Name: Toru Fujishiro
Year: 2004
 
 
I was around ten when I recognized that there were various countries, cultures, and languages across the vast ocean. Among many things that helped the innocent boy to know it, movies played a big role. In my childhood, I often saw movies on TV. But I was not satisfied so some friends and I used to sneak into a nearby theater to watch the latest films time after time. There I got interested in the languages spoken in the movies.
When I knew the language spoken in most movies was English, I thought how wonderful it would be if I could understand that. Even though I got eager to learn English, I was only ten years old in a municipal elementary school where English was not taught. So my parents allowed me to go to the ECC. My teacher Yumi Takahashi kindly taught me the English alphabet, pronunciation, basic words and grammar, etc. using funny pictures and songs. It was like playing. After I entered a JHS, ECC lessons prepared me for classes in JHS.
English classes in the JHS were boring at first, just as I had expected. Because most classmates had no information of English, and students were not divided according to their levels, I had to sing the ABC song again. We started to read articles in the textbook a month later I found there were some differences from ECC lessons. First of all, the teachers in my JHS rarely told students to read sentences out loud. Now I suppose that the reason was the shyness of the students. Most of them read in an undertone. In addition, they seemed to think that speaking English like native speakers was funny, and might sound like mimicking. I was laughed at in the classroom when I read some sentences. Secondly, the phonetic symbols were not taught to us. This kind of neglect can be a problem for English learners. Even though letters and sounds are not separable, most students could not tell from the symbols how words should be pronounced. I am really thankful to Ms. Takahashi for teaching them to me. I went to the ECC until I graduated JHS.
Though the difficulty of the textbooks gradually became greater, the method of English lessons in my HS was very similar to that in my JHS. In the classroom, I was learning grammar, usage, and expressions through reading articles and the explanations of them in detail by the teacher. And once in a while the teacher gave us vocabulary tests. Thus it was monotonous, and also gave me no excitement since there was no pair work like conversation lesson or discussion in English.
It should have brought me to the situation where I could make progress in my ability to speak English in my high school days. In marked contrast to classes in my JHS and HS, in Dokkyo University there are many classes in which I have to speak in English. I was glad to take these classes, but it took a while to get used to it because of a gap of three years in which I had no opportunity to talk to someone in English. Now I have gotten able to speak much more frequently than before, though sometimes I am at a loss for what to say.
However, I cannot catch what people are saying at times if they speak fast or use slang or difficult words. So I was determined to brush up my hearing ability to be able to understand what people are saying, and I intend to take a summer course of listening to English.
I know I still do not have a good command of English despite learning it for about ten years. I think I am capable of speaking English enough to travel abroad or have a chat with people. But it is not my goal. There are some jobs I want to consider in the future, which include teacher, journalist, etc. Therefore I want to learn more.
Finally, I would like to give advice to other students. University is a place you can do almost whatever you want. In other words, you can be even lazy. But your lives are limited. Be ambitious! Aim high! And relax while you do!