イギリス英会話ブログ

このポストでは、他人に何かをしてくれるように頼む色んな方法を紹介します。 (Continued)

There are apparently many more non-native speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers, and as a consequence of this the traditional rules of the language-learning game are under pressure to change. (Continued)

In this post we are going to look at a special use of the verb ‘find’. If we take the question in the title - ‘How did you find it?’ - we would probably translate it into a Japanese as something like 「それをどうやって見つけたんですか？」. But, this question can have a completely different meaning - it could mean something like ‘How was it?’, 「どうでしたか」、「それをどう思ったか」, etc.. (Continued)

Recently a friend drew my attention to a documentary available on YouTube about the 9-11 terrorist attacks in America. The documentary is called ‘Loose Change’ and seems to have been put together by a group of young Americans who were not happy with the official explanations of the events of September 11th 2001.

Basically, the documentary proposes that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were actually organized by the Bush administration (& CIA, FBI, etc) in order to create a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Outlandish as such an idea may sound to some people, there are a number of interesting facts reported in the documentary which make it worth watching even if one is not happy to swallow the story whole.

Although derided by more ‘official’ organizations as a mere ‘conspiracy theory’ , the ‘Loose Change’ documentary became a bit of an internet phenomenon when it was first posted up on the internet and the makers appeared quite frequently on TV media in America to put their arguments and questions to a variety of experts. Certainly, watching the video one does get a feeling that maybe these guys are actually onto something. True experts seem to have little time for their ideas though.

Perhaps the high profile that the ‘Loose Change’ documentary achieved after its release is more due to the lack of credibility of the Bush administration - people were, and still are, hungry for any revelations that will damn the Neo-Liberal project.

It would be interesting to hear what people think about this.

And here’s another, perhaps more believable, conspiracy theory from an article in the Japan Times.

In negative sentences, intonation is very important. (Continued)

日本人は、「あまり」という言葉をよく使うと思います。英語でも、同じような表現がよく使われます。 (Continued)

I have been following a very interesting discussion on an e-mail mailing list I subscribe to. The thread started off by discussing native English speakers tendency to use the pronoun ‘my’ more than Japanese speakers - as in ‘my company’, ‘my neighbours’, ‘my school’. I think it is basically true that pronouns are used much more frequently in English than in Japanese; but this was not the really interesting part of the discussion. (Continued)