英語の練習するのために、一番いいのは英語でメッセージを書いたり、メールを送ったりだと思います。　（英語練習の方法のトップランキングをこちらで見てね。）

だから、僕は英語でチャットというのサービスを提供したらいいでしょうねと思っていた。みんなさんが練習できるようにするために、このブログからメッセージを書くフォームを立ち上げました。

力があれば？もしそだったら、こちらから英語でのメッセージを書いてください！

すべてのメッセージを返信します。プライベートの英会話ようなサービスみたいね。

よろしくお願いします。

One of the best ways of learning English is to practice by writing messages or emails to someone in English. ( see my top ten tips for learning English here. )

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I could offer this service to people and help them practice their English. I could set up a form on my blog and let people write to me in English and then reply and start a conversation.

So I have decided to set up a small contact form which you can use ( if you are brave enough ) to send me a message in English. I will reply to every message I get and maybe we can start a conversation.

If you want to give it a try then please send me a message from here.

This is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing multi-cultural couples living abroad and is something that I am experiencing first hand as a father and husband. My wife is Japanese and we are raising my two year old daughter here in Tokyo.

My wife and me both work full time so our daughter goes to nursery school every day and when she is there she plays with the teachers and her friends and has a great time. The nursery school is a Japanese school and so naturally most of the kids are native Japanese, which means they speak Japanese all day.

At home I speak English 100% and my wife speaks both English and Japanese but mainly Japanese. If I speak to my daughter I speak English and she understands. However, she usually replies in Japanese. We get some strange looks on the train when people see this! Occasionally, when my daughter is in a really good mood she will reply in English and when she does it really makes my day.

I read somewhere that it does not really matter what language the parents speak or what they do to try to make their children speak a certain language. It said that if a child has friends who speak a certain language then the child will naturally want to speak in that language. We humans are social creatures and we all want to fit in with the people around us, apparently this is also true for very young children like my daughter.

So as a parent my challenge is to find what I can do to give her a head-start in English when she wants to speak Japanese because all her friends speak Japanese?

今朝、私の日本人友達がわからなかった英語フレイズのは、「彼にとっては。。」でした。

僕は、それは、英語で「From his point of view..」だを答えました。

私にとっては　- From my point of view.

これは「In my opinion」と近い意味と思います。「私の意見は。。」

パソコンのデータについて、仕事中のよく聞く言葉なんですけど。（私はインターネット系開発者です。)

Duplicate

意味は「重複している」です。

使い方は、日本語とちょっと違うとおもいます。

例えば、

英語「There is no duplicate data.」

日本語「データが重複していません。」

日本語では動詞形ような言葉ですね。

他のよくある例文

There are no duplicates.

The client has complained about some duplicate data.

This is a duplicate record. (他のデータはこのデータと同じみたい。)

I am not an English teacher. But while I have been living in Japan a lot of people have asked me if I can teach them English.

I always say ‘yes’ because I am happy to help people who want to learn something, but to be honest, I don’t know what to do to help them learn. Unless they ask me a question there is not really much I can do.

I may not actually be an English teacher but I have studied three different languages - French, German and Japanese, so I know a little bit about learning languages.

It might sound obvious, but to become skilled at using a foreign language you have to practice speaking, reading, writing and listening in that language. These are the core-four skills you will need to be fluent.

Some people are more interested in one particular thing, like being able to read English, or being able to talk in English to their foreign friends, and that is no problem at all, but I still think you should try to practice all four skills because each skill helps you with the other skill.

For example, when you are practicing your reading you will learn new words and phrases that will help you with your speaking. Also, the biggest benefit of practicing all four skills is that it makes your study time more interesting. If you only do one thing again and again you will soon lose interest and then the risk that you stop studying all together is very high.

And that brings us to what is, in my opinion, the most important thing for learning a language - persistence.

It takes time to study a language and there is no way to get around that fact and there really are no short cuts.

When I study Japanese I find that the best way to keep going and constantly improve my skills is to do just a tiny bit of study every single day - just five minutes on the train on the way to work in the morning. It is easy to do everyday because I only study a little bit so it doesn’t feel like hard work and because I study every day it has become a part of my lifestyle, it has become my new habit and it has become easy to continue. Also I get a great feeling of satisfaction from doing this because it feels like I am always learning and always progressing.

So my advice for you is to do a small bit of study every morning on the train to work. If you don’t take the train then study while you eat breakfast, if you don’t have time to do that then study while you are on the toilet! Any time you can fit a regular five or ten minutes study into your day will be fine. The key is to do it everyday at the same time so your body makes it into a habit.

I meet a lot of people who want to learn English and I don’t mind that at all, I think that is great and I enjoy speaking to people who are trying to talk to me in my language.

However, the thing I hate the most is when someone ONLY want to speak to me because they want to practice their English - it is so obvious and, to be honest, it is so rude!

I am thinking about this now because last night I was riding the train home with a couple of Japanese girls I had met at a party and we were talking about what kind of guy they fancy. One of the girls was clearly into me ( sorry if I sound arrogant but it was true ) and was saying how she really likes Gaijin guys, I thought this was funny because it was so obvious! But that didn’t what upset me so much. The thing that upset me was when her friend turned around to me and said ( with a smile on her face ), “I really wouldn’t want a Gaijin guy, I hate that sort, I prefer a Japanese man, but I do want to practice my English, so that is why I have been talking to you”.

I couldn’t believe it.

Well the rest of that train journey was terrible, I felt awful just being with that girl and I was happy when they got off the train.

But it made me think, and I started to wonder about how many of my Japanese friends might be using me for English practice. And I have some very good friends who are Japanese so I didn’t like to think like this about my friends, I hope its not true!

But this is not really the thing I hate the most.

You see the thing I hate more than people trying to be my friend just to study English, is the big companies that are making money from the people who want to learn to speak English.

I am talking about companies like GABA, NOVA, Aeon and ECC; the big Eikaiwa schools here in Japan.

I hate them because I have to look at their posters every day on the train. I hate the way they make English seem like an impossible task, and make everyone feel obsessed with learning the language. Also I hate the stereotype that has developed of the foreign white guy in Japan just being an Eikaiwa teacher, out here to earn a bit of cash whilst they are drinking and stealing all the girls.

Luckily I think I can do something about it, because I can teach English to my friends and anyone else who asks me, for free! And, I can help people see that it is really not so hard to have a conversation with a foreigner in English.