Dear Joe;
I kind of feel like saying, "Can we drop this?" I know it's not like Karen to say this. But I'm a little confused...

Maybe 'enjoying it' is not essential when you study English. All I want to say is "Enjoy it, and you'll get more interested in it, and you'll be able to keep on doing it!" That's my policy, that's my belief.

I could end this article with the sentence, "I need love in order to keep doing it." But after I read your piece, I realized one serious problem of mine. Now I understand why I don't try to write English every day. I like writing English, but I don't like do it 'every day'.

Now I feel so comfortable with the pace of my posting. But I feel 'part of me' wants to write more often. It's like Karen is two women. One of Karens whispers to the other Karen, "Do you feel uncomfortable with the idea that you have to post your piece every day? Then just forget it. You don't have to do it against your will. You should just ENJOY your life!" I listen to her and obey her, after all.

I'd like to stay in this room where I feel cozy. I might be like a prisoner who has her own key. I wouldn't like to escape until I find it comfortable to write English every day.

It's not that I'm afraid of making mistakes or showing my 'lousy' English to everyone. I don't care about that kind of embarrasment. What I'm really afraid of is to think "I HAVE TO do something as a routine activity." I awfully hate the words 'I have to.'

Exactly 2 years ago, an extraordinary thing happend to me. Someone praised my English, saying, "Your English is so natural!" His words drastically changed my English-learning life.
I doubt if something extraordinary like that will happen to me AGAIN. I hope so, but it's been 2 years, and look at me! I still hesitate to write English every day. Maybe I'm weak, I'm a wimp. Call me whatever you like.

I'm just waiting, waiting for myself to 'naturally' get to feel like writing English more & more often. I believe the time will come sooner or later if and only if I keep on studying English.

You said, "What if you(Karen) stopped studying English right now?"
I guess you intentionally used the subjunctive mood （仮定法）. However, believe it or not, there sure is a possibility that I might stop studying English. I might hear you saying, "I don't know you, Karen." in the near future. I really hope NOT, of course. If I stop learning English, Karen will disappear from this world. If Karen passes away, I won't be able to 'enjoy' my life like this.




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I hate to hear someone say to me something like, "How do you know?  You haven't even tried it!"  So, one day we were talking about vegetarian, and I said something negative about it.  One vegetarian guy just shot me with the exact words above.  So I said, "Ok, I am a vegetarian from now on, and I'll tell you a year from today what's so great about being a vegetarian! OK?"  By the way, I'm very spontaneous & proactive, willing to try anything, but also I am very STUPID.  OK?

So, from that day, I started eating only fruits, vegetables, cereals and soybean products.  That was long time ago, and back then I didn't know anything about & I didn't care anything about calories and stuff.  Not to mention, I didn't know the fact that the most important carbohydrate, a simple sugar called glucose, which is so much easier to metabolize than fats or proteins.  There was no concept of low insulin diet available to us back then, y'know.

I ate tons of pasta, tofu, and tons & tons of bananas!  I drunk gallons of soy-milk & banana shake each day.  Within a year, I gained about 20 pounds.  Eventually I gained about 30 pounds in two years.

I told my friend that I didn't understand why I'd gained so much since I hadn't eaten any meat!  She looked at me and said matter-of-factly, "Do you know the biggest living primates called 'gorillas' that inhabit the forest of Africa?  And do you know what they eat?"

Lightening crashed, and I was totally stunned.  "I've been eating too much bananas, haven't I?" said I so miserably.

She just nodded slowly & deeply, and said "Yeah, you've eaten more bananas than a 500-pound silverback!"

I was full of shame.  I didn't know why, but all out of blue I thought of my grandma.  I though if she had seen me like this, she would've killed me.  She would've said "I don't have a grandson who is barely as intelligent as a giant monkey!"

◆  JOE  ◆        

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If you read the same book over and over until you memorize every single word in it, wouldn't that be more effective & productive than reading 1000 books only once?

I've said it many times for many years, but I haven't achieved anything even barely close to it.  I read same books repeatedly.  Some of them have been re-read over dozen times.  But I still wonder if I had picked one book twenty years ago and read it 2000 times, it might have done so much better to my English.  Well, it's not really too late, and I think I can start it right away; Pick one book for the rest of my life.

For the rest of my life, reading one book only!  The idea is fascinating, but it's practically impossible for this reason: There are too many candidates to pick just one novel.

From time to time I have said to myself, "I have enough, and now I can pick 10 books to read for the rest of my life."  But then I heard or read about the books that I haven't touched for years, and I just can't help reading them.  With different perspectives to the themes of the books, which have been accumulated over those deserted years, I usually find or see something different in them.

The book that I read 15 years ago and I didn't think of as 'thoughts provocative' turned out to be the one that I consider as 'the book for the rest of my life' when I re-read recently.  (Tours of the Black Clock is one of them.)

Also, I'm not so sure that the book I love today will be the same tomorrow, or next week, or a year from now.

Once I was a big fan of Auster.  However, after having read several of his novels two, three times each, things that had once attracted & fascinated me just disappeared, and I gave all of his novels away.

