一昨日9月11日は、NOVA渋谷本校のクラブ２の企画で、偉大なるレベル１のトムさんが7月31日に続き、再びパネリストとして、プレゼンを行って下さいました。全体の日本語でのレポートなどはこちらでまた別個トピックを立てたり、現在キープ中の9月11日分の僕の日記などでも今後掲載しますが、本日トムさんから前回と同じく、ご自身でテープを撮られ、それを起こされた文章をわざわざ僕のほうへ送ってきて下さいました。
昨日のプレゼンの内容の素晴らしさといい、こうしたご対応といい、トムさんの、僕たち英語学習の途上にある後身たちへの温かいご配慮には本当に心から感謝の限りです。トピックは事情により当初の予定と変わりましたが、前回のプレゼンに引き続き、「私の英語学習と通訳へのアプローチ」です。前回のトムさんのプレゼンも大変貴重で勉強になりましたが、。今回は更にその内容を敷衍、発展して下さいました。昨日参加できなかった皆さんも、是非読んで下さい。なお、前回と同様、お送り頂いた原文では、プレゼンの中で難解と思われる表現等には理解しやすいように、トムさんご自身がわざわざ赤字の表現を使用して下さいましたが、こちらでは表示できません。僕の日記のほうでは赤字も含めて表示していますので、ご興味がある方はそちらでもご覧下さい。
トムさん、何から何まで本当に有難うございます〜♪
＝＝＝＝＝（以下、トムさんのプレゼンの内容）＝＝＝
“My Approach to Studying English & Interpreting”
Masayuki Tominaga
Shibuya Honko Club2 Voice, September 11, 2006
I suppose some of you know that we were going to talk about terrorism or counter-terrorism, but since the topic seems to be a bit touchy, we decided to discuss another topic. I volunteered to be a panelist last Monday, and I was put in a bit of a bind. Because the NOVA management thinks the topic of terrorism is a bit touchy and sensitive, they had some second thoughts about that. So I offered to talk about my efforts to improve my English, and because I worked as an interpreter, talk about interpreting.
How many of you heard me here last time, which was July 31st? How many of you were here? One, two, three, four, just four of you, and the rest didn’t hear me give a talk on more or less the same topic. There are at least four people here who heard me give more or less the same talk. I’ll try not to repeat what I said last time. Last time, I gave a fairly lengthy sketch of my history in terms of studying English. I talked about my work at the American Embassy and a little bit about interpreting by playing some tapes. This time I have brought a few tapes, too. So in the latter part of my presentation, I think I’ll play some tapes to let you hear my interpreting. I don’t consider it a kind of exemplary sample of interpreting, but I thought you might be interested in hearing simultaneous interpretation and consecutive interpretation.
In order to avoid repeating myself, tonight I think I’ll talk about, as I said, my endeavor to improve my English. I’ll speak off the cuff here again. Although I have prepared a very rough outline of my presentation, I’ll try not to read anything from this. So I may start meandering and rambling, but I’ll try to stay on the topic.
When we talk about language proficiency, generally we think in terms of speaking skill, reading skill, writing skill, and listening skill, I suppose. In order to have a kind of all-round, well-rounded ability in handling any language, I think ideally you should have fairly well-developed skills in all these areas – speaking, listening, reading, and writing. I have been trying to improve my skills in all of these areas. I don’t consider my effort as being so successful. I still feel very much unsatisfied with my English skills.
I would like to talk a little bit about each of these areas. First in terms of speaking, to speak a foreign language in a way that is understandable, you must have reasonably good pronunciation, I suppose, and intonation, and the right rhythm, and you have to be articulate, I suppose. If you are not articulate, the listener will have trouble following you.
As I said last time, I worked on the US military base. That was my first job aside from this two-day experience I had with a company, which I quit two days after I started. I consider that my real career started with my work on this US military base. And there because it was an American military base, they had a lot of Americans working as soldiers or civilians. And I tried to speak to soldiers so that I could improve my speaking skill.
I visited a facility called the Service Club where soldiers come to relax, to listen to music, and play cards, or shoot pool or just chat with colleagues, and so forth. I often visited that facility, the Service Club, to talk to American soldiers. That’s how I picked up some slangy expressions, colloquial expressions. I think that helped me to some extent improve my speaking skill.
