Have a look at these beautiful Astersアスター!

スミス英会話布施校講師が書いた記事。 日本語のメインサイトはこちら

This week, I decided on these beautiful Astersアスター to decorate our English Conversation School英会話学校 in Fuse, Higashi-Osaka東大阪布施. This star shaped flower is very common in Europe and Asia, but no genus of this flower exists in Japan. Therefore I believe that the Japanese Katakana name アスター is taken from one of the European languages and resembles the English name “Aster” very well.  The English name again is taken form the Greek name for the flower, which means “star”.

The snow white petals around the yellow center make for the simple beauty of this flower. As the genus Asterアスター is closely relates to the Chrysanthemum菊,　it blooms quite long, so even at the end of this week all flowers are in full bloom and new buds open. So the Saturday students 英会話生徒 at the English Conversation school 英会話学校　here in Fuse, Higashi-Osaka東大阪布施 have the chance to appreciate the flowers.   During the conversation lessons, the blooming flowers can be used to practice one point of English. For example I used the Asters to exemplify the close relation between the noun “the bloom”, the verb “to bloom” and it`s adjectival use “blooming flower”, which is very typical for a number of languages. In linguistics, this process is generally called “derivation“派生 in the case of the change from noun to verb, and “inflection“語形変化 in the case of　adding an “-ing”動名詞. The derivation here is special because there is no visible marker like a suffix to show the change.

Enough talk about grammar. If you want to know more about the Asters, please read the English page in wikipedia.