Well, maybe I'm too intensive.  (Certainly, my grandma would have killed me if she'd found me being so disrespectful to novelists.)

◆  JOE  ◆        

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The other day at BOOK-OFF I read a few chapters of a book about the common mistakes we, Japanese ESL learners, make in English.  Probably, you guys coming here are all familiar with those books, which are usually written by native English-speaking ESL teachers who lived or have lived in Japanese for many years.

In general those books are a great help for Japanese ESL learners to know that 'grammatically correct English to us' often isn't good enough.  Also, they provide us the way native English speakers think & speak & write.

Ok, there are so many valuable things introduced by those books.  Yeah, there are so many so happily educational things that we can learn.  BUT, my question is: Shouldn't those books be the ones that we only use after we've actually used English?

I just WONDER how effective those books are for those ESL learning bloggers who don't practice English writing.  

Imagine, your daughter loves reading cooking books.  Now, you teach her the whole list of things she shouldn't do while making Curry-Rice.  But how much would she learn if she doesn't actually make one?  Or how effective would it be?

Those are honestly great books if and only if you use them properly.  I think you shouldn't read them so deeply until you feel comfortable speaking & writing English on daily basis.  Otherwise, it might just amplify the fear for mistakes, which might keep you away from speaking & writing English.  Oh, yeah, the thing is, by the time you get there, you just don't read those!  Funny, hah?

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Even f I had 10,000 visitors a day, even if I had hundreds of comments from them everyday for each blog post, if my blog post were the only thing or main thing they read in English, I would NOT be happy.  Or I'd feel guilty.  If you read one or two English articles a day, you should read something written by native English-speaking professional writers, most definitely not by an ESL learner like me!  (Well, if my blog entries were like one part of the process of their stepping up to professionals, I'd be relieved, though.)

If you come here and think "Well, an ESL learner like this guy (me) can write 30 blog posts a month, I can do it!" I'd be so happy.  I'm here to encourage other ESL learners to write more.  (Don't get me wrong, I encourage no one to STUDY English.)  

I was just like any other English-learning beginners, but I didn't spend hours and hours to write just several paragraphs.  I just wrote whatever I came up with no matter how many grammatical & logical mistakes I made.  Was I afraid of making errors?  I didn't even care!  Like, I was a lousy skier at the beginning, making errors, stumbling and falling million times, but I just kept on trying, and eventually I became an OK skier.

One thing so distinctively different in my attitude from many of other ESL Learners might have been that from the very beginning I was studying English to speak and write it.  Well, I learned how to ski in order to ski, not to enjoy watching the winter Olympics!

Well, I was a kid, and my parents took me to the valley and taught me the basic techniques of skiing, (and more like forced me to try it at the beginning.)  And learning English is far more complicated than learning skiing.  But sometimes I just wonder we, adults, tend to make everything unnecessarily complicated.  And kids see things more simply, like, treating learning English and learning skiing equally.  They don't fear shame, pain, and embarrassment, and certainly they hardly self-question the value of what they are doing, as often and extensively as we, adults do.  Well, that's what we might need here from time to time.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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A friend of mine, a Canadian ESL teacher, brought one of her students.  The student, let's say her name is Ms. Tanaka, is in her late 60s, ex-high school English teacher whose English is in fact remarkably good.  She is such a sweet, cheerful, groovy old lady who loves reading, and whose favorite phrase turned out to be "Oh, that's a good one, let me write that down!"  During our whole conversation she just kept taking notes.  She wrote down the words, phrases and sentences that she thought 'great'.

So, at the café, we were talking about a wide variety of things.  Ms. Tanaka was mostly listening and writing down.  She kept on saying to me, "Oh, I'm fine, I'm happy listening to you guys talking.  Don't worry about me!"

That was when we were talking briefly about politics, I said something like, "Oh yeah, now they know why those extremists wanna hate them 'cause hate is all the world has even seen lately!"

Ms. Tanaka cut in sharply, saying "Hold it, hold it, that's a good one, let me write that down.  Would you mind to repeat it, Joe?  From 'now they know why . . .'?"  Yeah, SHE IS DEAD SERIOUS!

I was VERY reluctant because that was from a song written & performed by a nu metal band called Limp Bizkit.  Y'know, the song from the movie MI2?  Imagine the collaboration of this sweet old lady and a nu metal band!  I explained that to her, and suggested she might reconsider it.  

But she said proudly, "I have no bias against the genre of music.  Go ahead, Joe!" and started writing down, 'now they know why . . .' and at the end, she scrubbed very carefully while mattering to herself, "L.I.M.P. . . . B.I.Z.K.I.T. . . ."

THAT JUST KILLED ME!

◆  JOE  ◆        

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I wonder if it is possible to finish a whole book by reading bit by bit everyday at the bookstore without buying it.  If you can read like 200 words per minute, you read 10 pages in 20 minuets.  So, you go to the bookstore everyday after work, five days a week, it would take a month to finish reading a book that has 400 to 450 pages.

