Iowa City!!!

Through the 1st semester, I noticed the like points of Iowa City.

My favorite things is the mood of people, park, place and shops.
Everything in Iowa City are soooo big. The City park is sooooo big.

When I back to the Mayflower by work in fall, I always watched the view of river side. It was beautiful! Because trees turned coulor to the red and sun was going to down to the river! I love the view!!!

But now, it changed because of snow... I could not back the doom by work...
But I like snow! so I don't care about snow!!!!
I don't like cold weather, though......

two home towns

I have two home towns.
One is Nagoya in Japan, another is Iowa in America.

I was born in Tokyo in Japan, and moved to Nagoya,which is middle in Japan when I was an elemental student. After that, I moved to Toyohashi, which is in the same prefecture with Nagoya, and I moved to Nagoya again.

So I can say that my hometown is Nagoya.
I like Nagoya because Nagoya is a thrid biggest city in Japan. Therefore, I can buy everything what I want. Moreover, I can go everywhere using subways or buses.

Hummm.... I dislike my hometown because people don't friendly like people who live in Iowa City. People smile at me when I walk on the street. But in Japan, if I smiled at other people in the same situation, they don't tend to smile....


My present hometown, Iowa City, is goooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Before I came here, I did'nt eat a Mexican food. But now, I love a brito!!
I think people are very friendly and I like my doom, Mayflower. Because I have a lot of friends there.

But...acually,I dislike the Iowa weather.
My hometown has few snow in one year. So I was suprised when the first snow fell!!! It was so early, I thought.

I decided to buy more clothes because I'll stay here more one semester!!!!!

APPOSITIVE

When I was a high school student, my English teacher tought us about appositive using a lot of time, because it was hard for students to understand well.

APPOSITIVE is used to mention a particular person/thing using extra imformation after","

Now, here is an example:non-restrictive
I have roommates, who learns Arabic.

In this sentence, "learn Arabic" is extra imformation about MY roommates. Without it, we can not know who my roommate is. The sentence can show that ALL roommate are studying Arabic.


an example:restrictive
My roommates who learn Arabic.

In this sentence, the meaning can show that there may be roommates, who don't study Arabic, because the sentence" who learn Arabic" didn't modifire "My roommate".

another example:restrictive
My father sitting on the chair is very kind.

In this sentence, the meaning is that I may have another fater besides the man, who is sitting on the chair.

Thus, it is different between Restrictive and non-Restrictive

NEW WORDS!!!

Mayflower I live in has many funny person.
There are Chinese, Korean, French, Thai, Taiwanese....

Today, I'll talk about a black man, who is storng, big, clever.

Because he is a black person, he always use Black English.
The most famous greeting of black English is "what's up?". But he didn't use it. Instead of it, he used

"Do you wanna dispute, man??"

I'm not sure that he used it for greeting words, but I thought that it was used in the same situation of "what's up?"


I thought the slang which the dictionary doesn't have are very intersting!!!

This picture was in a Halloween Party

Wedding

Congratulatioooooooooooooooooooon!Niki!!!!!


I studied what the traditional Japanese wedding is before, because it was my speech theme in my university.


Japanese traditional wedding is Shinto Wedding, which is taken place in a shrine and a groom and bridegroom wear a Kimono. There are no cake no champagne no dance.


Now, almost weddings are like west, it means that we wear a wedding dress, cutting a cake and it take place in a church.
Japan separates 2 parts, one is cheap wedding ceremony and another is expensive one.
Average costs is $26,000. I don't know it is more expensibe or not than American.

I think one differnce thing between American and Japanese is a groom and a brigegroom wear 3 or more dresses, such as wedding dress, Kimono, evening dress...


Well, if I would have a wedding ceremony, I want a night wedding or a gardan party.
Are there night weddings in America?? In Japna some hotels have a plan. It takes in the night, of cause, and pray the forever love under the moon. It's great!!
I wonder when it dream come ture....

JAPANESE style

There are a lot of differences between English and Japanese.

As you can see, a first differenc is a character. Japaneses has 3 characters, which I wrote on the last week's blog. So Japanese can creat more words than using alphabet.

Second difference is about grammar.
English form is that Subject + ver + predicative
But Japanese is moslty different.
For example: お昼ご飯を食べる。( I eat lunch.)
お昼ご飯 is a lunch
食べる is eating
so Japanese form is Subject + predicative + verb.

And in negative sentence, a negative verb is placed in the end of the sentence.
For example: お昼ご飯を食べない。( I don't eat lunch.)
ない is not.
So you cna't understand what Japanese speaker want to say if you don't listen to a end.