Then I started working for the American Embassy, and I began to interpret one year after I started there. So I naturally had to use English in my work, interpreting Japanese into English. Of course I interpreted English into Japanese, too, but I interpreted Japanese into English, too. When Japanese people asked questions, made comments, or even gave a presentation, I had to interpret either consecutively or simultaneously Japanese into English. So that necessitated my speaking English.
So that experience working as an interpreter gave me a lot of opportunities to speak English. And when I was interpreting for an American, I often traveled with him or her throughout Japan sometimes, going from Hokkaido to Okinawa visiting several cities on the way. So I had ample opportunities to speak with these Americans either on the plane or on the bullet train or in a restaurant when we were having lunch or dinner and so forth. So I had a lot of opportunities to speak English with these American speakers that I interpreted for.
To work as an interpreter, you have to be articulate and you have to be able to communicate ideas expressed in Japanese adequately into English so that the speaker can understand what the Japanese is saying. So I had to build my expressive power, so to speak, in English. I tried to expand my vocabulary, and I tried to familiarize myself with different English idioms or colloquial expressions and so forth, so that I would not sound so stilted or bookish in speaking English. I tried to sound rather natural in English by using some idiomatic expressions in interpreting.
And I have always been interested not only in formal English but also rather informal or colloquial English too. So I have bought many books on English colloquialisms and slang, and I have been trying to learn those informal expressions. I don’t know how successful I have been in learning colloquialisms and slang, but I think I have become somewhat knowledgeable about those expressions, although it takes a lot of care in using those slangy expressions, because those expressions may be a bit dangerous in the sense that if you use them in the wrong context, you may be misunderstood or you would sound kind of bizarre or strange or awkward.
So as a non-native speaker, I have to take care in throwing in a lot of slangy expressions. So I try to stay away from using them, but at least to gain knowledge about slangy expressions would not hurt you. At least when you hear such expressions being used, you would know at least what those expressions mean. So I think it is useful to learn those expressions, too.
And also in order to improve my speaking skill, I have developed a habit of speaking to myself in English. I don’t know when I started doing that. Maybe pretty early in my association with English, I think I began to talk to myself in English, of course, silently. If I speak to myself aloud, then people may think I’ve gone crazy or something. So I often speak to myself in English. I have a monologue with myself. Sometimes I debate with myself or I argue with myself. I take different positions on a particular issue that I’m talking about. So I try to present an affirmative position and a negative position on any given topic and try to sound convincing to myself.
So maybe that’s how I have learned to play the devil’s advocate. I try not to commit myself to any particular position on any issue, because I think it’s kind of risky or dangerous to have a firm position and be very rigid in one’s position, because there is always a possibility that you may be exposed to a totally different kind of information that could paint the picture completely differently and you realize that the position that you have taken is not really a good one, reasonable one in light of the new information that you have gained.
So I try not to be too firm in my position or opinion on any given issue. So I try to be open-minded and broad-minded so that I could look at any issue from different angles. Usually an issue has at least two or three facets or aspects, and depending on which facet you look at, the issue may begin to look different. So I try to be open-minded and try to be flexible so that I will not be set in a particular position in an inflexible way.
So I often find myself fantasizing or daydreaming in English. For instance, when I am in bed trying to fall asleep, and sometimes I have difficulty falling asleep, then I begin to fantasize in English. I don’t know if it helps me fall asleep or not. Sometimes it may make it even more difficult for me to fall asleep, as I get absorbed in my monologue, but I often do that. I don’t know if it will be helpful to you or not, but it may not be such a bad habit to develop, I suppose.
You can talk to yourself in English in all kinds of situations. You may be walking down the street and looking around. You may see different things, and you can describe all those things in English. Or you may be alone in your room and you have nothing in particular to do. You may start thinking about something, then try and think about that in English. That will be a good thing to do. Describing what you see and what you do in English may be one way to develop your speaking skill, I suppose.
Enough for speaking, I suppose. Then let’s talk about listening. To me, listening has been the most difficult aspect of learning English, I think, because I began to study English seriously only when I was 18 or so when I got into college, and I was too old to learn a foreign language naturally without making an effort. You have to be very young to pick up a foreign language without efforts, I think.