But the big question is, of course, if it's really worth trying!  And the answer should be, NO.  By going to the store and reading a book, you can save probably 1000 to 1500 yen for new ones!  Or 50 to 70 yen a day.  Considering the amount of time and energy you spend for doing that, it's just economically insignificant.

Well, you might end up meeting someone special, so . . . who knows!

Meanwhile, 24000 children under the age of 5 are dying everyday somewhere in the world.  That's like 1000 dying children every hour, and every minuet there are 16 children under the age of 5 dying somewhere in the world, well, mainly in Africa.  Yeah, I'm very fortunate to enjoy pondering about & dancing around such a stupid idea like above while the earth is turning.  And how do I sleep?  In fact, I sleep well.  It seems that, shamefully, neither has guilty conscience ever kicked in to disturb my sleep, nor is my bed . . . . . .

◆  JOE  ◆        

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I've noticed that we have different criteria for the definition of the term 'English learner' or 'ESL learner'.  Some of us apparently think that 'English learner' or 'ESL learner' means 'anyone who studies English'.

I think the definition above is oversimplified.  My version is this: 'English learner' or 'ESL learner' means 'a person who is willing to study English with his or her own will¹', and it excludes those who aren't interested in English, who aren't willing to learn English, or who study English just for various examinations.  

So, whenever I say 'English learner' or 'ESL learner', it doesn't include those students who are just obliged to learn English at school or to go to English conversation school by their parents.  English learners or ESL learners should be those who try so hard to learn English, who struggle with English, and who, overall, love English.  I think.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Dear Karen;
Neither was I provoked, nor am I just playing devil's advocate, OK?, but I'm just wondering if it's really true that you can't be good at something unless you enjoy it, and if it's possible that you can love something while you aren't particularly enjoying it, or you can enjoy something that you don't particularly love.  Moreover, I wonder if you can make 'studying English' one part of your daily life as 'brushing your teeth' while trying to look for how to keep enjoying it.

There might be many things that you are good at right now, for which you greatly appreciate your parents for having forced you to keep on doing when you were a kid.  There are many guys who appreciate their parents for having forced them to take piano lessons which they didn't like at all when they were a kid because 1) they wanted to play soccer with buddies after school, 2) their buddies called them 'sissy', 3) their female teachers smelled funny, and 4) it just hurt their fingers.

And many of those Japanese kids who grew up bilingual in the States hated their parents talking to them in Japanese because other kids made fun of the weird language occasionally popped up from their mouths, and many of them begged their parents not to speak Japanese to them anymore.  However, they're probably grateful for their parents having kept the Japanese language alive in their family because they wouldn't have been bilingual otherwise.

Well, we aren't a kid anymore, and we have no parents to force us to learn something anymore.  Also, we don't live in the States, which makes it, based on your analysis, much harder or even impossible for us to massively expose ourselves to real English unless we enjoy it.  Then, how come there are so many ESL learners who seem to enjoy studying English so much but find it so hard to have massive exposure of English everyday?  Or, might it be just another case that requires other factors to make it happen?

For short, I don't agree with the idea that you cannot be good at something or you cannot keep on doing something unless you enjoy it.  I don't enjoy studying English, (I do enjoy using it, though), but I've been reading newspaper & newsmagazine articles to learn unknown cool phrases and big words everyday for many years.  What keeps me doing it is partly because I don't expect it to be so enjoyable, taking it rather as a sheer daily core that I have to get it done regardless of my preference, and also, (though it totally sounds corny & clichéd), because of the faith in English that 'English' makes my life better, and that it makes something extraordinary happen one day, if I keep on studying it.  And that should be the biggest reason why I study English, and probably why I love English.

As you said, you brush your teeth for oral hygiene.  And I study English to keep my life healthy.  

By the way, what if you stopped studying English right now?  First, you'd make me sad.  Second, well, then, I wouldn't know you, Karen!

◆  With a song full of silent and lucid love, JOE  ◆        

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Dear Joe
On your 1-19 article, you said,

"I don't think 'enjoying English' is the most important aspect of English-learning. The ideal way to study English is, to me, 'study English as I brush my teeth.' "
I know what you mean. Still, I believe 'enjoying English' is the most important aspect of English-learning, at least to me.

Every time I hear someone saying, "I really HATE English. But I HAVE TO study English in order to win the promotion," I feel so sad. I feel the urge to say to them, "If you hate it Sooo much, just forget about it! You won't be able to make English your own after all. You won't be able to better at what you really hate." (Do I sound a little bit harsh? If I hurt someone's feelings, I'm so sorry.)

In order to have a good command of English, you have to expose yourself to English as much as humanly possible. I guess those who hate English will find 'exposing themselves to English' really painful or boring, sooner or later. Once they think so, they won't be able to keep studying English, I think.

I also brush my teeth every day. I do so in order to keep my teeth clean. It's about oral hygiene. If I neglect cleaning my teeth, I will have decayed teeth eventually. I know that, SO I brush my teeth routinely.

