Sorry for my long absence

Hi All

I'm sorry not to post to Blogging English for a long time. I'm fine. I'm now 71 years old. As I live on my pension now, I've been enjoying my hobbies everyday.

I'm now crazy about playing contract bridge. I attend near bridge club to play it five times a month all day. I go to Tokyo to join team matches three time a month. Additionally I play Robot Duplicate on my PC almost every day.

I belong to an ocarina club. I practiced playing my ocarina with my club members three times a month. We also visit a home for aged people once a month and play our ocarina for an hour. I think playing my ocarina is good for my health.

I also join a English conversation club. Our class convenes twice a month. We have an American teacher. We talk about current topics each other and learn English grammar.

I've been busy but I keep to write my journal in English every day.

I'll keep watching this blog and join Blogging English.

Regards,

Sadamu

Welcomes & check-ins

Please post comments below to welcome new members, say hello to old friends, check in and let everyone know you are back ~ even if only to visit. Got questions? Use comments for those too.

New blog members start by following and commenting on posts to say hello, introduce themselves, ask questions, etc. After you've had a chance to settle in, get to know everyone and have decided you might want to "stick around" for a while, we'll invite you to become a contributor. That means you can write and post directly to the blog as well as commenting.

Here's a welcome to new blog member Junai. She's from Japan and will, I hope, tell us more about herself and what she expects from Blogging English. She's bound to have questions too.

Here are few links to older posts that might be helpful:

• Getting Started: what are your English learning stories?
• How this works
• Getting to know one another - I see here that it's time for me to update my introduction. What about yours? Life goes on and change is inevitable. 

PS: unless your messages and questions need to be private and confidential, please use the blog to communicate with us

My city, Hidaka by Sadamu

Here is Sadamu's interesting and informative essay about his home city, Hidaka, that forward from the Advanced Writing group on Google. I thought he has already posted it to the blog like Allun did. Sadamu and all: please accept my apologies. I'd like to draw everyone's attention to an important point that Sadamu makes: learning about something by writing about it. I've also heard this referred to as "write to learn."  Vanessa

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sadamu
To: StudyCom Advanced Writing

My city, Hidaka

I have two cities which I can call that it's my city. One of them is the city where I had raised till my high school graduation. The other is Hidaka where I have been living since 1996. Working on this home
work, I found that I didn't know about my city, Hidaka. I studied about my city, so I got wiser now.

Hidaka is located in the southwestern part of Saitama Prefecture,almost in the center of Japan. You can easily view my city on Google Earth at 139 degrees 20'42" E longitude, 35 degrees 54' 36" N latitude. It extends 11.1 km east to west, 6 km north to south. The eastern part of Hidaka is made up of plains and the city's urban district, while the west features high hills and mountains 200m high.Hidaka is a wonderful sightseeing location with Koma River.

The city was founded on October 1, 1991. We have 39 cities in Saitama Prefecture. Hidaka is 37th city in Saitama. The city has estimated population of 56,821 at Jan. 1, 2010. Population density of Hidaka is 1,200 persons per square kilometers. 25% of the city land is agricultural land and 20 % of it is residential and building lots. The city is served by Komagawa and Takahagi stations on JR line and by Koma station on Seibu line. One fifth of working people who live in Hidaka commute to outside of Saitama by these lines.

The oldest relic that has been uncovered in Hidaka is a knife shaped stone implement, about 12,000 years old. It is said that 1,799 Kokuri-jin (Korean immigrants) moved to the Hidaka area and established Koma
Country, in the year 716.

Main industry in Hidaka is sight seeing. There are many places to see and visit in Hidaka. It is supposed that Hidaka will have 6,500 thousands visitors in 2009 FY.

Regards, Sadamu

Top ten websites to learn English

Who isn't overwhelmed by the all the websites for learning and teaching English? Here's one teacher's list of websites that her students picked as best for learning English.

A common element in these websites: students have fun while learning English.

Top ten websites to learn English from Jennifer Verschoor's blog My Integrating Technology journey

FYI: follow changes to any website

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of web pages, from blogs to news sites to Craig's list queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today Google Reader rolls out a change that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed. These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page. We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets. If you don't want Google to crawl or create feeds for a specific site, site owners can opt-out. If you have a feed-less page you've been dying to follow, sign in to Google Reader and try it out for yourself.

how to learn a language

How to learn a foreign language is the million dollar question, but actually there is no magic answer. Many factors should be taken into consideration, as well as tools useful for learning a new language. The good news is that there are methods and techniques to use.

Language Components	Language Tools
Vocabulary Grammar Writing Listening and Speaking	Memory Practice Motivation

Ghotit | super-spell-checker

Larry Ferlazzo posts,

Ghotit is a super-spell-checker that is ideal for very beginning English Language Learners ... (as well as native speakers with challenges). It has the ability to help “sleuth-out” words that people are trying to spell — in a much more in depth way than most regular spell-checkers. Thanks to Ira Socol for the tip on this app. I learned about it through an excellent post he wrote titled Classroom Changers.

Ghotit | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...