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」

Hard

As an adjective, hard can mean: 

The opposite of soft:

• Wood is hard.

The opposite of easy:

• The exam was hard.

Something involving effort:

• Running a marathon is hard.

As an adverb, hard can mean:

Doing something with energy:

• She works hard.

To use force:

• He hit the ball hard.

One of my favorite things about English (or any language) is how small differences in pronunciation, speech pattern, and vocabularly can you tell you where a person is from without even having to ask!

The United States is riddled with different accents and the way people speak can vary drastically just by travelling a few hundred miles into a new state or even within the same state (e.g. those in southern Texas sound a little different than those in the northern part of the state). 

I think accents and dialects are fascinating, so at home I often try to speak in different ones (even though I’m terrible at it). Here are a few of the more unique ones to be found in America, with a few (stereotypical) words and phrases you can try out:

Boston Accent: Instead of pronouncing the r’s in “Where did you park the car?” change them to an ‘eh’ sound, which becomes “Wheh’d you pehk the keh?” 

North-Central (Minnesota, upper Michigan, the Dakotas):  This accent sounds very friendly and similar to some Canadian dialects. It often makes ‘o’ sounds longer and rounder than they are in other American accents. For instance, Minn-uh-sota (Minnesota) sounds more like Minn-uh-sohda, with the lips taking on a rounder shape at the ‘oh’ part of the word. Likewise, ‘Don’t you know?’ becomes ‘Dontcha noh?”

Southern: Although the southern accent varies greatly from state to state and even city to city, most of them employ what is called a vowel shift. Where ‘standard English’ words with ‘i’ in the middle sometimes result in an /ay/ or ‘eye’ sound, in the south this becomes more of an /ah/. For instance, the word ‘hide’ becomes ‘hahd’ and ‘rice’ becomes ‘rahs’. 

To hear some of these southern accents in action, check out actor and comedian Fred Armisen in this bit on The Tonight Show:

So my trip to Kyoto last weekend was great: I enjoyed a long walk through shrines and parks in the rain and I went to see one of my favorite artists live and we ended up going to Ginkakuji together the next day. Pretty cool.

The one downside of the trip was my capsule hotel experience. I won’t say the name of this capsule hotel because I’ve had good stays before, but this time I woke up sweaty around 6 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. The air was suffocating and I couldn’t find a fan or air conditioning button so I forced myself out of the tube to get fresh air and a shower just to cool down. I ended up checking out after that because I would have rather been sleep deprived than climbing into that furnace again.

I’m not trying to dissuade people from staying in a capsule hotel. On the contrary, I usually recommend them because of how cheap and conveniently located they are. I will warn you though to find a way to ventilate your capsule before falling asleep!

Joe

こんにちは、アミック石井校マネージャーの辰馬です。

3月の正式オープン以来、まだ2ヶ月と少しですが、お蔭様で英会話とプログラミング教室を合計して、すでに40人を超える方々にご入会いただきました！　

皆様とのご縁をいただけたこと、本当に嬉しく思っています(^^)　

これからも「楽しくて役に立つレッスン」を合言葉に頑張っていきますので、どうぞよろしくお願いします。

英会話レッスンの枠は徐々に埋まりつつあるのですが、16時からの時間帯は火曜日・木曜日と空きがありますので、お気軽に無料レッスン体験をお問い合わせください♪

プログラミング教室も、ベーシック・アドバンス本コースが開始して1ヶ月になりますが、

今の段階なら途中からの合流も比較的しやすいので、ぜひぜひ土曜午前の授業を見学してみてください。道後校では5月いっぱい、無料の体験会も実施していますよ！

それでは、楽しかったGWの思い出を胸に、5月も頑張っていきましょう！

If your family is like mine, you didn’t grow up owning fun pets. Sure, we had cats, fish, and hamsters, but not any pets that you could actually do anything with. Much like cats, fish, and hamsters, neopets are also quite boring. 

