4/01/2017

My son's great idea

March 31st was the last day for us to go to my 6-year-old daughter's nursery school.

She will enter the elementary school in April.

On the night before the last day, I told her:

"Why don't we make thank-you cards for the teachers? Teacher A and B really take care of you, don't they? I'm going to make the cards using my laptop, so can you write a letter or draw on them?"

"Sure, I want to write messages to them!"

We started making the cards.

After we finished it, I noticed that I didn't have any nice envelopes to put letters in.

"Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! They are not suitable for putting in thank-you cards in!"

I told my children.

"How about drawing or decorating them?"

My 8-year-old son said.

"Oh, what a nice idea! It's better than using the normal envelopes.  All right, I'm going to decorate them with masking tape, so please draw pictures anything you like."

I said.

"I'm going to draw the teacher and me!"

My daughter said and started drawing.

It took about an hour and finally we finished it.



Next day, she handed them to the teachers before we left the nursery school.

"Wow! You drew the picture? How nice! I'm so happy! Thank you so much!"

They were glad to see it.

Spring time is the season of encounter and parting in Japan.

We thank those who part from us, and look forward to seeing new people.



Thank you(^o^) for reading this article!

7 comments:

  1. Hello Kumi-san,

    Sorry for the delay in writing, but my email inbox got very full, and so it took me some time to get to your email notification for your blog.

    Congratulation to your Daughter for moving to the next school. I hope she enjoyed the experience.

    The card that was created looked very pretty.

    In England I am not sure if it is common for pupils to give gifts to the teachers when they leave the school. I am not certain but I think we had a party, though my memory is uncertain on this.

    I hope you Daughter gets to make a lot of new friends.

    As for me and my fun, but difficult task towards learning Japanese. I have finished reading Human Japanese the beginning and intermediate levels. I am now reading a book called:

    Basic Japanese by Samuel E Martin & Eriko Sato

    http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/language-books/japanese/self-study-books/basic-japanese-paperback-with-disc

    So far it seems like a good book, though I got the ebook version for my android tablet. There are more grammar terms than I would like, but not so many as to make it unreadable.

    I find it somewhat funny that it is a BASIC course and yet it has over 300+ pages. This book will take me a long time to finish. Though hopefully it will be worth it.


    Here is a list of some of the issues found with the rest of the post:

    Part 1:

    Question: Throughout the text you write cards in plural form. Was more than one card created? If not then cards should be card.

    This line:
    March 31th was the last day for us to go to my 6-year-old daughter's nursery school.

    Should be:
    March 31st was the last day for us to go to my 6-year-old daughter's nursery school.

    Reason:
    March 31 ends with st not th.

    This line:
    At the night before the last day, I told her:

    Should be:
    (On) the night before the last day, I told her:

    Or:
    The night before the last day, I told her:

    This line:
    "Why don't we make thanks cards for the teachers? Teacher A and B really take care of you, don't they? I'm going to make the cards using my laptop, so can you write a letter or draw on them?"

    Should be:
    "Why don't we make thank-you cards for the teachers? Teachers A and B really take care of you, don't they? I'm going to make the cards using my laptop, so can you write a letter or draw on them?"

    Or if there was one card only:
    "Why don't we make a thank-you card for the teachers? Teachers A and B really take care of you, don't they? I'm going to make the card using my laptop, so can you write a letter or draw on them?"

    Reason:
    thanks cards is more likely to be said as thank-you cards.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Part 2:

    This line:
    After we finished it, I noticed that I didn't have any nice envelopes to put letters in.

    Should be:
    After we finished it, I noticed that I didn't have any nice envelopes to put letters in.

    Or if there is more that one card:
    After we finished them, I noticed that I didn't have any nice envelopes to put letters in.

    This line:
    "Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! It's not suitable for putting in thanks card!"

    Should be:
    "Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! They are not suitable for a thank-you card!"

    Or if more than one card:
    "Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! They are not suitable for thank-you cards!"

    This line:
    "How about drawing or decorating on it?"

    Should be:
    "How about drawing or decorating them?"

    This line:
    "Oh, what a nice idea! It's better than using the normal envelope. All right, I'm going to decorate them with masking tapes, so please draw pictures anything you like."

    Should be:
    "Oh, what a nice idea! It's better than using the normal envelope. All right, I'm going to decorate them with masking tape, so please draw whatever pictures you like."

