this simple system. I would share the way I recommend and actually I practice everyday; that is to print out the correction page and check your original sentences with the corrected sentences.

Analyzing radio voice

Radio call is the biggest obstacle for me before getting the flight license. In order to overcome my difficulties in listening English, I decided to count on technology including an MP3 voice recorder and sound analyzing software. Recording all the radio calls during my flight and listening to the obscure parts again and again until they make sense, that is my new training which looks like a detective job. Using this voice analyzing software I can listen to just the phrase which is not clear repeatedly and at slow speed. It's a great software but I still have lots of unclear parts in the recorded radio voice. Today I asked my friend for help about this voice analyzing job. He is a native English speaker who has recently got the flight license. Surprisingly he couldn't recognize the phrase after listening to it several times. What I understood was that focusing just to the radio voice is not a good idea because we can use any other information while flying such as the flight course, requested procedure, and visual information. Anyway I have to get used to it as early as possible.

What's your point?

I often receive phone calls from someone I don't know. They are various kinds of sales person from newspapers, donation groups, and insurance companies. Of course I'm not interested in most of their business, but they are not always annoying me because I can practice English conversation with them for free. As you know, conversation by telephone is one of the hardest things for us ESL people because we cannot use any body languages and expressions, and incoming calls are especially difficult to deal with as we have no idea about the purpose of the call when we pick up the receiver. Today I received a call from a donation group. As soon as I lift the telephone, he started speaking very quickly with my full name and some key words such as "police" and "government" which made me nervous. As he didn't seem to pause speaking, I said my special phrase, "Excuse me, I'm afraid I can't speak English well. Would you tell me your point?" Then he eventually said it was the call about a donation. I refused to donation and the five minute free telephone lesson finished.

Hydrangea

As I am a boy, I'm not so interested in flowers as girls. I know few Japanese flower names, and I know much less in English. I'm shocked to count up my vocabularies of flowers. Cherry blossom, rose, lily, tulip, and that's all! Sure I'm not to work for flower shops but I had better know many more words. As you know "hydrangea" is the name of this flower, which I have never heard in my life while I have seen it repeatedly in the summer season both in Japan and Canada. I assume that "hydra" is related to water and this flower comes out in rainy season. In such way, my vocabularies are gradually increasing.