If you are unfamiliar with Neopets.com, I’m not surprised. Developed in the late 90’s, Neopets quickly gained popularity in a time when flash animation was incredibly popular. Visiting Neopets.com today is like entering a portal into early 2000’s internet. It was a simpler time; eBaum’s World is where we got all our viral videos and MySpace was still relevant. Neopets gave kids with social anxiety a nice quiet place to play games, own and decorate a virtual home, and, strangely, buy and sell stocks in the Neopian stock market.

Most importantly, you could create your own neopet, strange creatures that didn’t quite do anything. You can customize your pet by painting it or buying it clothes…and that’s it. They’re fun to look at, I guess? The strange thing is; despite Neopets.com’s frozen-in-time setting, it still has a thriving community of active players, myself included. I think it’s precisely the nostalgia for a simpler time that keeps people coming back for more, and, if it’s not broken, why fix it?

みなさん、こんにちは♪

アミックブログをご覧いただきありがとうございます。

5月に入り、気持ちの良いお天気が続きますね。

先日近所を散歩していると、何やら道後温泉付近が大賑わいでした。外国人観光客もたくさんです。

どうやら、4年前に道後温泉本館改築120周年を記念して開催された道後オンセナ―トというアートフェスティバルが、今年もまた行われているようです。

愛媛みかんの試食会も行われていました🍊

日本ブームの今ですが、2018年の訪日外国人数は約3200万人の予想となっているそうです！😲

そこで気になるのが、外国人観光客とのコミュニケーションですね。

道で地図を広げて迷っている外国人、見かけたことはありませんか？　ぜひ声をかけてみましょう！

基本のフレーズは

May I help you?（お困りですか？）

Do you need any help?（お手伝いしましょうか？）

次のような質問を聞かれたら、
How can I get to ～？（～にどうやっていけますか？）

Could you tell me to get to ～？(～に行く方法を教えてください)

このようなキーになる表現を使って道案内できます。

・go straight～（～を、まっすぐ）
・go along～（～に沿って）
・turn right／left～（～を右／左に曲がって）

・go past～（～を通りすぎて）
もしくは、
Shall I go with you?　(一緒に行きましょうか？)
と、一緒に案内してあげるのもいいいかもしれません。

少しの勇気で国際交流、ぜひおススメです(*^-^*)

Make and Do

Use make:

• when we create something : I just made a cake. 
• when something causes a reaction: This film makes me happy.

Use do:

• when we talk about activities: I’m not doing anything. What do you want to do?
• when we talk about activities in general: What does he do? He’s a lawyer.

私は今、このブログを東京行きの飛行機の中で書いています。次の日曜日に横浜で開催されるトライアスロン大会に出場するためです(^^)v

During Golden Week, I made my first trip to Osaka. I always regarded Matsuyama as a big city (any place with over 500,000 people is considered large in America), but visiting Osaka and the surrounding area really put things into perspective and made Matsuyama feel like the small town that my students insist it is!

While there, I did all the usual Kansai tourist activities such as visiting the castle, shopping at Dotonbori, taking a day trip to Nara, going to the top of the Tsutenkaku Tower, and of course eating plenty of okonomiyaki, takoyaki, and kushikatsu. 

However the highlight of my trip was  ̶e̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶T̶a̶c̶o̶ ̶B̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶s̶  going to the small (by comparison) town of Ikeda to tour the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Not only do you learn about the interesting history of Cup Noodles there, you also get to create your own noodle recipe to take home and enjoy. 

Overall, I feel about Osaka the way I do New York: a fantastic city to visit and be entertained by for hours just by walking in any random direction, but a little too hectic of a place for me to live.

–Andrew

I’m very fortunate and excited to be able to attend M.E.S.H.’s (aka James Whipple) audio visual set in Kyoto this coming Sunday. He’s been one of my favorite experimental electronic producers over the past few years but he is also a highly capable DJ that will conjure your catharsis whether you expect it or not, after the ambient washes give way to monstrous drums. Here’s one of his more upbeat compositions called “Search. Reveal.”. Enjoy! 😉

– Joe