Pukman @ WinK: the community that time didn't forget

Grammar is the field of....

morphology: 形態論
syntax: 語法
phonetics: 音声学
phonology: 音韻論
semantics: 意味論
pragmatics: 語用論

Since I seem to have a recent theme of CUP books, let me remind you of the Cambridge English Readers series. I recommend that you read all the books at Starter level (my favorite is Dirty Money) and at Level 1 (my favorite is Inspector Logan) to start with, building up your fluency and confidence. A classic at level 2 is Jojo's Story.

You may be interested to hear that the PUK Library has just obtained the 15 books in the Primary Classic Readers series. Check them out in LibraryThing! (You may need to log in to view this page.)

All the books are retellings of traditional tales. They offer you a good chance to read any stories you don't know, and also an opportunity to re-read stories that you already know.

I've created a new account on LibraryThing to show the PUK Library collection of graded readers, leveled readers, and other readers for students. The account is pukreaders, and you can see the collection here, or navigate there from the WinK People group (click on "_____ members" from the group homepage). I recommend that you make pukreaders a friend, or monitor the pukreaders collection.

Although there are at present 1866 books in the collection, it is not complete yet, and I will continue to add covers and to tag all the books. Please check out the tag cloud.

Note that you need to log in to LibraryThing to use some features.

Do you know Stories of Monsters, from the Usborne Young Reading series? You can see some sample pages here, and listen to an excerpt here. If you like it, why not borrow the book and CD together?

Enhanced podcast episode assembled in GarageBand and exported to m4a, converted at zamzar.com to mp4, then uploaded to YouTube, finally embedded in this post in the usual way from YouTube.
The file has been curtailed with about 20 seconds to go, the photos have become desynchronized from the audio, and the audio has been massively processed to the point of severe distortion. But I count this a success, as I've finally succeeded in getting something out of GarageBand and into the blog.

But one has to wonder: Why, oh why does Blogger allow video uploads but not audio?

Most of you have the "Orange Book", the 読書記録手帳. The back of the book has a list of books, organized by series and level, with details of the difficulty and number of words. When you note the books you are reading, you should write two figures in the words column, the number of words of the present book and your total number of words so far.

The Orange Book doesn't have details on all books. A book with lots more data is the 英語多読完全ブックガイド. The PUK Library has three copies of this book. How about the KGU Library?

Check out the search widget in my sidebar, and use it to search the KGU English Reading Garden collection. Some sample searches to try:

• Usborne
• I Can Read
• Bookworms
• Cambridge

It seems that the Cinderella story originated in China, and has been adapted and interpreted in many countries and hundreds of versions. Check out the collection of Cinderella-related books in my LibraryThing account. You may need to sign in to LibraryThing to see the collection as it's supposed to be seen. If the display doesn't work properly, go to my collection and search for cinderella.

Do you like Cambridge English Readers? I think they are great. One interesting-looking recent release is Love in the Lakes. You can read a short excerpt here. If you like love stories, some other good ones are Just Good Friends, Staying Together, and When Summer Comes.

Read more about CER on one of my other blogs.

Many students like the Oxford Reading Tree series. I think this is the best of the leveled readers (as opposed to graded readers) series. Check out these sites to get a bit more information.

Do you know the Step Into Reading series? I may have mentioned it before but it's worth mentioning again, as there's a wide range of books and levels. Many students at PUK don't notice this series, because of their location in the library. Do you have them at KGU? I recommend the Step 3 books at first, because they are very easy to read. Steps 4 and 5 are also interesting.

Let's do lots of reading-related activities today.

First, please visit Penguin Dossiers, click on Archive at the top of the page, and look through the list of articles. When you find an interesting one, click on Read Dossier.

When reading the dossier, click on the words in blue to see definitions. If necessary, go to rikai.com to help you with other words. When you have finished reading, write a blog post summarizing the article.

When you have finished summarizing the article, do other reading-related activities freely. Some choices:

1. Write a book review on your blog.
2. Write a blog post listing some of the vocabulary you have learned from reading recently.
3. Work on your LibraryThing collection. Make sure that you are a member of the WinK People group. Remember you can search for books or add from other people's collections.
   
4. Browse the WinK book site. Remember that the first semester is coming to an end. Make sure that you have read a variety of books by the end of the semester and that you are able to read longer books easily (for example Oxford Bookworms Level 1; Cambridge English Readers Level 1).
   

TODAY'S TYPING TOPIC: My favorite book
NEXT WEEK'S TYPING TOPIC: A shop I like

Today's main activities:

1. Talking about reading
   
2. Starting Essay 1 (Kumamoto)

Scholastic's Folk & Fairy Tale Easy Readers series is very easy, and a good choice for students who wish to increase their reading speed. These books are available in the PUK library.

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Some of you may have seen or heard of the 多聴多読 magazine. I just got the 1st and 3rd volumes, to complete my collection.

Here are two more sites where you can practice reading online. Remember to copy the text and paste it into rikai.com Also, it's a good idea to paste the text into Spreeder and read it through once very fast, before reading more slowly.

Here are the sites: 410 Reading Exercises, and Classic Fairy Tales.

A good site for interesting short passages for reading is Penguin Dossiers. It has articles about, for example, Christmas, Chinese New Year, soccer, James Bond, Christina Ricci, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. They are quite short and reasonably easy to read.

It's difficult to read quickly if you don't know most of the words. Rikai can help you with that. To use rikai, it is best to open 2 tabs in Firefox. In one tab, open an article from Penguin Dossiers that looks interesting. Select and copy the text. In the other tab, open rikai, and paste the text into the window. Then press Go. Move your mouse over any words that look difficult.

Most people read slowly out of habit. Spreeder ("speed reader") can help you do that. Paste the text from the Penguin Dossiers article into Spreeder, and change the settings to about 240 words per minute and chunks of 3 words. Then concentrate as the words appear on the screen. Don't worry if you cannot read all of them.

If 240 words seemed too fast, move the speed UP to 300, and read again. Then go down to 200, and finally back up to 240. Probably it won't seem too fast. Remember you can read 3 times at 300 wpm in the same time it takes to read once at 100 wpm.

Reading lots of English books to learn English, and then blogging about the books, is becoming more and more popular in Japan. I believe it is one of the best ways to learn English. Here's a site I found recently. We can get lots of good ideas for reading here.