I’m taking the SMART Method and the last class is coming in a few weeks. The SMART Method is an English crash course for four months specialized in speaking and listening skills. First of all, it was great experience to take it and I believe the English skills that I learned through the lessons can be helpful for my life to last, of course that experience too.
One of the good things of this course is that I can be given a lot of opportunities to construct questions, because in Japan, this is especially evident in school classes, there are few opportunities to speak English, furthermore, there are less opportunities to ask something than to answer something. In my opinion, the reason why I have few opportunities for asking is the Japanese university exams. In Japan, we who want to be admitted to a university study hard to pass the exam, and the exam rarely asks us to write questions, and most of the questions it’s all about pointing out grammatical errors and asking if we can accurately grasp the intent of a long sentence. I don’t point out whether this Japanese examination system is good or bad, I just want to say is that although there are so many opportunities to ask people things in our daily lives, we have rarely had the chance to do so until now. That’s why I though it was a very good thing that this course has given me a lot of opportunities to construct questions.
Just as there is rhythm in Japanese, there is also rhythm in English, but I’m still not used to the rhythm of the questions. For example, when I want to say “Is the bag you were talking about red?”, I often end up saying “Is the bag you were talking about IS red?” with “is” twice. Native speakers and I from the the future may think this is wondering, but Japanese questions are very simple and often end with “?” at the end of a sentence is enough to make it a question. English is more difficult because of its grammar, but it is a very fun language.
Lastly, as the title, what I thought through taking an English crash course is to have conversations is important to improve English skills because in conversations, we communicate each other, which means you have to construct questions to ask. If you don’t ask questions, they will think you are not interested in them or you perfectly understand what they said, and it can be the reason of trouble. Perhaps the reason why most Japanese people only say yes is because they can’t formulate questions.
Of course, I would like to continue to get used to speaking English through online English, moreover I would like to be able to read and write difficult sentences.
Thanks.