Articles

1. I went to Canada when I was high school student.
2. My mother likes taking a picture.
3. We have been all around the Kyushu.
4. He took us to many camping place.
5. I was member of marching band for many years in high school.
6. I like a strawberry.
7. My younger brother is junior high school student.
8. I play the basketball.
9. I joined a tennis club in high school.
10. I did part-time job on Saturday.
11. I want to be the teacher.

More rhymes

I talked about rhymes in my last post. Here, I'd like to talk about a few more. Here's one:

A liter of water's a pint and three quarters

And here's another:

Celsius to Fahrenheit

Times by two, add twenty-eight

These ones, and the one about jam in my last post, were popular when I was a primary school student. They were designed to help us move from the Imperial system of measurements to the metric system.

Rhymes

Rhythm is very important for speaking English well. And it's especially difficult for Japanese learners of English, because English and Japanese are very different.

Rhymes (rimes) (e.g. hen - pen - den) are also very useful for learners of English (including native speaker children) because they help us learn the sound system and increase our vocabulary.

Learning short rhymes teaches us rhythm and rhyming. Here is an example. Can you guess where it is from?:

Three rings for the elven kings under the sky

Seven for the dwarf lords on their dark thrones

Nine for mortal men doomed to die

One for the dark lord on his dark throne

No? Well, here's the last part:

One ring to rule them all

One ring to find them

One ring to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them

That's right. It's Lord of the Rings. Here's a question for you: How many rings are there? Here's another rhyme:

Two and a quarter pounds of jam

Weigh about a kilogram

What do you think that's about?

World Cup squads

Did you see the announcement of Japan's squad for the World Cup in South Africa next month? Mr Okada announced all 23 members much earlier than other national coaches, most of whom have announced provisional 30-member squads and will cut their squad down to 23 very soon.

Japan's squad doesn't contain many surprises, although many were surprised at the inclusion of Kawaguchi, who is quite old and injured. Most people assume he will not play, but is included to help maintain a good atmosphere in the squad. In defence, I think everything depends on Tulio and Nagasawa not getting injured. Iwamasa is a great defender in the J League's best team, but he hasn't looked good in matches for the national team, and hasn't been given enough playing chances to get used to the team.

There are few surprises in midfield. My feeling is that Kengo Nakamura is the most likely midfielder not to play at all. He is a good player, and can replace the other Nakamura or any of the volante players, but will probably only get a chance if someone is injured.

The Cranberries

Do you know the Cranberries? They are a band from Ireland, perhaps Ireland's most popular band ever apart from U2. They were most active through the early part of the 1990s, and only made five original albums (and no live albums), but they sold more than 14.5 million albums in the United States, and many more worldwide.

Their second album, No Need to Argue, was their most successful, and it contained the hit song Zombie. But their most famous song is Dreams, from their first album, Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Don't We?

Golden Week

In Golden Week, I went camping in Aso with my family and several other families. This is the same as we have been doing for the last few years. However, this year the number of families was less than in previous years, because as the children have grown up they have become busy with entrance exams and so on.

Anyway, we stayed for two nights. This is the usual schedule, but in the last we have often had to come home early because the weather has worsened. This time the weather was good for all three days, although it was very cold on Saturday night!

Camping in Golden Week

I'm going to write about Golden Week. In Golden Week I went camping with my family and a few other families. We have been doing this for several years now. Actually, the number of families has gone down recently because the children are getting older and some of them are busy with entrance exams and so on.

Sorry! I got interrupted so I can't type for 10 minutes!