    Reason:
    Even though you used multiple pieces of masking tape, since they are all collected upon one object it is said "masking tape" singular. It's irregular, but it's the way it is said.

    This line:
    "Wow! You draw the picture? How nice! I'm happy! Thank you so much!"

    Should be:
    "Wow! You drew the picture? How nice! I'm so happy! Thank you so much!"

    Reason:
    When commenting on what someone has already (in the past) drawn it is said drew (past tense of draw). If you want to keep the word draw then it could be reworded as follows:

    "Wow! You did you draw the picture? How nice! I'm so happy! Thank you so much!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Correction my last sentence should read:

    "Wow! Did you draw the picture? How nice! I'm so happy! Thank you so much!"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hello Terry, how are you?
    Thank you for a lot of corrections.

    I saw the link of Japanese textbook.
    Verb conjugation must be difficult for you.
    We usually speak Japanese naturally, and don't mind how to change verbs.
    We learned Japanese verb conjugation when I was a junior high school student.

    About the blog;
    Acturally we wrote two cards, one for teacher A, the another for teacher B.
    In that case, is plural form suitable?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Kumi-san,

    With regard to if you should use plural form wording. Yes you should if you wrote more than one card. You should refer to both the cards and the envelopes in plural form. This is because you will need more than one of each.

    I re-read your post and I would make the following changes:

    This line:
    "Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! They are not suitable for putting in thank-you cards!"

    Should be:
    "Oh my goodness! I only have normal envelopes for business! They are not suitable for putting thank-you cards in!"

    Reason: For reasons that I am not certain of when you put things into envelopes normal the format is:

    ... putting (thing/things) in.

    Examples:

    Shoes are suitable for putting your feet (in/into/inside/inside of).
    The microwave is good for cooking food (in/inside of it).
    The car is not a good place to leave valuables (in/inside of).

    The word "in" tends to come after the thing put into the envelope or some other form of container.

    The problem is that this is not alway true and there does not seem to be a solid rule to explain why.

    This line:
    "Oh, what a nice idea! It's better than using the normal envelope. All right, I'm going to decorate them with masking tape, so please draw pictures anything you like."

    Should be:
    "Oh, what a nice idea! It's better than using the normal envelopes. All right, I'm going to decorate them with masking tape, so please draw pictures anything you like."

    Reason: Because you have more than one card, I assume that you will place each card into its own individual envelope. So because you have two envelopes you should refer to them in plural form. Envelopes not envelope.

    ReplyDelete
  6. With regard to your question about Japanese verb conjugations.

    Yes I find it very difficult to remember all the different ways the same verb/adverb/adjective can change based on how it is being used.

    We have very few verbs that change how they are written to express different meanings such as past, present and future tenses.

    The few verb words we do have that do this can usually be reworded in such a way to avoid them changing their form, if required.

    Examples:

    The following word has different forms when talking about past, present and future tenses:

    Sleep (Present/Future)
    Slept (Past)
    Sleeping (Currently doing)
    Asleep (Past/Present/Future)

    I like to sleep.
    I slept all night long.
    He is currently sleeping.
    He was asleep for a long time.
    When he is asleep then tonight it will be quite.
    He is asleep now.

    So a lot of different forms of the word for sleep. But it turns out that you could reword each sentence just by adding/removing extra words, and this allows English people to just use the "sleep/sleeps" word form and avoid all the others:

    I like to sleep.
    I was able to sleep all night long
    He currently sleeps.
    He did sleep for a long time.
    When he sleeps then tonight it will be quite
    He sleeps now.

    The above are correct, even if they would sometimes sound a little odd to a native English speaker. But the point is that in English we can avoid most verb changes.

    Even so when it is not the case that we can avoid the changes there a very few words that change, so it is not too bad.

    In Japanese almost all the words change and to an English person who has probably only memorized the dictionary forms of words, this is very difficult.

    Plus the problem of a lot of Japanese words having the same spoken sound but multiple different meanings depending on context. This is also a difficultly we don't have to deal with as much in English. As before we just add extra words and change word order to make the sentence meaning clearer.

    Still if Japanese was easy to learn I am sure that it would not be as much fun to learn it :)

    Plus I have many more books to read, so with luck, it will become easier.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Terry.
      Thank you for a lot of explanation!
      Yes, learning language is sometimes difficult, but that's why it is more fun.

      Let's have fun each other!

      Delete