So I have been making all sorts of efforts to improve my listening comprehension skill, but it’s been such a difficult thing to do. And I still have difficulty with listening comprehension. What I have been doing in order to help improve my listening comprehension is, for instance, when I was much younger, I would tape radio programs in English. We had the Far East Network. Now it’s called a different name, but in those days it was called the Far East Network. So I recorded news programs, dramas, talk shows, and so forth, and I listened to those tapes over and over again.
And of course speaking with native speakers can help you develop your listening skill, I think. I used to watch movies fairly regularly mainly to develop my listening skill. I remember watching the same movie at one sitting three times. It was a movie called “Some Like It Hot” (お熱いのがお好き) with Marilyn Monroe. I watched that movie three times at one sitting.
These days you have all kinds of media outlets like CNN. You can watch and listen to foreign broadcasting stations like the three major networks from the United States and I think the British public broadcasting system (the BBC) too. You can hear such English programs on the Internet, too, I suppose. So you have much more opportunities to listen to English through the media.
When you are trying to improve your listening skill, certainly having a large vocabulary helps with listening comprehension. A word that you don’t know is very difficult to catch. If you hear very obscure proper nouns like people’s names, place names, and so forth, it’s extremely difficult to catch those names correctly, because those proper nouns do not carry any message or information. So you have to have a really good ear for English in order to catch those proper nouns.
So as far as regular words are concerned outside of proper nouns, I think if you’ve built a vocabulary and if you have a large vocabulary, I think a range of words that you can catch will naturally expand. So I think having a large vocabulary is a good way to improve your listening comprehension.
OK, then let’s talk about reading a little bit. Because I worked as an interpreter, I had to read a lot of papers, documents, and materials in order to prepare myself for upcoming interpreting assignments. So I had a lot of opportunities or I had no choice but to read a lot of materials in order to be ready for interpreting assignments. That certainly helped me improve my English reading skill, I suppose. In addition to those rather dry materials and documents that I had to read in preparation for interpreting assignments, I tried to read books for pleasure. So I read for maybe a period of ten years or so, while I was working for the American Embassy, starting from 1975 or so until 1985 or so, I read many English books, mostly fiction, novels. That was a period in my interpreting career where I took a keen interest in reading aside from the reading that I had to do in conjunction with work.
Then I stopped reading for pleasure until I retired. I retired from the American Embassy a couple of years ago in 2004, and then I once again took up reading. I’ve been reading lots of English books maybe at a pace of a book a week, so in this two-year period I have read more than 130 English books. I am not focused on a particular genre. So I read kind of voraciously or randomly without specializing in any particular genre of books. I think I’ve read a lot of mysteries. I’ve read detective stories. I’ve read some romance stories. I’ve read non-fiction books, too. I’ve read all kinds of books, hoping that by reading a lot of books I’d be able to further improve my English reading skill.
But I still have trouble reading books in English, because sometimes I have to go back over what I just read and make sure that I understood. I sometimes find myself not really understanding what I am reading, so I have to go back over one sentence or a couple of sentences in order to make sure that I am absorbing the information from the book.
I also started subscribing to the Time magazine when I joined the American Embassy in 1970, and I had been subscribing to it ever since until I retired. I stopped my subscription of Time when I retired from the Embassy, thinking that maybe I can indulge in pleasure reading rather than reading Time, which is rather dry and boring. But that means I did subscribe to Time for 34 years or so. I didn’t read every single issue cover to cover. Sometimes I didn’t read Time at all. I just left it untouched, but sometimes I read Time cover to cover from the very first page to the very last page. So reading Time has certainly helped me increase my vocabulary.
In order to improve my vocabulary, I wrote down words that I didn’t know in order to learn them. I filled a lot of notebooks with lots of words that I jotted down. When I write down a new word I want to learn, I usually put it in a context. So I didn’t just take out a word from the sentence and just write it down in isolation from the sentence. I tried to write the whole sentence or at least a part of the sentence, so that I know how the word is used in context. Otherwise it’s difficult to learn to use that word properly. So I’ve tried to learn words in context. So I recommend you do the same when you are learning new words. Try to learn them in context rather than out of context by taking the word out of the sentence.