On the other hand, what if I stop studying English right now? Nothing wrong will occur to me. Because English is not necessary at all in my daily life in Japan. As I've said many times before, I don't have any native English-speaking friends, and I have no chance to use English since I'm a full-time housewife...
I don't know if it's lucky or unlucky, but most of us, the Japanese, can live without English in Japan. Those 'excellent' translations or interpretations will suffice.

Actually, many people have asked me before, "Why do you study English every day? I don't think you need English so much in your life."
My answer is: "You're right. I don't have to study English at all. I just love English. I study English just for fun."
I have no reason to study English except 'love'. So as soon as I lose interest in English, I'll stop learning English.

I don't need English in my daily life. SO I have need something, like motivation, which gets me going.

I don't intend to offer a counterargument to you, Joe. In the first place, I don't think what I've said above is logical or consistent. I'd just love to give my thoughts to you.

I love myself who loves English so much. I loathe myself who doesn't try to write English every day. I truly wish I could say "I study English as I brush my teeth."

◇ ◇　Truly Karen ◇ ◇        

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It seems that I've forgotten our basic policy here; keep it simple and clear.  So I try, again, to do so as hard as humanly possible.

One of the reasons that I've posted so many of my blog entries so far here is to encourage other ESL bloggers to write more and more often.  I want to share this wonderful feeling of 'writing English ONLY' with others.  It's just great to express your thoughts, ideas and feelings all in English.  And it's just so great to feel that you are actually doing it.

Do you remember the very first time when your very first English sentence appeared on the screen of your PC?  Wasn't it so sensational?  Didn't you feel like you've achieved something?  Wasn't the moment filled with such a wonderful expectation that something extraordinary might happen in your life?

I guess no one denies how important it is to keep that sensation in one's mind.

Well, my motto is 'no pain, no gain', and I don't believe that learning English isn't always enjoyable.  However, if you can enjoy blogging in English to talk about your problems & your painful experiences with English, that'd be fantastic.  And that'd be very productive and so much more effective than studying with those boring grammar books!

Many of those ESL bloggers would give anything to become very fluent in English.  And I guess none of them wants to end up still working on vocabulary books and grammar books 10 years from now.

I've been studying English for so many years.  So I can tell; it's not so easy to enjoy studying English, but it's relatively easy to love & enjoy using English.  Once you get used to using English, you'd love studying English more for sure.  Do you know what I mean?

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Whenever I write something for this blog, I put my laptop on the counter and I write standing up.  (Yeah, it's a Hemingway style, and I kind of like it.)  I'm one of those who'd be easily disturbed by complete silence.  I was born and raised in the city, yeah, an urban cowboy who needs some noise to concentrate on writing blog posts, and, by the way, who can smell a pig from a mile away, that's what I am.  

Anyway, so I usually listen to grunge type of stuff when I write, so that I get a constant disturbance.  (Now I'm listening to Mark Lanegan, songs like, 'Wedding Dress', 'I'll Take Care For you', 'Hit The City', and 'She's Not For You'.)  Pondering simultaneously the meaning of both the lyrics of the song that I'm listening to and the words that I've just written down pushes my brain to the edge of near neurological-crash.  And I like the feeling of dancing on this high wire, like, sensing the catastrophic brain explosion somewhere around the temple.  Once I was a serious over-clocker, and NOW I'm over-clocking the CPU in my head, brain.  Yeah, that's the way to go.

Well, sounds a tad complicated, but I don't usually do much of actual creative writing when I write.  Literally, it's more like assembling bits and pieces of outlines and rough drafts stored (or cached) mnemonically somewhere in the neuro-circuit of my brain or put down on in the notebook.  I mean, it isn't so easy to start from scratch and finish a piece within 10, 20 minuets, especially when my creativity doesn't so luckily kick in on time.  (Y'know, I am not so creative all the time!)  So, the point is the idea or topic to talk about, and if I have it and rough outlines when I start writing, I wouldn't have much problem finishing a piece within the time limit of 20 minuets.

So it's helpful that you have outlines or some sort of rough drafts in your head or notebook or cell phone.  Some of my buddies email themselves from cell phone whenever some idea pops up, and that might be another option.  I write down whatever thoughts and ideas occurred to me on my notebook.  It might be essential to be very creative on that account to be a successful ESL blogo-diarist.

Sitting in front of your PC and trying to figure out what to write from scratch for your English blog post might take too much time, or take forever.  And as I suggested somewhere down there, if you want to keep regular daily blog entries, spending more than 30 minuets for one blog post might jeopardize your oath.  By the time you lose the momentum, you might not be able to whip yourself hard enough to go on as before, then your posting frequency start declining, and eventually it becomes like once in a month or so, if not dropping down to zero.

There are many great English sites introducing and explaining the basic techniques of English writing for ESL learners.  So, before being diagnosed as a serious case of blogstipation, you might check those sites, spend some time there, and learn how to write!  Yeah, exactly, that's what I need here!

◆  JOE  ◆        

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If there's nothing pushing you to write English pieces, you might have to make one.  Probably you also need the fear that you might end up being someone who can understand English well but can't use it at all.  HOWEVER, if you are happy with it, and if you are tying hard to make ends meet, the case's closed, and you should equally be proud of yourself.  Seriously I have no problem with that.  Input-oriented or output-oriented, I equally love & respect anyone trying so hard.

