Make Differences

Summary

Are there any Japanese teachers of English who regularly post their working life in English?  If not, I might become the first one.

This is the first year of posting the blog and I think try and error is worth doing.  Since it took not so long time for me to write in English, I will try writing here in English for a while.  In the previous blog, I often posted on Japanese to “output” what I learned because most of my “input” is in Japanese.  This will not change easily, but still nice challenge to express things in other languages.

I teach English at a Japanese public junior high school.  I had students read a passage about India last week.  Now, I use the structure and write about my own case.

Japan, My Country

Aki

　　Konnichiwa.  It is one way to say hello in Japan.  Japan is located in East Asia.  More than one hundred million people live in Japan.  They speak mainly Japanese and start learning English from 8 years old now.  I am an Japanese teacher of English and I speak four languages: Japanese, English, Russian, Spanish.

　　Japanese is my first language.  It is used all over Japan.  I usually speak it with almost all of people in Japan.  I use it at school, at home, and at most of other places.  I read books and listen to audiobooks a lot and most of them are in Japanese.

 　　I also speak English.  I started learning English just as other Japanese people do at the age of 12.  I studied in the US for a year in total and was in TESOL course too.  I passed the first level of English proficiency test (EIKEN) in Japan too.  I am planning to take TOEIC exam on the end of February.

　　I learn Russian and Spanish, too.  I have many good Russian friends, because I joined Russian elementary language course in Siberia.  Some Russian words are used as Japanese words, like ikura (salmon raw).  I also learn Spanish when I was in the US to talk with Latino friends.  Spanish was easier for me to learn because it was similar to English.

　　I learned a lot from each of those languages: Japanese, English, Russian and Spanish.  Now I am learning Chinese.  All of them are special to me.  Xiexie.