So next about writing. Writing and speaking are closely connected, I think. If you can write English well, you should be able to speak English well, too, provided that your pronunciation is not so bad, your diction is not so bad, your intonation is not so unnatural. As long as you pronounce and intone more or less properly, if you can write English well, you should be able to speak English well, too.
The only difference between writing and speaking is that in the case of writing, you put your ideas down on a piece of paper or these days with a typewriter or into the computer. When you are speaking, you just verbalize what you are thinking, so I think writing skill should translate directly into speaking skill.
And also if you want to speak English correctly, you should pay close attention to grammar, too. People say …some people say grammar is not so important, or it may be even a hindrance or an obstacle which will keep you from speaking English without fear, because if you study grammar, you tend to become too conscious of your grammar and try to avoid making grammatical errors. So, that may keep you from being forthcoming in speaking. I still think that grammar is important if you want to sound intelligent or decently intelligent, you don’t want to speak broken English. If you are given a choice between speaking correct English and broken English, I think you all would opt for speaking correctly rather than speaking broken English.
English grammar does not strike me as difficult. Compared with Japanese grammar, I think English grammar is easy. I am very ignorant about Japanese grammar. I am much more comfortable with English grammar, simply because I’ve been studying English, I suppose. I studied Japanese grammar in junior high school, I suppose. Did I study Japanese grammar in senior high school? Maybe not in senior high school. Maybe at junior high school I must have studied Japanese grammar. I may have learned something about Japanese grammar, but almost all the knowledge that I might have gained from junior high school’s Japanese grammar class, I forgot almost all of it. I cannot conjugate properly all those different kinds of verbs. There are so many different conjugations in Japanese. Compared with that, I think English grammar is relatively simple.
And also in English what I find is very important, too, is to learn to speak English correctly in terms of collocations. Collocation is the way words are combined together frequently as a more or less regular way of combining them. So if you don’t learn collocations, then your English begins to sound unnatural and is probably difficult for native speakers to understand. So I think one should pay attention to collocations. When you are not sure about how a particular word is used, you should check your dictionary and make sure that the way you are using that particular word is correct in terms of collocations.
In Japanese we say “将棋を指す” and “碁を打つ”, we don’t say “将棋を打つ”and “碁を指す”, so that is a kind of collocation. Right? “将棋” combines nicely with “指す”, but “碁” combines nicely with “打つ”. There are all kinds of collocations. Familiarizing yourself with collocations is a good way to make your English sound good and natural.
If you are not sure of the collocations of a particular word, all you have to do is check your dictionary. These days you have electronic dictionaries that have a dictionary on collocations included in them. So I think it’s not so difficult to check about collocations. All it takes is your willingness to do so. It takes a little bit of time and effort to do that. But I think you should develop the habit of checking about collocations.
So I think that’s about enough for my approach to studying English. Then next I’ll talk a little bit about interpreting. As I said the last time I was here as a panelist, interpreting can be divided, roughly speaking, into consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. In interpreting, of course, you are interpreting information rather than transplanting an English word into a Japanese word. It’s not direct word-for-word translation that you are supposed to do, but it’s translating an idea or ideas, information into another language. So you have to go after messages and information rather than being too concerned with words. Word-for-word interpretation or translation never works.
In interpreting, what’s most important is to concentrate on what you are listening to. It takes a great deal of concentration to hear and understand every word that is being spoken by the speaker. So you have to keep up your concentration and try and catch every word that is coming at you from the speaker. I emphasized the importance of catching information rather than words, and now I’m saying that you should catch every word. There seems to be a little conflict or contradiction there, but there is no contradiction. Unless you catch every word, you cannot catch the meaning correctly. So by catching every word that is being spoken by the speaker, you can get the full meaning, the total picture of what the speaker is saying.
In interpreting consecutively, usually interpreters take notes in order not to forget what the speaker has just said. They have their own styles of taking notes. There is no single standard way of taking notes. The main idea is to kind of abbreviate and simplify what you are writing. If you start spelling out all the words that are coming to you, you will never be able to write down all the information that you are supposed to interpret. So you use lots of abbreviations and how you abbreviate words is something you learn to develop through interpreting. As you gain experience in interpreting, you develop your own style of note-taking.
(The speech ended here and was followed by a demonstration of my simultaneous and consecutive interpretation as well as note-taking, using a couple of tapes.)