In fact a friend of mine is a specialist in the field.  She's long given up pursuing her linguistic dream to be a good writer and speaker of English, and decided to specialize on maximizing her reading abilities.  She told me via email once, "Can't speak, can't write, yeah I'm a loser by some conversational-English savvy learners' definition, but so what?  When it comes to reading abilities and the girth of vocabulary, I can make most of them feel so miserable, like my Patriots have made your Iggles for the last . . . so many years, that's my raison d'etre."  Well, neither is she a loser, nor is she unable to write (she's in fact a good writer of English), but that's what has been her major 'push'.  [raison d'etre: reason for being]

The size of her vocab is in fact so huge that she can beat pocket-sized English dictionaries with no exaggeration.  Yeah, she reads English-English dictionaries, which are in fact her favorite reading to spend some peacefull time on the couch of Starbucks.  (If you see a good-looking tiny Japanese girl reading a huge Merriam-Webster so ferociously at Starbucks, that's her.  Y'know, the way she reads those English-related books is really scary, like, with eyes jumping all over as if two vultures devouring their prey with synchronizing motion.  And if you see a villain-looking guy who's got some Jason-Bourne killing instinct in his eyes constantly bugging her, that's me.)

The question is, statistically, how many English-learners here in Japan end up achieving their goals.  NOT MANY!  I guess that probably dwells somewhere around one in 100,000, though I believe the number is significantly higher among English-learning Japanese bloggers.  And possibly, having one very specific goal might make your English-learning life so much more prosperous.

I mean, she's so much closer to her final destination.  Meanwhile I feel like I've just started.

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She sent me the email the day after we watched the movie Gilbert Grape on DVD in which Gilbert said like "look at the girth of the house . . . " or something, and I guess that was probably why she used the word 'girth' to mean 'size'.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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I think of visitors & readers here.  I don't know anything about them, except things I've learned about those who've made comments here before.  (So far five people have commented on my pieces.)  So it might not so weird that I wonder what kind of linguistic dreams our readers have, how they actually pursue them, what kind of books they read, how many of them read my pieces from the beginning to the end, how many of them have found my pieces rather funny than disturbing, and so on.

It might sound strange but I often visit the blogs of those who left their URLs here.  I hardly make comments.  I'm a terrible commentator - I usually spend so much more time making a 20-, 30-words comment than writing a 400-words piece here.  So I just go there and read their pieces, then send out good thoughts and leave quietly with no trace.

Also I am not good at making replies to comments.  In some cases it could be much harder than writing a whole piece.  Oh, yeah, super-proactively & -positively speaking, maybe I am more like an artistic or creative type than a scientific one, which tends to be good at analyzing things and writing reports.  I'd be forever in awe of the fluency & relevance that Karen possesses on that account.  (That doesn't mean she isn't creative, though!)

Well, the number of visitors we have weekly might not be so gigantic by today's standard, but to me it's just so huge.  I'm not sure how many of them are coming here routinely, like everyday or every time we post a new entry, but I truly appreciate every one of them coming here to read & enjoy Karen's heart-warming and my rotten pieces.

It's just so great to have so many visitors here, but I can't help wondering what attracts them to this blog.  Karen writes once a week and I usually bring up and talk about topics that wouldn't attract & fascinate many readers.  We both don't write educational pieces, we don't talk about grammar, and we just so rarely brief about the way we study English.

I'd never mind that visitors & readers here disagree with me, or I don't mind that they don't even like me.  I'm just curious why they are willing to spend some time here with us, which I'm of course deeply moved by and more than happy with.  Or, it might more likely be the case that most of them just drop by, read few sentences, send off bad thoughts to my pieces, and get the hell out of here.  Yeah, that's more like the case here.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Hey, I really wanted to see 'the fastest man on no legs' competing with able-bodied athletes at the Olympic games.  Unfortunately, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banned him to pursue his Olympic dreams, or millions of other amputee sprinters' dreams.

The IAAF's spin: The prosthetic carbon-fiber legs that he uses to run give him an unfair technological 'advantage', which is the violation of athletic rules.  The decision was mainly based on the study conducted by a German expert who concluded that the prosthetic carbon-fiber legs requires 25% less energy than athletes with legs need to run at similar speeds.  [prosthesis: the replacement of a missing part of the body]

Well, this guy doesn't have legs!  He was born without fibulas (bones between the knee and the ankle), so his both legs were amputated when he was 11 months old.  What kind of 'advantage' he, who has faced all the disadvantages since he was born, could get?  To what degree?  [amputate: to cut off (an arm, leg, etc), esp. by surgery]

By the way, although he is the fastest man on no legs, his personal best hasn't been surpassed Olympic qualifying times yet.  If the prosthetic legs give such a big advantage to amputee sprinters, how come none of them have ever run faster than best able-bodied athletes?

I mean, the 25% advantage shouldn't be a big deal and should be offset by 25% or more of disadvantages they have had ever since they lost one or both legs.  Besides that, I guess it was more likely he was just seeking the opportunity to compete with able-bodied athletes so that he could encourage other physically challenged athletes.  Yeah, that's pretty much the spirit of the Olympics to me!

