Learning English 1

Some things I learned today about English:

grow on : to become gradually acceptable or pleasing to someone

cf. But I have to admit that over time the comedian has grown on me.

beat the rap: escape punishment for a crime.

pull down: earn a particular amount of money (American slang)

Writing exercise 17

I'm blogging only for self-serving reasons. I'm blogging not for profits. So I can write anything I want no matter how boring it gets, unless I write something too derogatory or obscene about someone or something.
Writing in a foreign language gives a kind of perverted pleasure which I suspect native speakers of that language might not understand. I've even come to the point where I find myself possessed by the desire to write something at all times. Just writing such meaningless sentences as "I ate two apples and three bananas this morning," makes me feel so happy sometimes, though I don't have the boldness to say such a thing. In other words, I find pleasure in writing in a foreign language in pretty much the same way I felt so happy when I began writing in my own tongue at elementary school.
But the fact is "words fail me," to borrow the title of a book. Or more exactly, "English fails me," as far as I go.

Writing exercise 16

Sometimes I feel a sudden urge to write something while online. No matter what. And I'm grateful that I can satisfy my desire to do that in no time at all. What a great time we're living in. In reality I wind up posting gibberish on the net most of the time, though. Recently I've been asking silly questions at Yahoo! Answers, to which by the way Yahoo! Japan has given a somewhat different name here in Japan that makes it hard to figure out what it really is at first glance.

People used to communicate their thoughts and feelings by writing letters. It seems that with the advent of the Internet, writing has again become as important as it was before the invention of telephones, when people were frequently writing to their family and friends, sometimes on a daily basis.

Writing exercise 15

Blogging is now free of charge and allows us the freedom to say anything but who knows if it will continue to be that way. Seeing as the government people love to control just about everything, some kind of censorship might be introduced in the future or the time may come when blogging is charged. In a nutshell, we're not supposed to do anything freely. Whenever things are going good for some people, there are other people who try to take control of them. Whenever people find a place nice and comfortable to be in, whether it be a town or playground for children, those people plan to build something drab and lifeless there that will completely ruin the fun of being there.
Any place comfy to some people that costs little to stay may be doomed to be demolished sooner or later for reasons of profitability. Looking back, every place I found nice to be in was pulled down a few years after I came across them. So I figure that when you find some place that' so nice to be in, you better go there as often as you can before it's obliterated.

Writing exercise 12

It seems to me that for non-native English writers to write in English, reading or listening to English at least an hour a day is a must. Otherwise what I'm doing here will always result in the direct translation of our own language into English and it's hard to make any progress at all or, even worse, it will result in memorizing odd sentences that I make up myself. But I think it's better than nothing....

Sometimes I read blogs written in Japanese by English-speaking people. The other day I stumbled upon an extremely odd one. But as odd as it was, it made perfect sense to me and I thought I could tell what was in his mind before he put the original English into Japanese.... So it was kind of interesting to read and struck me as kind of innovative and even artistic as Japanese prose, in the sense that no Japanese would be able to write that way.... And this led me to wonder if it's always necessary to learn ordinary ways of saying things in a foreign language when you learn to write in the language. What seems ideal to me when non-native writers try to write in a foreign language is being able to write in it in such a way that, even though you are not particularly interested in making your writing look as close to writings by native writers as possible, your writing will not strike them as odd at all. I think it's possible, in part because I have come across some very good Japanese writings by non-native Japanese writers before. I even thought their writings were in a sense better than poor Japanese written by Japanese people, not because they know a lot of Japanese clichés and conventional ways of saying things in Japanese, but because their writings are very logical and convincing although somewhat different from ours, and even though they seem not to care much about sticking to ordinary ways of making sentence in Japanese, for example, in terms of coordinating adjectives with nouns. I guess they can do so because they have mastered the Japanese grammar thoroughly. I mean not the textbook grammar but something that is at the root of the language. Or is it because English is inherently more logical than Japanese? I know that linguistically speaking, that's a misunderstanding, but sometimes I can't help but think so.

What I wanted to say is that logic might be different from convention that permeates language.

Writing exercise 11

Today is a national holiday called "Bunka no Hi," or "a Culture day." It falls on Friday, so people are going to have three days off in a row, though it has nothing to do with me, except that a special keirin race is taking place over this weekend, as is usual on a string of holidays like this.

From today's news (Asahi Shinbun, Nov 02): As Japanese food makes its way into the world, bureaucrats are now planning to establish a kind of international certification system for Japanese foods that is meant to dictate what Japanese cuisines should be like and how they should be made in an authentic way, thus trying to extend their control even beyond the border of our country. It looks like they want to have control of just about everything.

I've finished reading some of the books I have left half-read over the course of the past few months. One of them was “Airframe” by Michael Crichton, which was not really a compelling read but which is easy to read as it is not laden with as many literary words as novels like Stephen King's. I'm also reading "Different seasons" by King right now. The first part of it, a story about a prison break, was made into a movie. The novel seems to me much more compelling than the movie.
The thing I want to do now is increase my vocabulary of English that I can put into writing, but it takes time and a conscious effort to do so. Though it’s true that just reading books doesn’t help, it seems impossible to increase one’s vocabulary without reading at all.

My understanding is that information is conveyed in either of two ways: Electromagnetic radiation and language, or signs. The first is achieved by means of electric signals sent by electric installations as well as by human brains. Sight is also another form of information transmission by electromagnetic radiation. Telepathy has nothing to do with occultism. It’s how human brains, consisting of ordinary atoms, emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of waves that contain a lot of information. This allows us to recognize any threat lurking behind us, without relying on sight, or to know what someone is thinking about, without even exchanging words.

It seems that semantics is less talked about these days than it used to be. What semantics tells us is that the behavior of all animals including human beings is inextricably linked with language or signs. Language seems as important or more important than electromagnetic radiation as a means of conveying information. It would be safe to say that it’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of learning languages.