Ikebukuro is my ex-working place. It`s located northern part of Tokyo and is so called "entrance of Saitama prefecture" because a lot of rail roads are running from Ikebukuro to Saitama prefecture. Last weekend, I had a meeting with my bad friend and went to a Chinese restaurant which is near by north exit of Ikebukuro station. Recently Ikebukuro is famous for the Chinese community that includes Chinese grocery stores and restaurants. When we were hanging around in Ikebukuro my bad friend said to me "I read an article that there is a restaurant which serves dog meat around here, so what do you say?", The restaurant`s entrance was on a tiny alleyway and we went down a staircase to the basement. I asked to a restaurant staff "Do you serve dog meat?" and he said "Yes, sir". The dog meat we ordered was a spicy soup with chopped dog meat. At first the dog meat had the flavour I`ve never experienced but after a couple of scoops I began to get use to it. This time I can`t rate this restaurant properly so no rate. If you were interested in dog meat, why don`t you go to Ikebukuro?
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His first appearance was a Japanese TV show. When I saw him for the first time, I couldn`t breath at all. Look at his "masculine" shoulders! Recently he maid his short movies and showing them on his Myspace blog... enjoy! :-)
Mini Die Hard : The battle with Hans
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Sometimes I am asked why I started English study. Actually I don`t have a particular reason for that so I always said it was my new year resolution.
My English-study life has started since Jan 2002. Before the time, I was a normal Japanese guy who thought I could manage the conversation in English if it was necessary. It`s a typical misconception for a Japanese guy who works for a software company because programmers can program in English code therefore I can speak English.
Whereas it was a terrible mistake. On the first day at Nova I got a level check exam and an Australian girl was in charge. We were packed in an enclosure and she showed me a couple of pictures which I was instructed to explain the situation in English. I got extremely nervous... and in the end she said "YOU ARE SEVEN BE desu!" Oh my gosh!! (T_T) I had thought I could have been Lv6 at least, I was devastated. But of course I could not complain about it in English, I was a 7B.
Why Japanese people get so nervous when they have a situation speaking English? This is only from my experience but... Our Japanese start studying English at junior high school first year(12 years old). The first-ever English sentence we learnt was "This is a pen" and the teacher snap the pencil in two and said "This was a pen". Then we applied the sentence to "I am not a pen", "We are not pen" etc etc... Thus we learnt English sentences like mathematical formulas like "One plus one equal two". At the end of junior high school our English lessons got more and more complicated. We had to use past perfect sentence, past perfect progressive sentence and future perfect. "The more grammatically difficult sentence is the cooler" that was typical our perspective. That meant English was not a language but a logic and that image made English highly academic. Therefore when I heard the English sentences which were pronounced by native English speaker, it sounded like bellow.
I learnt difficult words and sentences picked up from News Week or New York Times by Japanese English-teachers but I was not use to hearing casual conversations and slang. So they sound like academical spell. That`s why I got extremely nervous when I joined Nova.
(To be continued...)
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