Hello everyone. Here is the class schedule for 2021 starting from Monday April 5th.

みなさん、こんにちは。 4月5日（月曜日）からの2021年の授業スケジュールです。

グーグル翻訳を使用して翻訳

言語を学ぶ上で最も難しいことは何だと思いますか？

私は人生のほとんどの間、日本語をオンとオフで学んでいます。私は2年間ロシア語をオンとオフで学んでいます。言語を勉強する上で私が最も難しいと思うのは、文法でも語彙でも、練習する人を見つけることでもありません。それは自己学習です。座って勉強しています。私はそれを一気に行うことができますが、一貫して自己学習することはできませんでした。これは私だけかもしれませんが、言語学習に関して誰もがこの問題を抱えていると確信しています。

この問題を解決することを約束する本やアプリケーションはたくさんあります。彼らはあなたが自分で言語を学ぶ方法を見つけたと主張しています。しかし、ここでの仕事にはもっと大きな困難があります。人によって学習方法は異なります。あなたにとって成功していることは、私にとって必ずしも成功しているわけではありません。だからこそ、私たちは教師に勉強を任せています。私たちが誰であり、どのように学ぶかを理解することは教師の役割です。あなたが良い教師になりたいのなら、あなたはあなたの生徒が誰であるか、そして彼らが学ぶのを助けるものを学ぶ必要があります。たとえば、私はなぜ私が何かをしているのかを教えてくれる人を必要とするタイプの学生です。理由がわかり次第、問題なくやって成功します。もし私ならそれは難しいように聞こえますが、たくさんあるでしょう。それは学習の1つの方法にすぎません。あなたが30人のクラスを持っているならば、あなたはそれらの30人がどのように学ぶかを理解しなければなりません。重複していると、学生は彼らに情報を提示するさまざまな方法を試すためのあなたの努力に感謝します。私のメンターがかつて言ったように、「一人が苦労していることに気づいたら、その一人を中心にレッスンを設計し、そのレッスンをクラス全体に提供します。他にも助けが必要な人がいる可能性があるからです。」

あなたが成功した学生になりたいのなら、あなたはあなたの学習スタイルが何であるかを理解し、そのスタイルに基づいてあなた自身の学習プログラムを構築するべきです。

とは言うものの;あなたの学習スタイルは何ですか？そして、そこにいる教師にとって、あなたの生徒はどのようなスタイルを学び、彼らがそのように学ぶのを助けるためにあなたは何をしますか。

What do you think is the most difficult thing about learning a language is?

I’ve been learning Japanese on and off for most of my life. I have been learning Russian on and off for two years. The thing I find hardest about studying a language is not the grammar, not the vocabulary, not finding someone to practice with, it is self studying. It is sitting down and studying. I can do it in bursts but I have never been able to consistently self study. This could just be me but I am certain that everyone has this problem with language learning.

There are plenty of books and applications that promise to solve this problem. They claim to have found the way for you to learn a language by yourself. There is a bigger difficulty at work here though. Every person has a different way of learning. What is successful for you is not necassarily successful for me. That is why we entrust teachers to help us to study. It is the teacher’s role to figure out who we are and how we learn. If you want to be a good teacher you have to learn who your students are and what helps them learn. For example, I am the type of student who needs someone to tell me why I am doing something. As soon as I know why, I will do it without question and succeed. If I do not know the answer to that question I will never get anywhere. That is just one way of learning. If you have a class of thirty people you have to figure out how those thirty people learn. That sounds challenging but there will be a lot of overlap and the students will appreciate your efforts to try different ways of presenting information to them. As my mentor once said, “when you realise one person is stuggling, design a lesson around that one person and then give that lesson to the whole class because chances are there are others that need that help too.”

If you want to be a successful student you should figure out what your learning style is and build your own learning program around that style.

With that said; what’s your learning style? And for the teachers out there what are your students learning styles and what do you do to help them learn that way.

Coronavirus news in Japan has been quite comical in many regards. I’ll briefly go through what happened in Japan.

From the start the government’s policy has been to stay open. Lockdown was never a thing here although there was a caution put out about meeting in groups of more than ten people. That said though there were two times when the schools were all closed. The first time was just before the new school year started. In fact the desire for an opening ceremony for the new year was so strong that schools across Japan were openned again for one day so everyone could have their opening ceremony. The schools were closed again and students stayed home. The school are still closed in many parts of the country and will reopen at the end of the month. My area is so rural that they reopened the schools much earlier. And this was the closest thing to a lockdown this country had. Parents still had to go to work.

Speaking of lockdowns. When the WHO announced that all countries should be doing widespread testing, social distancing and lockdowns the Abe government said no to all three. Testing has been incredibly limited for the past seven months. Just today it was reported that two hundred more people than had been reported died in Tokyo during March. That may not seem like much considering other countries statistics but it does point to a worrying trend of lack of testing and low reporting. But I digressed, shortly after WHO made that announcement Abe Shinzo made a large donation to WHO so that he got a special mention by name in one of the WHO tweets.

Like many countries there was a lot of debate about giving a stimulus package to the people of Japan to jump the economy. Being a conservative government there has been a great resitance to the idea of giving money to people. They did however decide that they should give out coupons. The wagyuu beef industry mentioned to the government that they were losing a great deal of export earnings from the closing of borders around the world so it was settled. The government would give out wagyuu beef coupons. The fish industry also mentioned they’d be in trouble so fish coupons were also agreed upon. Critics of the government mentioned that wagyuu beef was going to become the new currency if they went through with that plan and demanded that the government just give money to the people. In response Abe Shinzo himself said “My income hasn’t been effected by the pandemic so we don’t need to give any money.” Talk about not understanding how taxes work or how the economy works.

While the wagyu beef coupons may have been put on hold the idea of coupons hasn’t. Believing the biggest victims of the crisis was the tourism sector the government declared they are be making coupons called the go to campain. There are two varieties; the first variety is called ‘go to travel’ (the coupons will have this English phrase on it, it was a design point that people were paid taxpayers money to come up with) for use in tourism business and ‘go to eat’ coupons for use at restaurants.

In other giving news, upon hearing that there was a lack of masks in the health sector Abe decided that he would send every household two cotton masks. Five companies were commisioned to make the masks, three of which are legimate multibillion dollar companies and two of which have no information about them. Just that they exist. Billions of yen were spent on making the masks and sending them around Japan. We are yet to receive them. Many critics pointed out that two masks wasn’t enough for most households to which the government responded, “You are Japanese, if you don’t need your mask you should donate it to other people.” This is despite the fact that two masks per household would be fifty thousand under the population of Japan.

Meanwhile Abe Shinzo’s wife, despite strong suggestions that she should not leave the house, left for a retreat in Gifu. The retreat was for the religious group that she is a member of. One of their messages; the coronavirus is just an expression of cosmic energy, if you believe this than you won’t get the virus. That convinced me. I’ll immediately travel to Tokyo and hug everyone.

On the money news, one of the other political parties managed to get a bill through that would give everyone person in Japan about 100,000 yen. The ruling party were highly critic and called that party a traitor. That party usually worked very closely with the ruling party. Despite this Abe is getting the credit for the money.

Back to the masks. Recently people have been getting their masks in the mail. One of the responses that went viral was from a woman who felt the love of her government and of Shinzo Abe through the mask and was full of gratitude for all the people who helped get her those two masks.

Well you gotta laugh.