898

It was interesting for me to read your corrections of Mei Keneko’s journal entry. Altogether, you made corrections in 18 different areas: style, verb form, clause use, preposition, vocabulary, articles, capitals, plurality, markers, adjectives, punctuation, clarification, word order, hyphenation, sentence, excess words, verb/object and spelling (Sachi).

Ema and Saran did something even more interesting. They changed the text completely to make it true for them. In other words, the boys corrected the text for grammar, but the girls corrected the text for meaning i.e. meaning as it relates to them.

Perhaps you have different-type brains!

897

Sometimes it may be difficult to know what to write in a journal. Here are some ideas. You could write about something you . . .

1. did
2. thought about
3. felt
4. remembered or were reminded of
5. were interested in
6. were puzzled by
7. enjoyed / didn't enjoy
8. dreaded
9. looked forward to
10. planned
11. were bored by
12. thought was weird
13. tried
14. sampled
15. ate
16. experienced (maybe for the first time)
17. were bored by
18. were critical of
19. were impressed by
20. became tired doing
21. learned
22. played
23. watched
24. (someone) you met
25. (somewhere) you went

Shogo April 17th

896

The seven Kanazawa students who arrived in Dunedin on Sunday were welcomed to Otago Polytechnic with a mihi this morning. I made sure to arrive before time, and with a book in my pocket to while away the minutes. (It had to be small to into my pocket.)

The book I chose was The Bodyguard by Robert Tine. The French translation. It’s been a while since I looked at the language.

I got a sense of the meaning of the first couple of pages. After finding the original – in English – on the Internet Archive, I was able to understand more.

895

At the hub, waiting to catch the next bus to Saint Clair, I discovered myself without a book to read. However, I had my Kindle. The only problem was that it had nothing new in English. So I opened Hare Pota (in Japanese). I started reading from a random position. 

To my surprise, I managed very well indeed. It seems that the intensive reading I’ve been doing – I’m over 3000 sentences – have paid off. From now on, now that I’ve found my feet, I must cover more ground. Rather than trawl through sentences I must steam ahead much more speedily.