自らを追い込む

　地球上に住む人類の９８％は日本語を理解しません。一方、文明の利器であるインターネットは瞬時に世界の隅々まで繋がります。このアンバランスを埋めるのに拙いフェイスブックとブログでは「英語での発信」も心掛けてます。これは２０代のインドでの日常生活が基になってるでしょう。カルカッタ【現コルカタ】の街中を歩いていても日本語は全く聞こえて来ませんでした。

　私たち日本人が日々、生活するには日本語で何不自由なく生活できます。ですから、もし、英語を身近にするのならば「自分にとって英語が必要不可欠である状況に自らを追い込むこと」でしょう。つまり「必要は発明の母」の環境作りです。一般的に、日本では試験が済めば、日常生活で英語が必要でないです。しかし、世界の人とインターネットで繋がるには英語は不可欠です。

　という私も、生活で英語が必要に迫られないことから、英単語・熟語がなかなか脳に定着しません。このため、日々「英語がどうしても必要な環境を自ら作らねばなりません。」英語でものを考えたり、英文を書くのは「脳をすっかり英語に転換」しなくてはなりません。しかし、一歩一歩ですから、私は天声人語の英文対照版を教科書とし、１日１コラムを課題として語彙を増やしたいのですが、高齢期に入った今、なかなか難しいことです。それでも、脳への定着は「繰り返し実際に使うこと」と感じてます。

　英文を書くとき、高校時代に習った「五文型」に当て嵌め、日本語ではあまりない主語を必ず入れ、三単現では動詞にsやｅｓを忘れず、便利な関係代名詞や関係副詞も使います。常に手元に和英辞典と英和辞典の両方から例文を有効利用し、「英作文は英借文である」と、いい年をして辞書との睨めっこの日々です。

Dear my overseas friends who like both of nature and great music

　The simultaneous interpretation for your understanding will be done after my radio gymnastics held in the nearby park and breakfast in Japan time.

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As you know, 98% of the people living on Earth do not understand the language of Japan. On the other hand, the Internet, a tool of civilization, instantly connects every corner of the world. To fill this imbalance, I also try to "communicate in English" on Facebook and my weblog. This is probably based on my daily life in India in my 20s as a teacher of Japanese school. Even when I walked around the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), I had never heard any Japanese.

We Japanese can live our daily lives without any inconvenience by using Japanese. Therefore, if we want to become familiar with English, we should "put ourselves in a situation where English is indispensable to us." In other words, it is about creating an environment where "necessity is the mother of invention." Generally, here in Japan, once we have finished our exams, we do not need English in our daily life. However, English is indispensable to connect with people around the world via the Internet.

Even I, who do not need English in my daily life, have difficulty retaining English words and phrases in my brain. For this reason, I have to "create an environment where English is absolutely necessary" for me every day. Thinking and writing in English requires "completely switching my brain to English world." However, I want to increase my vocabulary step by step, using the English-version of Tensei Jingo published from Asahi Newspaper as my textbook and setting myself the task of writing one column a day, but it's quite difficult now that I'm older. Still, I feel that the key to come to stay it in my brain is to "actually use it repeatedly."

When I write English sentences or English composition, I use the "five sentence patterns" which I learned in high school, always including a subject that isn't common in Japanese, never forgetting to use "s" or "es" with verbs in the third person singular, and also using convenient relative pronouns and relative adverbs. I always make good use of example sentences from both a Japanese-English dictionary and an English-Japanese dictionary, and spend my senior days glaring at the dictionary, reminding that "English composition is English sentence borrowing."

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