I wondered if the IAAF could have given him other options.  For instance, he can participate in the race and compete with other athletes but not for medals, and all of his records will remain unofficial, no matter how fast he runs.

By the way, I have a question.  Are contact lenses OK?  Aren't they like a technological advantage to a guy who's from a country where only glasses are available?

◆  JOE  ◆        

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For the last two, three months ever since I came back here, I've done some intensive blog-hopping, visiting English-learning Japanese bloggers mainly on this Blogmura ranking site.  There's one peculiar thing I found out, that is, I have hardly seen anyone make or receive constructive criticism on his or her English.

Is it a big taboo here to make constructive criticism on other bloggers' English?  Is that because it's considered as so brutally rude by our Wabi-Sabi moral standard?  And why is it so awkward to point out other bloggers' grammatical mistakes and questionable word choices?

I do feel awkward to make direct constructive criticism, and that's mainly because I'm afraid one might give up writing English pieces if I do so.  In fact, I've seen several English-learning Japanese bloggers stopped keeping English diaries after receiving comments pointing out their grammatical errors several times in a row.  Do we all feel the same?  Might that be the reason why we all hesitate to make such comments?

Are we really OK with this, as English-learning bloggers?  Is it still better to give false compliments on other bloggers' English than to point out, with good intentions, the problems they have?  

For instance, I wonder how long we should overlook such a common grammatical mistake as "I have seen the movie when I was a kid."  I wonder if it is more academically correct to make comments that explain why it is wrong to use the present perfect tense in 'I have seen the movie' with the time clause 'when I was a kid'.  

It is true that beginners need more of 'encouragement', not 'whipping'.  However, are we all really OK to consider ourselves as 'beginners' after all those years of English education we've had?  

Again, I don't particularly opt for finding fault with other bloggers' English, saying "With all my respect, I'm afraid . . . ."  What we need here might be to get ourselves ready to be challenged, criticized, and nitpicked, by our readers or 'colleagues".  And the question is who'd be willing to be the villain.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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As much as I am with the idea of openly discussing the issues of grammatical mistakes, I'm against innocent English-learning blogo-diarists being picked on unnecessarily.  And after a while they deserted their blogs, and the corpses of their blogs left behind like the ruins of ancient civilizations.

I used to know one English-learning Japanese blogo-diarist who started her English diary about two years ago.  She'd post about every other day or so, and every time she posted a new diary, there was this guy in her comment section who went on pointing out every single grammatical error she made on the entry.

She was torn apart.  She thought the guy was just doing it with good intentions, so she figured that it was too rude to ask him stop commenting on her errors.  But at the same time she felt he was like a stalker who'd follow every move she makes, and soon she became afraid to write English diaries for fear of his comments.  That was the worst scenario.  You finally started something you'd long wanted to do, but by doing so you were disrupted by someone who thought was doing only for your sake.

She asked me via email what to do with it, and I told her, via email, to tell him that she wasn't really happy with it.  Well, his English wasn't really good, and I didn't know why he was so sure about everything.  (Some of his theories were so grammatically wrong, in fact.)  Moreover, she'd never doubted his good intentions, but it appeared to me what he was doing was nothing but sheer showing-off.  (Yeah, I of course wondered like 'what to show off, anyway?')  Besides that, he sounded too academic & boring, and he certainly failed to send out his good thoughts with those comments.

Unfortunately she stopped keeping English diaries after several weeks of struggling with his comments.  Well, honestly, the idea of storming his blog with notoriously detailed wordy comments attacking on the grammaticality of his English, like 2000 words a comment, had come across my mind more than dozen times, but I somehow managed to successfully gather myself to let it go.  I knew he was also an undeniably serious English learner, and I thought there might have been other readers who'd learned something from his comments.

Y'know, it's just so hard for that type of comments to fulfill their initial purpose by making diarists both happy and enlightened with new knowledge of English at the same time.  And now I feel as if I was just blown back to the starting point.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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DEAR KAREN
In the previous reply to the comment posted by Little-san, you wrote,

"In my opinion, the most important thing is to enjoy it (English).  So I don't like to hear someone saying, 'I must study English.'  As the Japanese proverb goes, 'We tend to be good at those things we like.'  I believe that's true."
Well, I don't agree with that.  First of all, I don't think 'enjoying English' is the most important aspect of English-learning.  The ideal way to study English is, to me, 'study English as I brush my teeth.'  

See, I brush my teeth three times a day everyday, and I don't think I particularly enjoy doing it.  But it certainly helps keep my teeth clean.  And, y'know, I brush my teeth every single day!  Wouldn't that be nice if you read English books, write English pieces, and watch English programs just as easily and routinely as you brush your teeth?

Also, I don't believe in the power of motivation!  Although English-learning bloggers often say "I have to motivate myself to study English" or "I need some extra motivation to keep writing everyday," I believe it's more ideal to keep studying English with no motivation.

