少人数制で楽しく身につく英会話教室・英会話スクールなら「アミックインターナショナル」

While I like all cute animals equally, cats hold a special place in my heart. I wouldn’t go so far as calling myself a crazy cat lady, more like a cat enthusiast. I love them despite their reputation of being mean-spirited (at times), independent, and scared of cucumbers. Maybe I love them in spite of all their so-called flaws.  Regardless, despite my lack of cats, my appreciation for cats also extends to their owners. Cat owners are da real MVPs. With the discovery of “animal labyrinth” videos, my appreciation for crazy cat people has increased twofold. Warning: adorable cats ahead:

Yay! Red-collar kitten won! WASN’T THAT CUTE?! My favorite part was the reverse playback so I could see just how wiggly the kitten was. What about you? Are you more of a dog person or are cats your number one animal?

NEWS

重信校よりNewsです。
我らが重信校のホープ、Ayanaさん（高２）が参加した高校対抗のディベート地区大会で
Ayanaさんのグループが見事全国大会への出場権を勝ち取りました！
そしてなんと中でもAyanaさんがベストディベーター賞を受賞。万歳！！
更に同じ週にロータリークラブ主催の英語スピーチコンテストで3位に入賞するという快挙。
アミックの講師、スタッフも、いつも彼女の頑張りを見ていたとはいえ、うれしい驚きです。

素晴らしい賞を見事勝ち取ったAyanaさんにインタビュー。

Q: ディベート全国大会出場までの道のりはいかがでしたか？

A: 毎日学校に遅くまで残ったり、様々な記事や証拠（自分たちの論をサポートする）を英語で読んだりと、たくさんしんどいこともあったけれど、euthanasia (安楽死) への理解が深められたし、何よりも英語で論文（大学教授が書いた）を読んだりして英語のボキャブラリーやreadingの力がついたので良かったです。

Q: ベストディベーター賞に選ばれた感想は？
A: 今まで頑張ってきて本当に良かったし嬉しかったです。

Q: スピーチコンテストの題材は？良かったこと、難しかったことなどを教えてください。
A: 題材はSense of beauty and culture。
自分の経験をふまえた上でどうしたら自分の思いが聞いているジャッジに伝わる言い方が出来るのか考えることが難しかったです。

外国人講師との英会話レッスンで発信力を鍛え、日本人講師とのレッスンでもケンブリッジ英検など日々の努力を続けるAyanaさんの今後にも期待です！

こんにちは、アミック石井校の辰馬です。

前回は、likeという単語に2つの意味があることを利用した、Fruit flies like a banana. というジョークを紹介しました。

この言い回しの元となった、Time flies like an arrow.（光陰矢のごとし）という文も、実は意味の取り方次第で他の解釈ができるんです。

なぜかというと、like だけではなく、time, flyにもそれぞれ「時間」、「飛ぶ」という元々の意味とは別の使い方があるからなんですね。

たとえばtimeを、「時間を測る」という動詞で使うと、
「矢のように（すばやく）ハエの飛ぶ時間を測りなさい」という命令文になります。

さらには、「矢のような（形をした）ハエの時間を測りなさい」というのも可能です。
（矢のような形のハエなんて存在するかは別ですが…）

相手は「時間が経つのは早いねえ」と言っているだけなのに、慌ててハエのタイムを測ってしまうことのないように、気をつけてくださいね！

Even though my height is barely above-average for an American male, that is apparently too tall for Japan, as I manage to hit my head almost every day on something.

While in the moment I am often inspired to unleash profanity, the many hits I have taken have also inspired me to write haikus about being tall.

Every morning,
Some wake with coffee or tea
I just hit my head

One good thing about
being tall, Is that in large crowds
Never lose my friends

On train, alter-ego
comes to life as I dodge rings
I am the hunchback

I’m not sure about Japanese YouTubers, but American YouTubers sure have a lot of drama. Amazingly, under a glamorous or HD facade, it turns out most YouTubers are also human beings. You know what they say; to err is human, no one is perfect, bless this hot mess, yadda, yadda, yadda. Long story short, we all have a phase in our life when we’ve done or said something we’re not proud of. However, if you grew up on YouTube, there’s a chance that whatever cringe-y or uneducated moment was captured on video. Famous YouTubers are just that–YouTubers, as in, their primary source of income is their YouTube channel. If you’re making a living making videos, you should at least have a personality or quirk that viewers love. Now say some video or other evidence were to come out that shows you weren’t the sweet or family-friendly YouTuber your viewers thought you were. Proof like that could ruin your follower count (aka your revenue source) which in turn would wreck possible sponsorships.

Once a famous YouTuber is publicly shamed or shunned it seems like they go into “PR/PC freak-out mode”. Maybe their follower count is steadily dropping (and followers/views = money) and they need to remedy the situation. The first thing they usually do is issue an apology tweet and if that’s not enough to staunch the flow of upset unsubscribing, an apology video will be shortly underway.  Depending on their level of fame (or infamy) their apology video will usually be the most watched video for several days before everyone moves on with their lives or some other YouTube drama breaks out. If they are deemed apologetic enough, they may make it out with their follower count still relatively intact. Of course, these apology videos are then dissected by other YouTubers either to see if their apology was genuine enough or to ride on the coat tails of a more famous YouTuber for views and clicks of their own.  

Here we have PewDiePie, a famous Swedish Youtuber who has issued his own apology video, break down and rate other apology videos for our enjoyment:

At least in the American education system, every high school student gets drilled into their head a number of English “rules” that we later learn are completely false: don’t begin a sentence with “And” or “But”; paragraphs must be at least three sentences long; never split infinitives, and many others.

