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Word Count

Total words:

Post Counts

September/October: 25
November: 11
December: 7
January: 11

Book Reviews

Total so far:

Podcast

Podcast Episodes:
Scripts:

Typing 太平

Juppun ha Juubun Stats

April 16th: 84
April 23rd: 127

October 1st: 89
October 15th: 109

January 7th: 185
January 21st: 93

First 2: 211
Middle 2: 198
Last 2: 278

My speed went down a bit over the first semester, but rose during the second semester.

[34 words]

Salmon fishing in the desert

A movie called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen started showing on Saturday. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds very interesting. It stars Ewan MacGregor, along with Emily Blunt and Kristin Scott Thomas. Probably you all know Ewan MacGregor from movies such as Trainspotting and Star Wars. You may also have heard of Emily Blunt, who recently starred in Looper and has also appeared in movies like My Summer of Love. Lasse Hallstrom, the director, also directed Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

[88 words]

Warning against unacknowledged copying

If you copy sentences from a book, for example, and don't mark the copied parts as quotes, this behavior counts as cheating, and your grade will be a fail.

Blog stats

Post Counts

September/October: 25
November: 11
December: 7
January:

Word Count

Total so far:

Book Reviews

Total so far: 23
Other reviews: 2
Total: 25

Podcast

Total episodes: 2

Scripts: 3

Typing

Total posts: 0

Juppun ha Juubun stats

April 16th: 158
April 23rd: 127
October 1st: 89
October 15th: 109
January 7th: 185
January 21st: 93

First 2: 285
Middle 2: 198
Last 2: 278

The weekend

At the weekend, we had the Center Test, a nationwide exam for third-year high school students and anyone wanting to go to university. The subjects tested were Koumin, Kokugo (Japanese), English (written test), and English (listening test) on the first day; and science and maths on the second day. The students must be very tired!

Recently, I saw the movie A Dangerous Method, starring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, and Michael Fassbender. It was an interesting movie, especially for the performances of Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, who played Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, respectively.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake

Today we watched the trailer of The Sorcerer and the White Snake on the iTunes Move Trailers site. Here is the summary on the site:

Action director Ching Siu-Tung helms this fantasy film based on an old Chinese legend about an herbalist who falls in love with a thousand-year-old White Snake disguised as a woman. Jet Li stars as a sorcerer who discovers her true identity and battles to save the man's soul.

I had heard that Jet Li wasn't planning to do any more action movies, so I'm looking forward to seeing this one. There wasn't much action on show from him in the trailer, but I'm hoping there will be more in the film. In any case, it should be interesting to find out about the legend.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake

Today, we watched The Sorcerer and the White Snake, a movie starring Jet Li. It's a fantasy movie, and it also appears to be a romance movie: it seems that the sorcerer has to choose between his duty and his love. Apparently, it's based on an ancient Chinese legend, but I don't remember this legend. I don't know when the movie is coming out in Japan, but I'll be on the lookout for it.
Another movie I want to check out is Zero Dark Thirty, coming next month.

Soccer in December and January

• Christmas Eve
• Christmas Day
• Boxing Day
• matches
• disappointment
• move up the table
• relegation
• avoid relegation
• be unlikely to avoid relegation
• promotion
• near the relegation places
• New Year's Eve
• New Year's Day
• The Guardian

In the holiday, I didn't have much chance to see or read about football, because the place where I was staying doesn't have any Internet connection. That was a pity, because the winter holiday is a very important time in the football season. Most teams in the Premier League play a match on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas Day, i.e. December 26th) and another match on New Year's Day. It is often said that, if you at the foot of the table on New Year's Day, you are rather unlikely to avoid relegation. At the top of the table, it is generally thought that, if you are not in the top 3 or 4 spots at this time of year, you are very unlikely to be the champion.

I get most of my football news from the Guardian, my favorite British newspaper. Although I was not able to read it during the holiday, I did see some news about Kagawa, who returned from injury to set up a goal or two for Manchester United.

By the way, what films are you looking forward to in 2013?

Remaining lessons

Remember that, after today's lesson, next week (January 14th) is a holiday, then we have classes on January 21st and January 22nd (virtual Monday).

New Year holiday

This New Year holiday was a little shorter than usual. I went to Amakusa on January 30th, then came back to Kumamoto on January 3rd to prepare for intensive lectures at PUK, which went on from January 4th to January 6th.

Football & Nagoya

I went to Nagoya at the weekend.

Nagoya and other things

Hi everyone, how's everything? At the weekend I went to Nagoya to attend a seminar and use the Nagoya University library. The seminar was very good, and the library was very nice, and I also had the chance to see The Hobbit, so it was a very good trip.

