Dec 8, 2008

This reminds...that reminds...

I have a cousin, who is in her 12 grade student. Now, she's studying so hard to take an entrance exam for university. If you wanna enter the national university, you have to take two exams. One is held in the middle of Jan. The other is given at the end of Feb.

The first one is called national center test for university admissions. After this test, each applicant takes second one in the university they wanna enter. Each university has different subjects and questions for test takers.

My cousin aims at entering a university which offers so-called most challenging exam. The other day, she asked me to correct her English answers.

I really paid attentions to all of aspects...whether grammar is correct (especially, it's difficult for us to decide whether a word she's using is countable or not), whether her argument is clear...Different from this blog, I really-frickin focus my mind on follow the prescriptive grammar. kkk



This time and whenever I wanna check something, I always rely on the book used especially in high school. I have lots memories with this book.

I had English grammar class after entering high school. The teacher in that class, elderly retired teacher hired as a temporary teacher, gave us lesson. Her class is really strict and I don't think almost all of my classmates had good feeling about her.

I asked so many questions to her after class. Actually, I don't think some of that questions were necessary for preparing for university entrance exam. But, I'm not the type I can ignore only slight, tiny questions. I'm so stubborn when it comes to studying. haha.

For instance, Japanese language doesn't have present perfect tense. The textbook can't explain about it clearly.Sometimes, the explanation was incoherent

The more I read some sentences using perfect tense, the more I understood. Still, if I go back to read the explanation in the textbook, somehow I felt awkward. Then, I asked her until I could understood what the textbook is telling us. . Whenever I asked her, she welcomed my questions.

It's only one year I learned English in her class. I have never seen such a strict and cooperative teacher. I appreciate her kindness.



I heard from a little bird that she passed away after I graduated from high school, that is, after I entered my university.

I guess she's around 68 year old.

If she saw my blog, she might scream because of my broken English. (sorry...)



Whenever I see my textbook, that reminds me of that memory with her.



Do you have that kind of stuff, scenery, sounds or smell/scent?

I do pretty much other than this textbook.

3 comments:

exter said...

morning, i feel so shame after reading this post, actually i use broken english too in my blog, not really follow the grammar & proper sentences, heheh (your post reminds me i have a good english language teacher during secondary school, really miss her!)

kaori said...

oh, don't be ashamed of your English! Your one is good~~.

Japanese tend to focus on making sentences gramatically always. That's ok but this leads us not to try to use English in our lives. You'll see you can't find many English blogs written by Japanese like me except professional English users.

We don't make academic blogs. First of all, we should enjoy communication through English!

exter said...

hahah, correct! ya,i see the enthusiasm for english you have,study abroad, writting english blog, actually you consider good too.

last time one IT(information technology) person come from Japan to our office to upgrade some system. He is very friendly but can't communicate in english with us,only use very simple english with us.

So my audit manager(Japanese)consider good already because he is under internationally division, need to travel oversea & need english for common communication, so they said they learn it through books, tapes& cds during travel time to work.Salute the enthusiams they have.