Perhaps the most famous and well-known of these misconceptions is that a sentence cannot end in a preposition (e.g., “Where is my coat at?” should instead be “Where is my coat?”). 

Grammarians have been pushing back against this myth for literal centuries, arguing that these stranded prepositions are perfectly fine in modern English. For example:

What did you put that there for? is much more natural than For what [reason] did you put that there?

and

The same goes for The match was rained off. versus Rained off was the match.

So who’s to blame for this confusion?

According to Wikipedia, the guilt falls on the pen of Englishman John Dryden. A poet and playwright, Dryden argued in a 1672 essay that since Latin (seen as a more elegant language) sentences cannot end in prepositions, neither should English ones.

Even with so much opposition and most modern grammar resources (from Fowler’s Modern English Usage to the internet’s Grammar Girl) dispelling and denouncing the myth, for some reason it lives on and is still taught in classrooms today. 

Thanks to the internet, there are seemingly endless ways to learn and practice English. Today, I’d like to focus on webcomics. Webcomics are very aptly named in the sense that they are exactly what they sound like; comic strips hosted on a website. Unlike newspaper or magazine comics, webcomics can be started by nearly anyone with an internet connection and basic drawing skills. The beauty of using webcomics to learn English is that nearly every webcomic deals with a different aspect of Western life. Some webcomics can be political or contain social commentary, such as Questionable Content and Scenes From A Multiverse. Some can be fun and educational (funducational?) like Hark! A Vagrant and xkcd. And some can be downright weird and hilarious like Wondermark, Dr. McNinja, and BOASAS.  Whatever your story preference is you can find a webcomic that fits the bill. Learn different English expressions and metaphors, as well as clever Western humor, all in three to five frames! Enjoy!

Turns out I still haven’t learned every word in the English language (but I’m working on it). Here are seven more words I came across recently that I had never seen (or at least remembered) before.

• Canard: a false or unfounded rumor, story, or belief 
• Furtive: done secretly, stealthily 
• Inchoate: being imperfectly formed or only partly in existence 
• Limn: to draw or paint on a surface; to outline in sharp detail 
• Spume: frothy matter/foam/scum on liquids 
• Sui generis: unique, particular, in a class of its own 
• Yegg: safecracker, robber

If you’re a chemistry enthusiast and/or huge nerd, you’re in for a treat! Mole Day, which is an integral part of National Chemistry Week, is the celebration of Avogadro’s Number. You may be asking yourself, “What in the world is Avogadro’s Number?!” As I am no chemistry devotee, I took the time to look this information up for you, dear reader. Avogadro’s Number (or Avogadro’s Constant, if ya fancy), named for famed Italian scientist, Amedeo Avogadro, is the number of molecules in one mole. I understand that you may be shouting “Now, what the heck is a mole?!” at your computer screen.  Fear not, dear reader, a mole is but the unit of measurement for amount of substance. Simply put, moles give chemists more accuracy when it comes to determining amounts of substances produced in a given reaction. Okay, maybe that wasn’t so simple, but the mole is a very useful unit of measurement. The measurement is approximately 6.022140857(74)×10²³ mol⁻¹   (and yes, I copied and pasted that formula). And so on this October twenty-third in the year two thousand and eighteen, and every October 23rd hereafter, between the hours of 6:02 A.M. and 6:02 P.M.,  we celebrate the mole. I recommend a visit to the American Chemical Society for more Mole Day activities and crafts to get you in the spirit to celebrate your favorite unit of measurement.

For those of us that are still confused; here’s a handy chart!:

Run in

• Meaning: Arrest
• Example: The guys who robbed the bank last week have finally been run in.

Run in

• Meaning: Use new machinery at less than full speed, preventing damage
• Example: I have to drive slowly for the first 1,000 miles to run the engine in.

Run into

• Meaning: Enter by running
• Example: He ran into the building.

Run into

• Meaning: Collide with
• Example: He lost control of the vehicle and ran into a tree.

Run into

• Meaning: Encounter or meet unexpectedly
• Example: I ran into your cousin the other day.

Run into

• Meaning: Cause to blend into
• Example: You can use the paintbrush this way to run the colors into each other.

Run into

• Meaning: Reach a large figure
• Example: By the end, the cost of the project ran into the millions of dollars.

Run low

• Meaning: Near the end of a supply of something; to be nearly running out
• Example: Our stocks of meat are running low.

RUN OFF meaning – Phrasal verbs with RUN

Run off

• Meaning: Flee or depart quickly
• Example: Don’t run off before the end of the event.

Run off

• Meaning: Make photocopies, or print
• Example: Please run off a couple dozen more flyers to pass out.

Run off

• Meaning: Write something quickly
• Example: Shakespeare could run off a play in just a couple of days.

Run off

• Meaning: Pour or spill off or over
• Example: They kept a barrel to store rainwater that has run off the roof.

Run off

• Meaning: Chase someone away
• Example: If anyone comes into this field, the bull will soon run them off.

Run off

• Meaning: Operate by a particular energy source
• Example: This radio runs off batteries.

Run off with

• Meaning: Leave with someone with the intention of living with them or marrying them
• Example: The chief accountant has run off with his secretary!

Run off with

• Meaning: Steal or abscond
• Example: He ran off with my wallet.

Run on

• Meaning: Continue without interruption
• Example: We can’t afford for the performance to run on for more than the specified time.

Run on

• Meaning: Using a certain time zone
• Example: I was still running on daylight savings time.

Run on

• Meaning: Continue talking for a long time
• Example: She ran on and wouldn’t let anyone get a word in edgeways.