＝＝＝＝＝＝（以 上）＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
昨日のプレゼンの内容の素晴らしさといい、こうしたご対応といい、トムさんの、僕たち英語学習の途上にある後身たちへの温かいご配慮には本当に心から感謝の限りです。トピックは事情により当初の予定と変わりましたが、前回のプレゼンに引き続き、「私の英語学習と通訳へのアプローチ」です。前回のトムさんのプレゼンも大変貴重で勉強になりましたが、。今回は更にその内容を敷衍、発展して下さいました。昨日参加できなかった皆さんも、是非読んで下さい。なお、前回と同様、お送り頂いた原文では、プレゼンの中で難解と思われる表現等には理解しやすいように、トムさんご自身がわざわざ赤字の表現を使用して下さいましたが、こちらでは表示できません。僕の日記のほうでは赤字も含めて表示していますので、ご興味がある方はそちらでもご覧下さい。
トムさん、何から何まで本当に有難うございます〜♪
＝＝＝＝＝（以下、トムさんのプレゼンの内容）＝＝＝
“My Approach to Studying English & Interpreting”
Masayuki Tominaga
Shibuya Honko Club2 Voice, September 11, 2006
I suppose some of you know that we were going to talk about terrorism or counter-terrorism, but since the topic seems to be a bit touchy, we decided to discuss another topic. I volunteered to be a panelist last Monday, and I was put in a bit of a bind. Because the NOVA management thinks the topic of terrorism is a bit touchy and sensitive, they had some second thoughts about that. So I offered to talk about my efforts to improve my English, and because I worked as an interpreter, talk about interpreting.
How many of you heard me here last time, which was July 31st? How many of you were here? One, two, three, four, just four of you, and the rest didn’t hear me give a talk on more or less the same topic. There are at least four people here who heard me give more or less the same talk. I’ll try not to repeat what I said last time. Last time, I gave a fairly lengthy sketch of my history in terms of studying English. I talked about my work at the American Embassy and a little bit about interpreting by playing some tapes. This time I have brought a few tapes, too. So in the latter part of my presentation, I think I’ll play some tapes to let you hear my interpreting. I don’t consider it a kind of exemplary sample of interpreting, but I thought you might be interested in hearing simultaneous interpretation and consecutive interpretation.
In order to avoid repeating myself, tonight I think I’ll talk about, as I said, my endeavor to improve my English. I’ll speak off the cuff here again. Although I have prepared a very rough outline of my presentation, I’ll try not to read anything from this. So I may start meandering and rambling, but I’ll try to stay on the topic.
When we talk about language proficiency, generally we think in terms of speaking skill, reading skill, writing skill, and listening skill, I suppose. In order to have a kind of all-round, well-rounded ability in handling any language, I think ideally you should have fairly well-developed skills in all these areas – speaking, listening, reading, and writing. I have been trying to improve my skills in all of these areas. I don’t consider my effort as being so successful. I still feel very much unsatisfied with my English skills.
I would like to talk a little bit about each of these areas. First in terms of speaking, to speak a foreign language in a way that is understandable, you must have reasonably good pronunciation, I suppose, and intonation, and the right rhythm, and you have to be articulate, I suppose. If you are not articulate, the listener will have trouble following you.
As I said last time, I worked on the US military base. That was my first job aside from this two-day experience I had with a company, which I quit two days after I started. I consider that my real career started with my work on this US military base. And there because it was an American military base, they had a lot of Americans working as soldiers or civilians. And I tried to speak to soldiers so that I could improve my speaking skill.
I visited a facility called the Service Club where soldiers come to relax, to listen to music, and play cards, or shoot pool or just chat with colleagues, and so forth. I often visited that facility, the Service Club, to talk to American soldiers. That’s how I picked up some slangy expressions, colloquial expressions. I think that helped me to some extent improve my speaking skill.
Then I started working for the American Embassy, and I began to interpret one year after I started there. So I naturally had to use English in my work, interpreting Japanese into English. Of course I interpreted English into Japanese, too, but I interpreted Japanese into English, too. When Japanese people asked questions, made comments, or even gave a presentation, I had to interpret either consecutively or simultaneously Japanese into English. So that necessitated my speaking English.
