Homework (October 20th, 2014)

Guten Tag everyone, how are you? I hope you are doing well :) Today's topic is about evernote, google slide, and my R&P. So now let's start :D

1. Evernote

 Actually, I've started using evernote some months before on my i Phone. The application for phones is also very useful, because you can see some large files, such as exel or pdf clearly on your phone. Sometimes I use it in order to check my shift of part time jobs.

 During today's lecture, we downloaded evernote web clipper on our google crome. I have never used evernote on PC, so it was totally new to me. By using evernote web clipper, you can clip the whole website, bookmark, articles in your evernote easily. Moreover, you can also clip a screenshot of a website and devise the picture online! It was very surprising for me, because it enables me to save much time :) I don't need a long process (taking a screenshot → download in desktop → upload again) anymore! It's awesome :D The other good thing is you can find your files easily according to dates or searching on your evernote. I'm sure that I will continue to use evernote online in order to gather files for making presentations or other stuff.

2. Presentation

 I watched C.R.A.P videos which are provided by one of our tallest ELA teachers, Rab!C.R.A.P stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. These videos show that how you can improve your presentations or slides effectively by using visual effects. There are 4 things that you should consider when you make presentations. ①Contrast: Strong contrast in color is better to see and impress than weak contrast. ②Repetition: Font, color, font size, pictures should be the same through a presentation in order to keep consistency. ③Alignment: In order to make your presentation more attractive, you should arrange words and pictures effectively. ④Proximity: In a slide, words should have appropriate distances in order to avoid confusions among listeners. All these techniques are very useful to improve presentations. So, I'd like to pay attention to these points for final projects.

3. My topic

 For my final project, I'd like to write about funeral in Japan. However, still I can not find any good sources to support my argument. Maybe I should change my topic... I don't know. I hope I can write a better essay compare to the last one. I'll do my best! See ya!

Homework (October 13th, 2014)

Hi guys, how are you? Today's R&P lecture made me surprised very much, because there are so many useful techniques for study.

My 1st duty is to find featured articles on wikipedia and finally I found out that an article about "Stonewall riots", which is one of the biggest gay movements in the United States, is actually one of the most high quality articles. In my latest essay, I wrote about same-sex marriage, so this article was very helpful to understand, how those LGBT movements happened in the past and how the government treated with those actions at that time. I think this article is very sophisticated, because this has enough, clear references at the end of the article, so there are no question marks or signs which say "This article needs additional citations for verification" or so force. Moreover, this article is very well categorized and explained in detail, so if you are interested in LGBT rights or gay movements, please check the following homepage address.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

In addition to this, if you are looking for FA sources, you can find them easily from the following wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

On this page, featured articles or topics are listed alphabetically or based on themes, so you can find high quality sources, which are related to your essay or interest, much more quickly.

Secondly, I'd like to talk about zotero. This time was the 2nd time to make citations by using zotero and generally speaking, I was able to use zotero appropriately. However, when I want to do citations from Japanese newspaper resources, (ex. The Japan Times) sometimes zotero doesn't work well. The place, where the author's name should be, becomes somehow blank and when I use shortcut with Ctrl+Shift+A/V, then the title of the articles is pasted  on the document. I'm not sure whether there are certain ways to solve those problems quickly, but people have to sometimes type author's names or necessary information by themselves.

I'd like to continue using these techniques to improve my research and study. Thank you for your time :) See ya!

Homework 3 Zotero

 Hello guys, how are you? Today I'd like to write about my essay a little bit with some sources. The theme of my essay is legalizing the same sex marriage in Japan and I will use some datas as follows;

News, Hugh Schofield BBC, and Paris. “Hollande Signs Gay Marriage Bill.” BBC News.
Accessed September 23, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22579093.

Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?. Reprint版. New York:
FarrarStraus & Giroux, 2010.

“Toyota Moving Forward.” Advocate.com. Accessed September 23, 2014.
http://www.advocate.com/business/equality-allies/2011/09/20/toyota-moving-forward.

　The first article is about cases in France, where gay marriage has legalized this year. Even　though France is one of the Catholic countries and many anti-gay marriage
movements exist, 55-60% of French people support the same sex marriage.

 The second one is a book by Michael Sandel, a very famous philosopher at Harvard
university. In this book, he mentions that legalizing the same sex marriage can destroy the
radical concept of "marriage". I'd like to use this idea as counter argument in my essay.

 The third article is about Japanese companies' movements for LGBT people. It says that Toyota is one of the companies which provides convenient environments for LGBT people. 

 By using these datas, I'd like to construct my essay.

 For citations, I used zotero which we learned in the last R&P class. By using this tool, people can easily make MLA style citations and save time. I think this tool is very useful for writing essay or blogs, however, maybe it can be also sometimes wrong. In order to minimize possibilities of　plagiarism, I think checking by yourself is also necessary. That's all for today.

Have a nice holiday!! Fall has come :)
Mana

My survey about dialect

Hello everyone, today I'd like to show you the results of my questionnaire about dialect.

Q1: Do you speak any dialects?

Surprisingly, more than the half of our class speak some dialects.   









Q2: If any, what kind of dialects do you speak?

According to this survey, 3 people speak Kansai-dialect, 2 speak Nagoya-dialect and one speaks Kobe-dialect, Ensyu-dialect(Shizuoka region), Miyazaki-dialect, Kanagawa-dialect.

Others speak standard Japanese. 




Q3: Do you think that being able to speak dialects is cool?

※1 for not at all, 4 for strongly agree

6 people think that it's very cool, 5 people say it's cool, 6 people think it's not so cool, and one says it's not cool at all.








Q4: Do you have any particular words or nouns that are used only in your region?

I got some interesting, surprising answers from some dialect speakers as follows;
"Hutekoi" for being brazen.(Osaka)
"Menkoi" for cute.(Aomori)
"Tage" for many or much.(Miyazaki)
"Araiage" for washing dishes.(Shizuoka)

Have you ever heard any of these words? For me, all of these are really unfamiliar and sound a little bit strange. Even I'm a Japanese, I would never understand what these words exactly mean, if people use these during conversations. It was an interesting survey to see the results. Thank you.

Mana

Useful devices and apps I'm using now

 Hi, this time I want to introduce some useful apps that I'm using on i Phone for now. I have mainly three recommendations as follows; podcast, netprint and tuneln radio. 
 Firstly I want to write about podcast. Podcast is one of the apps in which you can download audio episodes, videos, or PDFs. Some programs are created by official TV stations or radio companies (ex. all night Nippon), others are made by ordinary people. They have many categories like news, language learning programs, audio books and so on. My favorite podcast is called "bilingual news", which is performed in two languages, English and Japanese. Their topics are really hot and sometimes surprising, so people can enjoy this radio and improve English listening skills at the same time. 
 The second one is netprint. This application is provided by 7&11 companies and by using this application you can print your stuff, PDF or web pages or photos or whatever at seven eleven. Personally I don't have any printers at home, so it helps me a lot when I need color printed papers during the semester. 
 Finally, I’d like to talk about tuneln radio. By using this application, you can listen to any kinds of radio around the world. I use this radio, especially when I miss some German radio programs, (I was in Germany for a year as an exchange student) so if you guys miss some particular radio programs or want to listen to some particular language radio programs, this application helps you. I feel like the improvement of technologies really helps me to spend comfortable life, it enables me to access the new world much easier and faster than before. That's all today! Hope this article was to some extent useful for you ;)