Here comes my brushing teeth analogy again.  Well, you don't need to get so fully motivated to brush your teeth, do you?  In fact it'd be utterly weird if you need some extra motivation to do so.

As you've known well, my primary attitude toward English-learning swirls around the idea that it's just better to do it routinely and take it as part of your life, and not to make a big deal out of it.

As always, I'm not talking about the rationality of the concept, just merely giving my thoughts to you, and I'll be grateful if I could receive yours.

◆  SINCERELY  JOE  ◆        

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A friend of mine, who is an advanced English-learning Japanese blogger, was on the JR limited express train on Jan, 11 at around 9 pm.  One super good looking Japanese girl was sitting next to him, holding her cell phone and punching keys to write something.  

He sat there quietly, and started reading a book, trying so hard to pretend not to pay any attention to what she was doing.  He read with the sound of her pressing keys.  Then the girl dropped the cell phone to his side, and magically he caught it in the air.  He handed it to her, and she thanked him.  And he thought, "GOD, she smells so nice!"

He didn't mean to read what she wrote, but he's one of those guys who can read 1000 words per minute, so his eyes just caught those words on the cell phone screen instantaneously.  They were all in English and something like, "Having been one of your fans for so long, this is the first time I comment here. . . . ," and the sentence ends with an unique Emoji.  

As a blogger himself, he knew what was going on.  She was writing her comment on the blog that she'd visited previously.  

Now she appeared to be checking words in the dictionary, and he was impressed by her formality.  Then their eyes met, and she smiled at him.  That might be simply because he's so good-looking, or because he saved her cell phone.  That encouraged him to say something to her, but she was busy pressing keys, and apparently wasn't in the mood to start a conversation with someone she hadn't met.

Anyway they got off the train at the same station.  She was still holding the cell phone, which meant she was still writing.  Once she glanced at him and bowed once casually.  

About 5 minutes later, his cell phone vibrated.  He opened it and noticed he got an email.  It was the email from FC2 notifying he got a comment on his blog.  Then he read the comment.

YEAH, so amazingly, so magically, the comment starts with "Having been one of your fans for so long, this is the first time I comment here . . . ," and ends with THAT unique Emoji!

◆  JOE  ◆        

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I SECRETLY decided to post my piece at least once in a week, on every Thursday. (I know it isn't a secret anymore since I've said this here on this blog.) But yesterday, on Thursday, I didn't post my piece. I have my own reason. Although you might not be interested in my reason, let me explain it here.

I was going to post yesterday afternoon. When I started to write something in English, the doorbell rang. I opened the door and I found three guys standing there. They came from the company which built my house ten years ago. (I don't know if I can call the company a 'housemaker.' I heard that a 'homemaker' means a housewife in the U.S., though.) They visited my house in order to make an inspection of my house.

About a month ago, one of them called me and said, "Your house is ten years old. So I strongly recommend that your house should be examined. Oh, don't worry about the cost. We'll give it for free." "For free? Then I'd like you to check my house carefully. Thank you in advance."

One guy climbed on the rooftop of my house and checked if the waterproof sheets worked properly. Another guy crawled under the floor and look over the foundation of the house.
After the examination, one of them said, "There's no problem in your house now. We don't see any termites (white ants) in the basement. Everything's fine."

They bowed to me in a courteous manner and left. The moment I thought, "Now I can start writing," my son came back home. I have to listen to him saying the multiplication tables up to 9, which means Kuku.
He had made an appointment with his friends. As soon as he finished his homework, he dashed out of the house like a bullet. "I can do what I want at last..." I said with a sigh of relief, but again, someone rang the door bell. That was a gas company guy...

To be continued... (Maybe)

Oh, some might think, "This is a lame excuse for belated posting!" But All I said above is true. Believe me!

◇ ◇　Karen ◇ ◇        

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I am one of those who go to Starbucks daily ritually to have some peaceful moment with my book or with my note & pen.  According to my friend, GP, one of the reasons that people prefer Starbucks is that they don't have to deal with the type of owner who thinks it's a coffee shop owner's mandated job to talk to a customer over the counter.  And I agree; I hate to talk mindlessly about something that is no one's concern.

Besides that, those waiters and waitresses at Starbucks are generally all well-trained and well-composed.  There's no terrible waitress who doesn't care which pot is regular, and which pot is decaf, or where exactly the tray center is, and stuff.

Anyway, I saw a girl writing something in English on the laptop the other day.  It seemed that she spent a great amount of time to write just one sentence.  Well, there was nothing wrong with it.  I sometimes spend an hour or two to come up with a sentence for other stuff, for which it now usually takes me two, three weeks to complete a piece since I elaborate every single sentence with big atrocious words in notorious complexity.

I don't spend any more than 10, 20 minutes to finish a piece for this blog.  I write more spontaneously, honestly and directly here with no gimmick.  (And that's why I don't need much time, y'know.)

For your English-learning purposes, I guess it might be more sufficient and effective to write with time limitation.  For instance, you post whatever you can write within 30 minutes everyday.  It could be one or two sentences, but you just post whatever you have.  In fact, several of my friends do that everyday, and according to them, it's worked out perfectly.

