Personality and Language Learning

Do some personalities learn a language better than others? I think that achievement of learning language might not depend on personalities and not because that someone is better than others. Yet there are different methods for each single person that helps one's progresses, and the differences are come from our personalities.

Thinking about myself, one the strongest thing that helps me keep motivation to learn English is my curiosity. When I started learning English, I was addicted to rock music mostly from the US and the UK. I tried to memorize and understand their lyrics. I could learn some new words and idioms not in my English textbooks. (Sometimes, you should not use such words in the real world, though.) That was my motivation. It does not come from academic purpose but I am always curious about something and even now that helps me gain wide range of knowledge.

One more thing that helps me is my tenacity. Once I am interested in something, mostly I keep the interest for it for a long time. Learning language is fortunately one of such things of mine, so I could keep learning it.

Since I came here, however sometimes l cannot have enough communication with peole around me because I am still a bit afraid of contact with others. I am too shy to the people whom I do not know well. Though once I know them, I can talk to them well. One of the reasons that I wanted to go out from my country was to know a lot of people and learn a lot from them. Now it is the time to throw my fears away.

My IRP topic

In this EBP course, we have an Independent Research Project as well as the reguler classes. It might be our huge task in this 10 week.

The topic that I select in this research is the Global Digital Divide and focus on this topic in India.

When I worked as a system engineer in Tokyo, We sometimes had guest engineers from India to our office. (Some of them actually lived in the US, though.) They are excellent skilled people. ( Not only that they are but also really diligent. I was amazed that one day I heard that they came to the office at 6am. When I asked one of them about the reason later, his answer was "Just got up early from jet lag and just had nothing to do." ) Today in the IT industry, India-power is already measurable and they are huge human resources in some IT-developed country like Japan and the US.

However, in fact, several well known problems are still in India like luck of educational opportunities, immature infrastructural development and less accessibility to digital information for a lot of people. The definition of "global digital divide" in the background reading I did ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_digital_divide ) ,is distinguishable from the "digital divide" between social classes(people), is a geographical division. However, I think the case of this in India is complicated. I still do not understand clearly and how to make out this point. But I am already deeply interested in this topic and want to know what the problems are in this powerful country. There may be cultural, political or historical issues underling this phenomenon.


Attn teachers,

Because it is blog, a global tool anybody can access ( I am not sure who want to, though ) and also just for my writing practice, I write some description ( like introduction of this post ) knowingly. Of course, I know everyone in the class knows what I am doing.

Why Orange???

Yes, orange is my favorite colour. (Green is also, though.)


Since I have been here in Vancouver, I saw admirably beautiful sunset many times. It is like orange changes to ruby, then melts into navy blue. I feel it so mysterious. In Tokyo, the process of it is nearly same, but feels like orange is more like yellow, and the moment changing into the dark is really short. This is my impression. It is very difficult to express about the things like this by words.

Actually, my blogname is coming from my nickname in my childfood. It means "orange"(as fruits) in Japanese. To be exact, it is more like "tangerine", though "TangerineLife" isn't sound good, is it?



I wrote only about my listening at my first posting, I should mention about the rest of the questions.

There is a typical problem for us as non-native speakers. Of course, I faced this problem many times. When we talk to someone face to face, we can communicate even there are some grammatical, structural problem in the sentences. However, when we talk to someone on the phone, we would face a huge problem just to tell a small thing. What to know from this, when we speak we not only use our voice but many alternative functions e.g. eye contact, actions (body language) ,facial expressions etc...and highly depend on them. When only our voice is accepted to use, we have to speak clearly, fluently and compactly. We should not to put unnatural pauses in a centence many times. We tend to try to create a long complex sentences but we should know that we often fell it and make no sense as a result.

I already have been learning English for long time (I do not mention how long exactly, because you might now my age from it). I have kept tring to improve my English to "natural" level. Actually I feel I am coming little by little. Besides, still I feel there is a huge wall in front of me to get beyond.

After all, the way to improve speaking as well as listening, is just keep doing. More speak, more listen, that make you improved.

It is my first experience of living abroad for a long time. I got a chance to "do" English at all hours. What I have to do first is listen all the time from people around me, in the dorm, in the bus, in the shops and in the town. More important thing is, not to hesitate to talk to people. It is still bit difficult for me, but I try.

At the end of this 10 week course, I hope I will gain all the skills with confident.

Just got started!

Hello, everyone. I just got to start this blog as an English class assignment.
Actually, English is not my native language. I am Japanese, just came to Canada 2 weeks ago. Now I am taking English Brigde Program at SFU to gain my laungage skills for taking academic program from next semester ( if I can pass this ).

I am going to write about my goal for this course(Academic Culture and Communication).

Before to mention about academic topics I would like to say I already found some points. While I have been living this town just for two weeks, I found that some essential language skills is neccesary for living in this multiculturel country. People have variety of own languages. They are cactually English, but not sounds like it for me sometimes. It is necessary to obtain skills for recognizing them.

Knowing how to get information is one of the key tips appered in the class. I believe this is really important in every dailylife situation not only for the class or at University in the future. Most of infomation in life are coming on voices and sounds and never get back once you miss. Thus, what I really have to improve is skill for getting information exactly and efficiently. I should not miss any keys. I should select what I really need, in a moment. I should keep it and never forget it.

This is not quite dificult to practice. I can train it everytime, everywhere. At the end of this course, I hope I am really acheved of this and get a comfortable life in Vancouver!