Turkish handcraft, traditional sweets "lokum"and traditional Turkish alcohol "Raki", these are present to us from him. Who is he? Izzet is. He came to stay with us 13 years ago.
And last night we met him in TOKYO. My younger daughter also joined us. When we met at a station three of them seemed not to change, but my younger daughter was there. At that she was 7 years old, and now she is twenty. Apparently she changed, and it told us our real age, and our change, it can't be helped.
Now he has two kids, and in Turkey kids already started to learn English in kindergartens. It is said to be natural things to learn some foreign language because of their location. First English, and second Spanish or Russian. And in his case English means "British English". Now I or Japanese people seem to struggle to master English --- compared with his natural attitude to learn English. Though it is just my opinion, Japanese people seemed to divide ourselves into two groups, people who can speak English, and people who cannot speak English. And some people close their minds to foreign countries because of lack of ability to speak English. It's a sham.
Why we don't learn English naturally --- I thought.
4 comments:
Do you think geographical location has anything to do with the motivation to speak English? Japan is an island...a rather isolated one, at that. Turkey is close to Europe where the common language is English and the contact with others (from other countries) is more frequent. OR...do you think it is an attitude of Japanese people to resist learning English?
thanks for the comment
I know, I know the situation "very well". Some of my junior or high school students say "We live in Japan, we don't need to speak English". and sometimes I say the same thing to despise that I cannot speak English well.
On the other hand we tend to narrow the world by ourselves. So we need totry to open our world by ourselves and the one of way is learning English.
If we couldn't speak English well, useing the Internet we are able to get world's information, and these days I think to learn English sentence structure, kind of English grammer, is apparently to learn different culture.
I am so happy you speak English Mieko! I would not have the fortunate opportunity to read your blog! :) It is so interesting to me to be able to read and learn about life in another country and cultural differences! i would love to travel but at this time it's not possible for me, as you know the cost that accompanies life with children.. ;)
So reading your blog is like traveling via the internet! I'm sure that there are many instances where this is the case as well as your wonderful ability to share things about another culture with people there in Japan who perhaps might not have such an opportunity without your knowledge of English.
Thanks Tarrah, I know my English skill is not so well, I will not be able to live in other countries without speaking Japanese. But anyway I can read and wirte English a little, so thanks for this ability my life is really wonderful.
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