BLACKOUT

Now just after a planned blackout in my neighbor we are preparing for another blackout which this time will possibly happen inevitably. It got very cold again today and people use much electricity. TEPCO or the dominant electricity supplier for the capital area including Tokyo and Yokohama started planned-blackout 2 days ago so that electricity was not to be shut down suddenly. But this cold weather have people use too much electricity to maintain a good supply of electricity. We are now told not to use home electronics much.

This is very inconvenient for us but in fact nothing compared to disaster refugees  are suffering. We, Tokyo citizens, are only onlookers on this disaster including radiation crisis. I feel I am useless. I wish I could go there and help them. It is now impossible to go there now .

Earthquake in Japan, Live

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12710020

Here you can see LIVE on earthquake in Japan. By the way, I am fine.

Being Logical

As you can see in my blog articles,  I  sometimes fail to be logical in writing and speaking and maybe also thinking. That is a problem I have wanted to overcome.

Logic, I suppose, is one of those subjects that should be well taught but actually isn’t in Japanese education. High school or even university don’t seem (to me at least) to provide good training of logic for students (maybe because I was too negligent a student to find those courses).  What I only can remember about writing training is that a teacher corrected misspelling words and wrong grammar but logic on my papers. When it comes to overall accomplishment of papers, it seemed that we had to rely only on our own sensibility but on logic.

I have wanted to improve my logical skill for myself and wondered what made me more logical. I concluded TOEFL could be a good text book to do so. To be more specific, it has a writing section that required you to write rightly in grammar and logic. Why does it have be done in English? I could improve my logic in my own language Japanese, but I can learn both of English itself and logic when I chose TOEFL one. I think, as well, learning logic in a foreign language will make my problems clearer and more objective than in Japanese. I hope I will give you better articles after I have improved logical skill.

I have tons of what-to-improve!! Logic, vocabulary, listening comprehension, those in English, in French…

Hay fever, pollen fever

Spring has come! And I am happy about that.

Spring, however, seems the worst season for quite a few people who have allergy to pollen. There are many people seen to wear masks in this season in Japan. I wonder if hay fever else where is as epidemic as in Japan. I haven’t heard so except someone in Canada said he had a slight problem on that.

Spring couldn’t have become a symbol of optimistic beginning if the allergy had been since long time ago as epidemic as it is now. Not many poems wouldn’t have been written.  According to Wikipedia, the first symptom reported in Japan was in a middle of 1900′s. This is pretty late.

To get back to what I wondered, it will be nice if you elsewhere tell us the situation of your region. I don’t know many things about the hay fever elsewhere because I didn’t pay attention to it.

 

Snow

It snows here in Tokyo today. There are only a few days snowy a year in Tokyo and it was one of those days today.  People around me seemed to have negative thoughts towards snow but I felt nice seeing snow. Snow makes a usual place different. I felt my town looked as different  as if  I was traveling elsewhere, coming back home from work and seeing out from a window in a bus.

I wonder why those like this snow and the first warm wind in spring are that comfortable and agreeable (almost romantic)? Four-season makes Japan beautiful.

SMOKING NO CIGARETTE

It’s been 130 days since I quit smoking. At last I feel I overcame smoking temptation now.
I remember it was around 100th days when I was really obsessed with cigarettes and in fact dreamed of them some times. Dreams of cigarette when you stop smoking will be so real. First you really feel you have to smoke and struggle. Then you eventually reach your cigarette and again, you are struggling not to put fire on it. Finally, you light a cigarette and take a drag from it. There is only a moment you feel good. After the moment, there remains only remorse on your mind.
I really shouldn’t have start smoking again the last time. I had quit smoking before I went to Canada where there weren’t as many places to smoke as in Japan. It is getting improving but there aren’t strict rules about smoking in Japan, compared with other developed countries. You can buy one Marlboro for no more than five dollars and smoke in many public places including McDonald’s, needless to say drinking spots.
The last time, I hadn’t smoked for two years before I started it again when I stole my sister’s cigarette. I believed it was a meaningless drag and would stop again. But I failed. After that, I had smoked for a year and half before I quit it this time. I hope, well, I must make it permanent not to smoke.

Le français

I started studying French again. I think I have to make it everyday practice this time. Studying French is very fun and interesting indeed. It is not too much difficult for me to understand the grammar of French, for I have already been able to see the grammar of another foreign language,the English. If you are a speaker of those languages, you may say “English and French are much different !”.

This may sound odd to someone, but it seems that if your mother tongue is Japanese, which is a language far from Germans or Latins, and once you have mastered one of those European languages, you will develop a refined sense of grammar. I can only focus on learning some exceptions while I only have to replace an English word with a French word. For example, “be” with “être” or “which or that” with “que or qui”.

Now, I must say I meant a grammar of a sentence structure by grammar above. Tense, collocations and prepositions are very difficult grammatical issues in French.  What is the most difficult in learning French is definitely pronunciation. I even can’t memorize what is the difference between éision, liaison and enchaînement not to mention how they work.

To sum up, studying French makes me enjoy learning new thing and also my English improve in a way. And I like it.

 

THE NATIONAL FLAG OF JAPAN, Nippon.

This is the national flag of Japan. Did you know that?

70th days after I dismoked.

I have never taken one drag since 70 days ago. Could I officially say I don’t smoke?

Anne of Green Gables

I have been reading Anne of Green Gables for a while. I’ve read so far several such books as The little prince and Alice in wonderland and found them not very easy to read for me. Especially Anne seemed very difficult with many words I didn’t know, when I first started to read it. And it still takes me time to move on next page after understanding words with help of a dictionary. Yet I can say that I like it very much and wonder if I might be interested in those “juvenile books”. I was a silly child who never read books except for Manga or comic books. I suppose many people read juvenile books as juvenile while I didn’t. Meanwhile, are those books like Anne and The little prince written for children? I don’t know how I would feel because I didn’t read as child but I believe we as adult have to read them to remind what pure children we used to be.