So that experience working as an interpreter gave me a lot of opportunities to speak English. And when I was interpreting for an American, I often traveled with him or her throughout Japan sometimes, going from Hokkaido to Okinawa visiting several cities on the way. So I had ample opportunities to speak with these Americans either on the plane or on the bullet train or in a restaurant when we were having lunch or dinner and so forth. So I had a lot of opportunities to speak English with these American speakers that I interpreted for.
To work as an interpreter, you have to be articulate and you have to be able to communicate ideas expressed in Japanese adequately into English so that the speaker can understand what the Japanese is saying. So I had to build my expressive power, so to speak, in English. I tried to expand my vocabulary, and I tried to familiarize myself with different English idioms or colloquial expressions and so forth, so that I would not sound so stilted or bookish in speaking English. I tried to sound rather natural in English by using some idiomatic expressions in interpreting.
And I have always been interested not only in formal English but also rather informal or colloquial English too. So I have bought many books on English colloquialisms and slang, and I have been trying to learn those informal expressions. I don’t know how successful I have been in learning colloquialisms and slang, but I think I have become somewhat knowledgeable about those expressions, although it takes a lot of care in using those slangy expressions, because those expressions may be a bit dangerous in the sense that if you use them in the wrong context, you may be misunderstood or you would sound kind of bizarre or strange or awkward.
So as a non-native speaker, I have to take care in throwing in a lot of slangy expressions. So I try to stay away from using them, but at least to gain knowledge about slangy expressions would not hurt you. At least when you hear such expressions being used, you would know at least what those expressions mean. So I think it is useful to learn those expressions, too.
And also in order to improve my speaking skill, I have developed a habit of speaking to myself in English. I don’t know when I started doing that. Maybe pretty early in my association with English, I think I began to talk to myself in English, of course, silently. If I speak to myself aloud, then people may think I’ve gone crazy or something. So I often speak to myself in English. I have a monologue with myself. Sometimes I debate with myself or I argue with myself. I take different positions on a particular issue that I’m talking about. So I try to present an affirmative position and a negative position on any given topic and try to sound convincing to myself.
So maybe that’s how I have learned to play the devil’s advocate. I try not to commit myself to any particular position on any issue, because I think it’s kind of risky or dangerous to have a firm position and be very rigid in one’s position, because there is always a possibility that you may be exposed to a totally different kind of information that could paint the picture completely differently and you realize that the position that you have taken is not really a good one, reasonable one in light of the new information that you have gained.
So I try not to be too firm in my position or opinion on any given issue. So I try to be open-minded and broad-minded so that I could look at any issue from different angles. Usually an issue has at least two or three facets or aspects, and depending on which facet you look at, the issue may begin to look different. So I try to be open-minded and try to be flexible so that I will not be set in a particular position in an inflexible way.
So I often find myself fantasizing or daydreaming in English. For instance, when I am in bed trying to fall asleep, and sometimes I have difficulty falling asleep, then I begin to fantasize in English. I don’t know if it helps me fall asleep or not. Sometimes it may make it even more difficult for me to fall asleep, as I get absorbed in my monologue, but I often do that. I don’t know if it will be helpful to you or not, but it may not be such a bad habit to develop, I suppose.
You can talk to yourself in English in all kinds of situations. You may be walking down the street and looking around. You may see different things, and you can describe all those things in English. Or you may be alone in your room and you have nothing in particular to do. You may start thinking about something, then try and think about that in English. That will be a good thing to do. Describing what you see and what you do in English may be one way to develop your speaking skill, I suppose.
Enough for speaking, I suppose. Then let’s talk about listening. To me, listening has been the most difficult aspect of learning English, I think, because I began to study English seriously only when I was 18 or so when I got into college, and I was too old to learn a foreign language naturally without making an effort. You have to be very young to pick up a foreign language without efforts, I think.
So I have been making all sorts of efforts to improve my listening comprehension skill, but it’s been such a difficult thing to do. And I still have difficulty with listening comprehension. What I have been doing in order to help improve my listening comprehension is, for instance, when I was much younger, I would tape radio programs in English. We had the Far East Network. Now it’s called a different name, but in those days it was called the Far East Network. So I recorded news programs, dramas, talk shows, and so forth, and I listened to those tapes over and over again.