One girl told me that she cooks the idea for a piece in the bath tab, and she writes it while drying her hair.  One guy told me that he divides his lunch break in two, the first half for eating and thinking, and the other half for writing.  Both have been writing everyday for more than two years, and they claimed that it has improved their speaking abilities, too.

When you have to write something in English within 30 minutes, you need to prepare for it.  In other words, you have to have something to write before you actually start writing.  To do that, you more likely tend to think your thoughts and ideas in English, and by doing so everyday, you eventually get used to it.

It's just wonderful, and certainly worth giving it a shot!

◆  JOE  ◆        

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There's no New Year's resolution to make, in fact, I hate to declare something like that on New Year's Day.  Y'know, I'm more like spontaneous kind of guy, and it always makes me wonder, 'Why don't you start right away when you think that's what you should do?"  So, there's nothing special about what I do here on this blog this year.  I write as much as I can, that's about it.  

I write on average 300 to 350 words a piece here, so if I post 30 pieces a month, I end up writing about 10,000 words a month here.  That doesn't mean anything.  I might be the champion of the largest volume of English words posted on this ranking competition, (if there were any), but who cares, right?

On this English-Diary ranking, blogo-diarists write 100 to 200 a piece on average.  I believe that the most important thing is how often you write, not how many words as a total you write.  Besides all those great effects on your English, if you force yourself to write a piece everyday, you might get something extra on your life in general.

A friend of mine once told me that her life has been changed (just a bit) ever since she started keeping English diaries everyday.  She started writing about a wide variety of things, but soon there was nothing to write about.  She realized that choosing the topic to talk about was as equally troublesome as writing in English.

She then began to observe people and things more carefully, always trying to hunt out source materials for her blog.  And according to her, she's seen and found out so many things that she wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't started her blog.

That could be any blog, I thought.  But she insisted that it was more obvious with her case, saying "if you force yourself to write in English everyday, the source material is the most important factor.  Funny things or people or incidents motivate me to write in English."

I totally agree with her.  So, if you find a weird dude looking around carefully as if hunting some blogo-material and writing something in English at Starbucks, that dude can be me.  If you find a book of Stephenson, Morgan, or Gibson right beside him, that's me.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Relating to my previous post, some wonder why some of those with low TOEIC scores write better than those with high scores.  Well, the soccer analogy can explain it well: You can be a good player without knowing every single rule.

Then you might wonder if that can apply it to English.  Is it possible that you write well without knowing grammar?  The answer might be YES and NO.  No, if you don't know anything about grammar.  Yes, if you know basic grammar.

Again, you might wonder how basic it could be to keep English diaries or journals.  Then I would say, 'Read those Japanese kids who keep English diaries or journals on their blogs!'

For instance, read the following,

Yesterday was Halloween.  My mom and dad had a party in our house.  More than 20 people came to the party.  Adults gave kids a lot of candies and chocolates.  There were also mom and dad's relatives.  One of them was my favorite uncle Joe.  I call him 'Uncle J'.  He gave me a big hug and Toblerones and Timtams.
That was written by a Japanese kid, (I changed just a bit, though), and if you understand everything up there, you are very much ready to keep English diaries.

One thing you need to keep in your mind is that it's just impossible to express everything you want to say in English from the beginning.

I believe it's more important to keep on writing whatever you can write with your English.  If there is something you can't express with it, I guess you should just forget about it.

For that, you might need to read more, and take notes from your readings.  You write down words, expressions, and sentences that you like, and you use them in your diary, and you do that for years.  One day, you'll find yourself expressing everything you want to say in English.

Well, at least, that's what I've been doing to my English.

◆  JOE  ◆        

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Up to until we started blogging, there had been no such place where we, English learners, were able to express our ideas and thoughts in English so easily, frequently, and extensively.  Also, it hadn't been so easy to see what other English learners' English was like before.  'Blog' made it all possible.

One big shame is that 'Blog' also made us, English learners, an easy prey for those who criticize our English for wrong reasons.  Sadly, 'they' could be, or more likely are, one of us.

So, as English learners started blogging in English, keeping English diaries or journals, writing poems and short stories and mini essays in English, more people have chance to read our English.  They started talking behind us, criticizing our fluency in the scam pit rotten BBS.  One popular criticism is this, "Those English-learning bloggers don't know how to write even though they have over 900 TOEIC scores!"  (I guess everybody here has heard once or twice that kind of nonsense.)

That's just so ridiculous.  Well, it'd be just so hard to be a good writer even in our native language if we don't practice.  And there's no way you can be fluent in English-writing, unless you write hundreds of thousands of English sentences.

Imagine, there's a test for the rules of soccer, 'TEST OF THE RULES OF SOCCER' (TOROS), and you had a perfect score on TOROS.  However, it doesn't mean you are a good soccer player.  You are just an expert of the rules.  To be a good player, you have to practice it day after day for a long time.

So, what they say about how lame those over 900+ scorers write is just like you say those who know the rules are good players.  It doesn't take genius to figure out how wrong that is!

◆  JOE  ◆        

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