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Thursday, 23 August 2007

random replies

Dear Amy and everyone,

Good evening! How was the day today? Today,,,, I actually instructed the stuff to the people in the other dept. which our department is now doing and I should have been able to talk and taught them in a better way. As today was first time to do that for me, my boss kindly allowed my all the mistakes and he gave me help in perfect timing. I really appreciated him today and was ashamed of myself - I can not do anything about work by myself and I should work much harder to understand all the stuff related to me. It will be a long way to achieve, but hopefully, one day I will.

Dear Amy, you should come visit Japan and Korea at the same time! It must be interesting to see differences and resemblance. No need to say, you can enjoy the food as well! Here has a very traditional vegitarian for buddhists, which is made from Soy bean.
Answering your first task, I think 'hand out' would be replaced by 'distribute'.

I have one sentence which I would like to ask. I would appreiciate it if you kindly answer as always....Thank you in advance.

-I tend to use 'the' more often than 'a/an'.
-I prefer using 'the' to 'a/an'"

Should I use the word 'prefer'? To be honest, I am not very good at using the word 'prefer' - it was the word which I got in the quiz in high school, and I always made a mistake. let me ask one more....

-I prefer to drink orange juice rather than have orange itself.
-I prefer drinking orange juice to having orange itself.

In the senteces above, the reason I should use 'rather than' is, I said 'prefer to drink' so that 'to + verb' will cause repetition of 'to'?

Last thing, could you please give me the advice how I could pick the way of speaking / writing in a formal way? Do you think I should read difficult books or magazines to brush up my English for business scene?
Amy, thank you again!


Here are some replies to you. Let's communicate :)

Sevinc>Honestly I thought you are a guy. I am sorry but it is always difficult to tell someone's gender only by name. Japanese also have grammatical jender but never had the idea to use words which makes the sentence equal - like s/he, or it instead of him. Apparently it is because we are more concervative than English.

Ana paula>Thank you for your kind comments as always. I read your blog which was about Caqui, and found very interesting. I never thought you had. Have you ever tried dried-caqui before? It is the goody in winter in Japan. I love it so much! Hope you will come to Japan someday--- would love to have you here.

Tony>I am not sure b/c I am not a native English speaker. Actually the reason I chose 'tend' was the direct translation from Japanese to English. So it might be the reason it sounded odd to you... How do you think?

Silwar Kishor> Thank you for your advice. Yes, I also realize my task for improving my English. Would you please tell me what kind of book you read usually? and would you give me any advice for me? I would appreciate it if you kindly answer.

Good night everyone:)

Comments

Dear Yumi, Good evening, Today I am going to write some interesting facts about my study. Like most of the Asian student I started to learn English from primary school and continue till I completed master degree. Nowadays, my son is studying in grade 5 in English based school and my 5 years daughter in pre-primary school. If she wants to learn pronunciation of word she consult with her brother and she want to learn grammar work she consult with me. One day I asked my daughter to read a paragraph from her English book, I found her way of pronunciation is different than me and more similar to her brother. When I started to think over it, then I realized that I should practice listening and speaking part in English language and I started to think about my English teachers in primary and secondary levels. They know the meaning of word and do not know proper pronunciation and I learnt from them is somewhat mixed. Nowadays I started to do listening and speaking exercise from the BBC website and British Council website. For about two and half years, I worked in missionaries as a local staff where I got an opportunity to practice my English speaking with English speaking peoples. After my hard work and support from boss and colleague, I became able to improve my English I little bit. But I am not sure how much I improved during that time. Now I started to visit English language learning website to improve reading habit. Have you tried Business English-Ten days in Manchester website? Certainly it may help you. I will catch you later.

Hi Yumi!!! You are so kind :-). Actually I have never eaten dried-caqui. I always eat the fruit and sometimes a pie made for this fruit, hmm... delicious. It´d be delightful if one day I could visit Japan :-). Then we could go in one of these maid cafés, huh? What do you think? ;-) Moreover you could come to Brazil and try the caqui pie. It would be a pleasure have you here Yumi :-). Anyway, today was a gorgeous day to me Yumi, because I finally have a day off and went to the beach! Hurray! The sea mountain is so beautiful Yumi! In your way to the beach you can see birds, lots of threes with flowers coming into bloom and there´s a dazzling view of a waterfall. And the beach itself was great! The sea was calm and blue and the waves broke softly on the shore. Oh... I´m on cloud nine today!!!:-) Have a wonderful Friday, Ana Paula.

Hi Yumi, thank for sharing Japanese's grammatical genders perspective. I would like to ask to anybody entring this blogs the blove question; except for turkish language; if are there any languages in which aren't grammatical genders. if there are the ones who know, I would really appreciate them. as far as I know, the usage of prefer like this; for the former sentence; I would rather prefer drinking orange juice than having orange itself. for the latter; -I prefer to drink orange juice to have orange itself. have a nice weekend

Hi Yumiko :-) I see that you are very careful about using the formal language. I find it strange because the formal language is getting less and less popular all over the word. When you sound informal you feel smaller distance from the person you are talking to, thus your English becomes more fluent. I'm sure that there are some more important things you shoud be carefull about. Never cover your mouth while smiling (I noticed that Japanese girls sometimes do that). Covering anything suggests you have something to cover (it's subconscious); When you are invited to lunch or dinner, never show in your Japanese way that you like the food, never: unlike you Japanese, we people of European culture just hate it; These things are much more important than using formal language. What's worse, people being too formal are seen funny. The best way is to be natural, unaffected. Smile and say 'please' and 'thank you' as often as possile and everything will be OK. All the best

Hi Yumi, your job seems to be really demanding. I hope you have fun on weekend, you deserve it. Bye

Thanks for all your contributions. This blog has now closed and can no longer accept new comments.

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