ブログ
2020年 5月 7日 【The Final】
Good Bye Everyone
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To my sadness, this is the last time to tell you my enthusiasm for English for the contract expiration.
Thank my students for following me.
Thank my colleagues and my unique bosses for your countless supports.
I know I should be responsible for giving you all my farewell messages in person but as you know it’s unfortunately for me to be forced to take a means like this because of Covid-19 spreading.
To tell you this first,
my weblog of today is a bit longer than usual, please scroll your cell phone’s screen ahead to the end of this weblog and you should make sure if you can read it now on or not.However, the most important thing is “Don’t forget to read my weblog later.Be sure to do it later.”?
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Before stepping ahead to the main body of today, here are my previous weblogs.
Please check them out later, too.
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【Beyond hardships.Beyond border.】
【Be selfish to pursue your dreams】
Here we go!!
I love learning foreign languages, in particular, English. I love it so much that I often use it in my daily life. For example, chatting with my foreign friends via Skype or reading the press in English, what’s more, I’m one of the followers of the president Donald J. Trump and face his radical messages. When people find that about me, they always ask me, Why do you like English so much? How do you practice it? Although it helped me become what I am today to be delegated to America and stay there for a year, or to travel to many countries (My favorite one is Phillipines as you can guess), To be honest, my answer would be, “I don’t know. I simply love learning languages.”But people were never happy with that answer. They wanted to know why they’re spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency, and here. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. And that made me wonder, too, how do actually polyglots do it? What do they have in common? And what is it that enables them to learn languages so much faster than other people? I decided to meet other people when I visited the convention held in Las Vegas in 2018 and find that out. The best place to see a lot of polyglots is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice their languages.
There’re several such polyglot events organized all around the world, and I decided to go there and ask them about the methods that they use. And so I met a girl from Philippines(the girl who wears a blue dress on the picture, who is the same age as me and my friend), who told me that her method is to start speaking from day one. She learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right away. She doesn’t mind making even 100 mistakes a day, because that’s how she learns, based on the feedback. And the best thing is, she doesn’t even need to travel a lot today, because she can easily have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of her living room, using websites. I also met a boy(the boy from the same one Philippines who is next to me on the picture)who had a really interesting method to learn German. He simply added a hundred random German speakers on Skype as friends, and then he opened a chat window with one of them and wrote “Hi” in Russian. And the person replied, “Hi, how are you?” He copied this and put it into text window with another person, and the person replied, “I’m good, thank you, how are you?” He copied this back to the first person, and in this way, he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it. And soon he would start typing by himself, because he had so many of these conversations that he figured out how the Russian conversation usually starts. What an ingenious method, right? Besides, he always starts with imitating sounds of the language, and always learns the around 500 most frequent words of the language. If I asked a hundred different polyglots, I would hear a hundred different approaches to learning languages. Everybody seems to have a unique way how they learn a language, and yet they all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently. And as I was listening to both of them telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me : the one thing they both have in common is that we simply found ways how to enjoy the language learning process. All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it were great fun. You should have seen their faces when they were showing you their colorful grammar charts, and their carefully handmade flash cards, and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps, or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language. All of them use different methods, but they always make sure that it’s something that they personally enjoy. I realized that this is actually how I learn languages by myself, too. When I was learning English in my junior high school class, I was bored with a text in the textbook. I mean, who wants to read about “Bob asking the directions to the train station, right”? I wanted to read something more fun like “Harry Potter” instead, because that was my favorite book as a child, and I have read it in Japanese many times. So I got the English translation of “Harry Potter” and started reading, and sure enough, at that time, I didn’t understand almost anything at the beginning, but I kept on reading, by the end of the book, I was able to follow it almost without any problems though it took too much time to reach there?. I only realized it after that experience, that for not the genius there is no shortcut to master languages. We simply found ways how to enjoy the process, how to turn language learning from a boring subject into a pleasant activity, which you don’t mind doing everyday. If you don’t like writing words down on paper, you can always type them in an app. If you don’t like listening to boring textbook material, find interesting contents on Youtube or on someone’s Facebook posts for any languages. If you’re a more introverted person and you cannot imagine speaking to native speakers right away, you can apply the method of self-talk. You can talk to yourself in the comfort of your room, describing your plans for the weekend, how your day has been, or even take a random picture from your cell phone, or search for some picture on Google, and then describe the picture to your imaginary friend. I often do that though I might look strange to my family while enjoying conversations with no one else. However, the best news is, it’s available to anyone who’s willing to take the learning into their own hands. In short, I believe that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the process of learning languages, but also that joy in itself is not enough. If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language, you’ll also need to apply three more principles, said my friend who live in Las Vegas. First of all, you’ll need effective methods. If you try to memorize a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will be stored in your short-term memory and you’ll forget them after a few days. If you, however, want to keep words long-term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the what’s called space repetition. The third principle to follow is to create a system in your learning. We’re all busy and it may be too difficult to spare enough time to learn languages, but we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead. As for me, thesedays, I wake up 30 minutes earlier than I normally do to review the words which I learned by heart, this action signifies keeping a regular life from the disorder because of the Covid-19. In addition, I enjoy chatting with my friends living in Phillipines or America. You may say that you don’t have any friends unlike me, if so, it will do to find great ones on SNS such as Facebook.
Don’t look for the excuses as to why you cannot do something,
look for ways to help you do it.
To sum up, as has been noted, what matters the most is to enjoy the learning and to put the studies into the part of your daily life. This is the last message from me as a staff of Toshin. Looking back over this year, I’ve kept on telling the pleasures and the importance of learning English. I hope that as many of you as possible got to take it into action.
This is really the last time to tell you.
Thank you so much for following my weblogs.
I’m grateful to you all.
See you someday
P.S.
At last, I’ve just found the best font type.Omg…This is the exactly last time to write it.Why didn’t you come out earlier.
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