And of course speaking with native speakers can help you develop your listening skill, I think. I used to watch movies fairly regularly mainly to develop my listening skill. I remember watching the same movie at one sitting three times. It was a movie called “Some Like It Hot” (お熱いのがお好き) with Marilyn Monroe. I watched that movie three times at one sitting.
These days you have all kinds of media outlets like CNN. You can watch and listen to foreign broadcasting stations like the three major networks from the United States and I think the British public broadcasting system (the BBC) too. You can hear such English programs on the Internet, too, I suppose. So you have much more opportunities to listen to English through the media.
When you are trying to improve your listening skill, certainly having a large vocabulary helps with listening comprehension. A word that you don’t know is very difficult to catch. If you hear very obscure proper nouns like people’s names, place names, and so forth, it’s extremely difficult to catch those names correctly, because those proper nouns do not carry any message or information. So you have to have a really good ear for English in order to catch those proper nouns.
So as far as regular words are concerned outside of proper nouns, I think if you’ve built a vocabulary and if you have a large vocabulary, I think a range of words that you can catch will naturally expand. So I think having a large vocabulary is a good way to improve your listening comprehension.
OK, then let’s talk about reading a little bit. Because I worked as an interpreter, I had to read a lot of papers, documents, and materials in order to prepare myself for upcoming interpreting assignments. So I had a lot of opportunities or I had no choice but to read a lot of materials in order to be ready for interpreting assignments. That certainly helped me improve my English reading skill, I suppose. In addition to those rather dry materials and documents that I had to read in preparation for interpreting assignments, I tried to read books for pleasure. So I read for maybe a period of ten years or so, while I was working for the American Embassy, starting from 1975 or so until 1985 or so, I read many English books, mostly fiction, novels. That was a period in my interpreting career where I took a keen interest in reading aside from the reading that I had to do in conjunction with work.
Then I stopped reading for pleasure until I retired. I retired from the American Embassy a couple of years ago in 2004, and then I once again took up reading. I’ve been reading lots of English books maybe at a pace of a book a week, so in this two-year period I have read more than 130 English books. I am not focused on a particular genre. So I read kind of voraciously or randomly without specializing in any particular genre of books. I think I’ve read a lot of mysteries. I’ve read detective stories. I’ve read some romance stories. I’ve read non-fiction books, too. I’ve read all kinds of books, hoping that by reading a lot of books I’d be able to further improve my English reading skill.
But I still have trouble reading books in English, because sometimes I have to go back over what I just read and make sure that I understood. I sometimes find myself not really understanding what I am reading, so I have to go back over one sentence or a couple of sentences in order to make sure that I am absorbing the information from the book.
I also started subscribing to the Time magazine when I joined the American Embassy in 1970, and I had been subscribing to it ever since until I retired. I stopped my subscription of Time when I retired from the Embassy, thinking that maybe I can indulge in pleasure reading rather than reading Time, which is rather dry and boring. But that means I did subscribe to Time for 34 years or so. I didn’t read every single issue cover to cover. Sometimes I didn’t read Time at all. I just left it untouched, but sometimes I read Time cover to cover from the very first page to the very last page. So reading Time has certainly helped me increase my vocabulary.
In order to improve my vocabulary, I wrote down words that I didn’t know in order to learn them. I filled a lot of notebooks with lots of words that I jotted down. When I write down a new word I want to learn, I usually put it in a context. So I didn’t just take out a word from the sentence and just write it down in isolation from the sentence. I tried to write the whole sentence or at least a part of the sentence, so that I know how the word is used in context. Otherwise it’s difficult to learn to use that word properly. So I’ve tried to learn words in context. So I recommend you do the same when you are learning new words. Try to learn them in context rather than out of context by taking the word out of the sentence.
So next about writing. Writing and speaking are closely connected, I think. If you can write English well, you should be able to speak English well, too, provided that your pronunciation is not so bad, your diction is not so bad, your intonation is not so unnatural. As long as you pronounce and intone more or less properly, if you can write English well, you should be able to speak English well, too.
The only difference between writing and speaking is that in the case of writing, you put your ideas down on a piece of paper or these days with a typewriter or into the computer. When you are speaking, you just verbalize what you are thinking, so I think writing skill should translate directly into speaking skill.