Last difference is pronunciation.
Some asian language has similar pronunciations to English, such as Korean and Chinese. But Japanese doesn't.
Japaneses doesn't have a "th-", "q-,-q", "sh" etc. So many Japanese people have a difficult time to learn English pronunciation.
In my case, I didn't understand the difference between "L" and "R".
Still now, I have faced the difficult time to learn speaking English and listening skill.

JAPANESE

My first language is Japanese, you know.
And I studied Chinese in my university in Japan. My university is the Nagoya University Of Foreign Studies, so every students study some language. For example, one of my friends learns Spanish, another friend learns German, and I have friends who study French or korean.

I think in the UI there are many students who are learning Japanese. S0 I helped them to attend the Japanese class as a guest speaker of Japanese, and I belong to the JCA-Japanese culture association.
At that time, I think about Japanese suddenly.
Japanese has 3 characters of writing, kanzi漢字, hiraganaひらがな and katakanaカタカナ

kanzi is the similar form to Chinese. So when I learned Chinese, I could understand what a textbook in Chinese wants to say, but the pronunciation is difficult!!!!
Hiragana and Katakana are the original language forms of Japanese.
What I wanted to say in today's blog was Japanese has 3 writing patterns. I don't know any language which have some characters for writing. I think it is interesting.

In Japanese,if you don't know a word spell, you can write another form from 3 characters.

CHICAGO

I spent a great time in Chicago!
I could make a memory which I had never had.
I'll tell you about one great thing of Chicago.

It's...PIZZA!
I heard Chicago's pizza is very famous and very delicious from my friend's sister, who lived in Iowa City before, so my friend mailed to her which pizza shop is the best. Her answer was "UNO"
Do you know UNO? I didn't know, but I rereaded the guide book, there was the name.
The book said it was the most famous, so you might wait 4 hours after order.
But we tried!!!

It was sooooo delicious!!!
Uno's pizza was different from my imagination, because the dough of pizza was like pie dough. I mean it was short. Also, needless to say, it was sooooo big!
I became a fan of UNO. I wonder UNO is made in Japan.

Oh! I forgot to write about my funny experience in Chicago!
When I was walking to the bus stop, I saw 3 or 4 men who were sitting on the bench and looking at us. I noticed their eyes, so I watched them. Then one of them said "Hi", so we repeated, and keep walking. They were saying something after that, but we didn't say any more, then someone shouted...




"Chicken Teriyaki!!!"



How did they know we are Japanese?? :-)

eating!!!

I'm good at eating!
Italian, Chinese, Korean, Mexican are good!! Recentry I'm crazy about Indian curry, so I'm looking for the best Indian curry restaurant.
But I love sweets!!!
Cakes, cookies, chocolate, ice cream, Japanese snacks are very good!! I want to eat a sweet thing whenever I want to eat, I started to cook by myself.
When I was child, I often used to cook something with my mother in rainy days.
My mother likes cooking some sweets, so on my birthday, christmasn day or some special days mom cooked me something.
When I was a high school student, I cooked sweets by myselfe for christmas, mom's birthday, St. Valentain's Day instead of mom.
So I became a good cooker of sweets :>

My special is a cheese cake. I recomend you to cook cheese cake because it is very easy to cook, moreover it's very delicious!!!!
I'm sure that if you cook it for someone, he or she says "Yummy!!" to you!

Using this skill, what I want to do in the future is cooking for my children.
My dream is that when children come back home from school, I'm in a home and cooking for them.
So I should learn how to cook many kind of sweets.

the nature of universe

I chose about the black hole as the H.W topic.




“Black hole”
When I was a junior high school student, my science teacher told me about a black hole. Until then, I was interested in a black hole.

A black hole is a star which affects a very strong gravitation to everything around the black hole, even light. It is thought that it was made by contracting a huge gas cloud, and the size is bigger and bigger nowadays. The research about a black hole has kept; however, any scientists can’t observe it directly. But in the universe, it is thought that there is a super-massive black hole which is the biggest one, and also it is said that the white hole exists in the universe.
The black hole can be a role that sucks everything around it into itself. By contraries the role of white hole is getting out everything that was sucked by the black hole.

So it means that if there were the black hole and the white hole in the earth, we could travel in the twinkling of an eye!!!!!
I wish the day came true by the time I will die.

Sept 11

THE SENTENCE: I've been buying all these old D-battery-powered video games from the '80s. (Adams 2007)

EXPLANATION: The sentence means that "I" keep buying still now. I mean "I" bought first D-battery-powered video games in 80's.
It is said the past perfect progress.

E.G:
A: How many old D-battery-powered video games?
B: I can't count!!! Becaues too many!
A: Do you like these when you were a child?
B: Yeah, I've been buying all these old D-battery-powered video games from the '80s.