2008年02月21日
最新のメッセージ
Always do the best you can and you will overcome any limits.
■Andy先生のエッセイ（「2008年5月学校だより」より）
How do you make language learning fun? I love to sing and one way to improve your understanding is to sing in a different language! My manager, Sachiyo, challenged me to sing a song in Japanese. I didn’t know how I would do it but I thought it would be a good way for me to learn more Japanese.
To practice, I recorded a famous song by Kome Kome Club called ‘Roman Hikou’ onto my voice recorder. I then divided the track up into short parts. I sang just before I went to bed, I sang in the shower and I even sang while I walked to school (It’s a good job not many people were walking around to suffer hearing me practice!)
When it came to the singing night, I felt confident enough to give it a go. I pretended to everyone at the start of the evening that I wouldn’t be able to sing all the way to the end of the song. I even gave them a ‘taster’ by singing some parts deliberately out of tune (ha, ha, ha!) When it was time for me to sing, I gave it my best shot… and it was a blast! To sing a song for three and a half minutes, entirely in Japanese was a very special moment for me. A few of my friends stood up as their eyeballs popped out and they jumped upright to take pictures with their phones!
I learned more about Japanese. I tried writing the lyrics in Hiragana and Katakana to improve my writing speed and learning the song one-line-at-a-time made it easier because I could move at my own pace. Right now I’m learning two more Japanese songs. So a question to all my students, ‘Can you sing a song in English?’