Football (yet again)

This last weekend's Premier League matches were very exciting. Manchester United beat Manchester City 3–2, and Liverpool beat West Ham by the same scoreline. Chelsea beat Sunderland 3–1, and Arsenal beat West Bromwich Albion. Apart from Spurs losing to Everton, the traditional top teams all won, and the table is looking closer to what it usually looks like, with the traditional top teams in the top half. Perhaps the only big disappointment is Newcastle, who were in the top 6 last year but are now in 14th.

In Japan the FIFA Club World Cup is going on, but unfortunately I haven't had time to see any of the matches. On Saturday, Chelsea flew to Japan after their Premier League match to join in the competition.

Working on writing errors

Hi everyone,

Today, let's work on writing errors, using my student Maika's worksheet. Let's use our typing homeworks. Please print out 3 or 4 of them and use them with the worksheet.

Nagoya

I went to Nagoya at the weekend. It was just a short trip: I flew up there on Friday night after classes, and had to come back on Saturday night because I had work to do on Sunday. But a teacher in Nagoya took me to a beer restaurant there on Friday night, and the workshop I attended on Saturday was excellent. I had to leave a little early to catch my flight back.

The FIFA Club World Cup 2012 is starting very soon. The first match, between Sanfrecce Hiroshima and Auckland City FC, is on December 6th. The competition will continue until December 16th. You can check out the schedule here.

Soccer, soccer, soccer

The Premier League is getting more and more exciting. Usually by this point in the season it is beginning to become clear who the top 4 teams will be at the end of the season. The general consensus at the beginning of the season was that those teams would be Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, and Arsenal. However, Chelsea seem to have lost confidence, and the same appears to be true of Arsenal. Chelsea are still hanging on to third place, so the predictions may still turn out to be largely true, but Arsenal are now in 10th place, and it's difficult to see where improvement is going to come from. You can find the league table here.

The Football Club World Cup is coming soon. Maybe Chelsea will be able to discover a new mentality in Japan!

Blog Stats

As I have explained several times, it is very important in this course to write monthly Blog Stats posts. These posts allow you and your teacher to keep track of how much you have been writing, and to solve any problems that you discover.

Here is one example of a good Blog Stats post. You will notice that it has figures for November and also total figures for this semester. If you look around the blog, you'll also notice that it has Tags in the sidebar, and that the Tags include "blog stats". This is also necessary, because it enables us to find this important information easily at any time.

Mr Tomei will be checking all the blogs from Tuesday. There is a strong possibility that those without a blog stats post for November—visible in the sidebar—will fail the course.

California (Oxford Bookworms Factfiles)

Everyone has heard of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. Everyone has seen films from Hollywood. But what else do we know about California? This book looks at the cities and the mountains, at the sea and the deserts…

California is a book in the Factfiles subseries of Oxford Bookworms. As you may know, Factfiles is a nonfiction subseries. Many of the books are about places, and some about social problems such as the environment. Many of the books about places are about countries, but this one is about America's most populous state. Like many of the books, California has nine chapters: The Golden State; The Gold Rush; San Francisco; Parks; Highway 1; Los Angeles; The Desert; San Diego; and California. Some consist of two pages, as with the Stage 1 books, others of four pages. The first and last chapters (The Golden State and California) consist of only one page each. The last chapter has a nice large map of California, and photos are included on every page. The book ends with two pages of exercises and a glossary.

The language in general is fairly simple, but the impression is that it's noticeably more challenging than Stage 1 books. Most of the vocabulary is fairly simple, but there are many proper nouns. This is unavoidable in a book introducing a place, but may give an impression of difficulty to some students. Picking page 8 at random, the numbers of words in each sentence are as follows: 15, 14, 17, 10, 19, 11, 14, 8, 21, 11, 12, 10, 11, 12, 22. These figures give a mean of 13.8. One noticeable difference from Stage 1 books is the absence of very short sentences of fewer than 10 words, which may slow down reading speed a little.

The chapter that appealed to me the most was Chapter 4: Parks. The first park mentioned is Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which, according to the book, "is a twenty million year-old forest. Visitors drive through its fifty-two kilometre Avenue of the Giants to see some of the world's tallest redwood trees." The other parks introduced are Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Kings Canyon National Park. In Sequoia National Park, we can find the General Sherman Tree, which is 31 metres round and 84 metres tall. This chapter also introduces Lake Tahoe, which "is a favourite place for water sports, horse-riding and walking—and in the winter for skiing."