Every day I find piles and piles of fun videos on You Tube. Some of them are educational, some quaint, others odd. Every weekend I put my favourites here for my English school (英会話) students to enjoy, and I hope that they also get a little extra learning from this opportunity. Not always English study videos per se, all of them are useful for English language studies in some way or other. Don’t worry if you can’t catch every word, phrase or idiom, as it takes years and years and hundreds of hours of study and listening practice to become an expert. I’ve been studying French since I was 5 and Japanese since I moved to Japan in 2007 AND I live here in Japan and still I can barely understand 60% of the dialogue in French movies and 30% of the dialogue in the Japanese movies and dramas that I watch. Give yourself a break (and a pat on the back) if you can’t understand everything after only a couple years of study- you have lots of time to study and improve, so just enjoy the videos. I recommend to my students that they watch each clip 3 times- the 1st time for the general idea of the clip, the 2nd time to get some detail, the final time to bring it all together. Hope you can learn something new!
This week’s video is very high level, so if you aren’t that high level ,maybe skip this one! This is a TED talk done in New York by famous Canadian-American writer Ruth Ozeki. Her most famous book, My Year of Meats, written in 1998, is an international bestseller and Kiriyama Prize recipient. I highly recommend it to anyone who is Japanese or American, anyone who is interested in vegetarian lifestyle or the process of factory farming, or anyone who just enjoys a good read. This talk is about Zen Meditation. Though slow and peaceful, the English is high level. Good luck!
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