The Voyage of Dr. Manbo

When I was a middle school student, one of my favorite Japanese authers was Morio Kita. He is a son of a famouse Japanese tanka, thirty-one syllabled verse, master and wrote lots of interesting books. I enjoyed his books especially essays. His essays are sprinkled with humor and have a lot of laughs.
My first book of his essay was どくとるマンボウ航海記, The Voyage of  Dr. Manbo. He wrote in the book about his experience of a voyage as a ship's doctor. The episodes were silly and funny. It's hard to explain how funny the book is. He didn't write about nice tourist spots nor delisious foods. It was published in1960. It's an old one but I highly guarantee you'll enjoy reading it!

How to buy fish at fish markets

I’ll tell you about the auctions at local fish markets.
Only people who has the rights to buy at the fish market can take part in the fish auction. Fifty to 100 buyers from places like local fish shops or super markets come to buy fish at the markets every morning.
When you find some fish worth buying, you have to show the price you decided to the auctioneer with the secret hand sign and the person who offers the highest price can buy the fish.

No topic

I decided to post my blog every day but sometimes, like today, I can't come up with an idea to write. Sorry. If I get a good topic I'll post a new one. Maybe, later tonight.

Extensive reading

About eight years ago, I began to study English for the first time in 20-something years. I don't remember exactly why I was thinking about learning English at that time. Maybe it was a fashion. I bought some books on extencive reading, 多読, and it was really interesting for me. They say there are only three rules for extensive reading. First, don't use any dictionaries while reading a book. Second, you should skip unfamiliar words in the books. And last, throw away the book if you lose interest in it. The method was quite new for me. I started reading English books like the way I learned from the books.
It worked well at first and spent six years just reading books in that way. It was fun but I've changed my mind because as long as I don't use a dictionary I won't read any advanced books or magazines like TIME. It's obvious. At best, I could read books at young adult level if I did't use a dictionary. I should have used dictionaries more.

Kouhaku

Watching Kouhaku utagassen ,紅白歌合戦, on TV is a Japanese custom.  The Japanese public TV station, NHK, broadcasts the music show on December 31st every year. Many popular singers appear the program. My wife is really into it since she was a child. While watching the show, she often asks me like "do you think which side would get a win?" or "the white team will win because the mc is Arashi and they are really nice this year, what do you think?" Leave me alone. I'm not interested in the show but I HAVE TO answer it seriously otherwise she would blame me! Do you like Kouhaku?

Thinking about this year

Time flies. Can you believe it's November already? One year ago, I studied English all alone except taking on-line lessons. I was using Twitter at that time but I didn't follow Japanese people so I didn't have English learneing friends at all. I had no idea what to do for learning English.
The situation has chenged since this March after taking English pronunciation lesson from Mr. Kaz Uekawa who teaches it with Eigonodo methed. He said speak English from your throat. He also recomended me to make friends on language exchange site and talk with the friends on Skype for improve my English skills. And I did it. Talking with friends on Skype helps me to speak English. I've got used to do it now, not really good at though.
After that, I followed many English learners, some of them are master class, on Twitter and made friends on Facebook. I learned a lot from them like shadowing, reading TIME magazine, rapid reading, flash speaking and more and others are inspireing me to study English hard. Thanks all. I'll continue to do my best.

Why do you study language?

Almost every Sunday morning, I talk with an American friend on Skype. We met a language exchange site, Lang-8, this march. He's learning Japanese all by himself for several years.

He lives in Florida and he is nice, funny and a little bit shy. Every Japanese learner has their own reason for studying Japanese like Japanese culture, manga, J-Pop and so on. He said he likes the sound of Japanese. I understand his reason that brought him to learn Japanese because I also like the sound of English.