A little about myself.
I am an IT technician, participate in many projects, some HTML work, and reading a lot. I also contribute articles to IT magazines about Open Source Software as a core member of Japan Apache Users Group. I've been in computer related fields from 1978. starting in college, nuclear physics major, I had to take a class in FORTRAN and that was it, I was hooked on the machines. I started working first as an application programmar at a system development
company. Then moved on to a system integration company, and specializing in data communication, small & mid size systems. I run a small intranet at home, a router, Windows Servers, Windows Desktops and CentOS Linux . The Linux runs DNS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and POP3 making it nice for software testing and development.



Sunday, April 26, 2009

How Google's Japanese Vice President master English

I love reading. I often go to bookstore next to the station. There is foreign language corner, and you can see a lot of books about foreign language, especially English-how-to books. I have never bought that kind of books. But I found interesting one. That was "Mr. Murakami's simple way to master English" and subtitle was "How Goole's Japanese vice president master English". I was interested in the subtitle. I like Google very much, in addition to search engine, gmail, calendar, docs and so on.

Mr. Murakami was a president of Google Japan and a vice president of Google headquarters.  He said that he had not be able to speak English and he started study English when he was thirty, moved on American computer company. It's the first time for last ten years I bought this kind of book, How-to-English book.

He said first in his book, you'd better to read English books without dictionary and aim to read one million words. I really think so, and I did it already.

Second, he said about vocabulary building. His way is just glance words. He recommend some vocabulary books which has over ten thousand English word list for leaners. You'd  better to glance all of them everyday. Upps, It's sound very tough. You need over a couple of hours a day. But he said he had done it.

The most interesting of his ways is how to deal with when you meet a word you don't know. He said almost all difficult English word is adjective or adverb. You can understand English sentences if you know noun and verb well without adjective or adverb. And adjective and adverb have only two type, good or bad.  If you meet unknown word, and it is adjective or adverb, you can change the word good or bad in your mind.

For example, you read "He was tall and languid, with longish blond hair, a deep tan, pale blue eyes, and a diamond in his left ear."
There is no difficult word but "languid". According to a dictionary, languid is "lazy and involving very little activity". You can change this to "bad".
"He was tall and bad, with longish blond hair, a deep tan, pale blue eyes, and a diamond in his left ear." It' no problem for you to follow the sentence. How do you think so?


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