And also if you want to speak English correctly, you should pay close attention to grammar, too. People say …some people say grammar is not so important, or it may be even a hindrance or an obstacle which will keep you from speaking English without fear, because if you study grammar, you tend to become too conscious of your grammar and try to avoid making grammatical errors. So, that may keep you from being forthcoming in speaking. I still think that grammar is important if you want to sound intelligent or decently intelligent, you don’t want to speak broken English. If you are given a choice between speaking correct English and broken English, I think you all would opt for speaking correctly rather than speaking broken English.
English grammar does not strike me as difficult. Compared with Japanese grammar, I think English grammar is easy. I am very ignorant about Japanese grammar. I am much more comfortable with English grammar, simply because I’ve been studying English, I suppose. I studied Japanese grammar in junior high school, I suppose. Did I study Japanese grammar in senior high school? Maybe not in senior high school. Maybe at junior high school I must have studied Japanese grammar. I may have learned something about Japanese grammar, but almost all the knowledge that I might have gained from junior high school’s Japanese grammar class, I forgot almost all of it. I cannot conjugate properly all those different kinds of verbs. There are so many different conjugations in Japanese. Compared with that, I think English grammar is relatively simple.
And also in English what I find is very important, too, is to learn to speak English correctly in terms of collocations. Collocation is the way words are combined together frequently as a more or less regular way of combining them. So if you don’t learn collocations, then your English begins to sound unnatural and is probably difficult for native speakers to understand. So I think one should pay attention to collocations. When you are not sure about how a particular word is used, you should check your dictionary and make sure that the way you are using that particular word is correct in terms of collocations.
In Japanese we say “将棋を指す” and “碁を打つ”, we don’t say “将棋を打つ”and “碁を指す”, so that is a kind of collocation. Right? “将棋” combines nicely with “指す”, but “碁” combines nicely with “打つ”. There are all kinds of collocations. Familiarizing yourself with collocations is a good way to make your English sound good and natural.
If you are not sure of the collocations of a particular word, all you have to do is check your dictionary. These days you have electronic dictionaries that have a dictionary on collocations included in them. So I think it’s not so difficult to check about collocations. All it takes is your willingness to do so. It takes a little bit of time and effort to do that. But I think you should develop the habit of checking about collocations.
So I think that’s about enough for my approach to studying English. Then next I’ll talk a little bit about interpreting. As I said the last time I was here as a panelist, interpreting can be divided, roughly speaking, into consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting. In interpreting, of course, you are interpreting information rather than transplanting an English word into a Japanese word. It’s not direct word-for-word translation that you are supposed to do, but it’s translating an idea or ideas, information into another language. So you have to go after messages and information rather than being too concerned with words. Word-for-word interpretation or translation never works.
In interpreting, what’s most important is to concentrate on what you are listening to. It takes a great deal of concentration to hear and understand every word that is being spoken by the speaker. So you have to keep up your concentration and try and catch every word that is coming at you from the speaker. I emphasized the importance of catching information rather than words, and now I’m saying that you should catch every word. There seems to be a little conflict or contradiction there, but there is no contradiction. Unless you catch every word, you cannot catch the meaning correctly. So by catching every word that is being spoken by the speaker, you can get the full meaning, the total picture of what the speaker is saying.
In interpreting consecutively, usually interpreters take notes in order not to forget what the speaker has just said. They have their own styles of taking notes. There is no single standard way of taking notes. The main idea is to kind of abbreviate and simplify what you are writing. If you start spelling out all the words that are coming to you, you will never be able to write down all the information that you are supposed to interpret. So you use lots of abbreviations and how you abbreviate words is something you learn to develop through interpreting. As you gain experience in interpreting, you develop your own style of note-taking.
(The speech ended here and was followed by a demonstration of my simultaneous and consecutive interpretation as well as note-taking, using a couple of tapes.)
＝＝＝＝＝＝（以 上）＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
NOVA渋谷エリア 更新情報
-
最新のアンケート
-
まだ何もありません
-
NOVA渋谷エリアのメンバーはこんなコミュニティにも参加しています
人気コミュニティランキング
- 1位
- お洒落な女の子が好き
- 90041人
- 2位
- 大人のmixi【おとミク】
- 6422人
- 3位
- 独り言
- 9045人