The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of English writng cource at an English school AEON:

Topic: How could English education be improved in Japan?
Style: Formal

If we start from harsh reality, Japan’s English proficiency ranking among 88 countries is 49th in 2018 according to a research of Education First company. The rank is low, even lower than some Asian countries such as Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and so on.
FSI, Foreign Service Institute in the US, released data of “FSI’s Experience with Language Learning”, explaining necessary hours to learn 65 foreign languages for standard Americans who are monolingual of English. While nine European languages including Dutch, French, Italian and others are classified as category I requiring 600 – 750 hours to learn, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic are classified as category IV requiring 2200 hours and are said to be “super-hard” languages. It is vice versa that people in these four countries require very long hours to master English. Among these four countries, Chinese and English are the same in word order. For example, “I love you.” in Chinese is “wo ai nee. (我愛你)”, which is subject + verb + object for both languages. It is easier for Chinese people to understand some parts of English than Japanese. Many English teachers in Japan say that an average Japanese person needs around 3,000 hours to master English. How many hours then does a normal student in Japan learn English in a junior high school and in a high school? We usually start to learn English from junior high school at the age of 12. In three years at junior high school, there are aggregated around 350 hours of English lessons. In high schools, they are 440 hours. Even if we add some more hours at universities, the total sum of learning is still under 1,000 hours. Since there are plethora of disciplines to be taught at both junior high and high schools, we cannot simply increase the hours of English lessons. Parents should be aware of this reality and they should give more hours to learn English at home to their children.
One more worrying concern for the English education in Japan is the level of English teachers in junior high schools and high schools. The average TOEIC score of junior high school English teachers is 560 and that of high school English teachers is 620. These scores are incredibly low, especially the junior high school teachers’ score is even lower than average score of TOEIC. This means they are less proficient in English than average business people. They are not at all eligible for teaching English. They should “learn” English for the time being. The government should deal with this problem and institute a much higher level of English mandatory for English teachers applicants. If they cannot improve the situation quickly, we should hire more native speakers for schools.

The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of an English school AEON.

Topic: Japanese food
Style: Casual

If we ask some foreigners about their favorite Japanese food, answers might be almost always the same: sushi, tempura, sashimi, and so on. I think the most important thing in Japanese food is not a specific type of dish, but an element or ingredient, namely, dashi. I do not think there is an exact corresponding word in English, but soup or soup stock could be the one. As for the types of tastes of human, there were only four in western countries, namely sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness. In Japan, we had one more taste called umami. Though the fifth taste was just empirically known, Kikunae Ikeda found that L-monosodium glutamate could make us sense umami in 1907. He derived the chemical by boiling dried kelp, which is one of the most popular ingredients to get good dashi in Japan. Most western scientists did not approve the new taste, but it was proven that there are receptors of umami on our tongues in 2000. Dashi means soup that can provide any dishes with umami. For most Japanese dishes, we use some dashi in them. The most typical sauce shoyu or soy source contains a lot of umami in it such as amino acid, glutamic acid, and asparagine acid. Now umami is translated into English as savory.
Except for dried kelp, we use katsuobushi, dried bonito, niboshi or iriko, dried small sardine, and also dried shiitake mushroom, and so on. Combinations of dried kelp and dried bonito are the most important skill for all Japanese dishes’ chefs. One good thing about these two ingredients is that they are well prepared for daily usage and we can easily use them even at home. On the contrast, in French dishes, chefs take some burdensome steps to get Bouillon, or broth.
Do not forget one more important material: water. Some western chefs tried to use dried kelp and dried bonito in their countries, but because of the different quality of water, they could not get good dashi. I heard that some famous Japanese chefs brought a big bottle of Japanese water with them when they were asked to cook in foreign countries.
I show you a good example of Japanese dishes that utilize dashi: Dashi maki tamago, or Japanese style rolled omelet with dashi. It is a very simple dish, just bake egg with dashi mixed, but it is very tough to get a good figure. We use a special small square pan just for this dish.
At last, one thing I hate is that many Japanese house wives use instant powder type dashi that uses MSG for their daily dishes. I never choose convenience over getting good dashi.

The following essay is what I wrote as an writing assignment for an English school AEON:

Topic: What kind of TV programs should children watch or not watch?
Style: Formal

For this topic, an old episode in China related to the mother of the famous Chinese philosopher Mensius (372–289 BC or 385–303 or 302 BC) could be a good reference. During raising and teaching him, she changed residences three times. At first, the mother and Mensius as a kid were living in the vicinity of some graves. The young Mensius always emulated some rituals of funerals as a play. Then the mother changed their residences to a place close to a big market. Mensius then started to mimick actions of merchants such as counting money. The mater decided to change their dwellings again, this time next to a school. At last, Mensius started to learn mimicking students in the school and he later became a famous philosopher of Confucianism. The lesson of this episode is that kids can be easily affected by both good and bad things or environments.
From this viewpoint, we can easily conclude that we should give only good and some educational TV programs to our kids. This approach, however, is easy to say but hard to do. In my childhood, there was no smartphone nor the Internet. Nowadays, most children are given their own smartphones. They can watch anything in YouTube or in some other video distributing services. It is true that there are some “parental control” software to limit the range of the contents on the Internet for children. The problem is, however, that recent kids are all born to be users of smartphones and they are usually more proficient in utilizing the equipment than their parents. It may be easy for them to unlock the parental control software without being noticed by their parent.
Another factor you should consider is that it is very important for kids to watch the same programs as their friends, otherwise they might be excluded from the circle of daily talks with their friends. Thus, some famous TV programs at that age, even though they are somewhat vulgar, should be allowed to kids to some extents. In my personal experiences, the reason I became a big fan of comic and animation is because my father did not allow me to read comics and to watch animation so often at home. That was a clear backlash.
There is no clear conclusion for this essay, but it is no use to worry about the possible future of your kids. They are usually not so foolish as you may think, and they will soon be able to select suitable TV programs by themselves.

英単語の語彙力について。色々な方法でチェックした結果では、私の現在の英単語の知識は大体9,000語と10,000語の間ぐらいだと思います。一方でTimeやNewsweek、あるいはNew York Timesなどのインテリ向け記事の単語は20,000語以上が使われていると良く言われています。では、単語力が20,000語以上無いとこれらの記事が読めないか、というとそんなことはないです。（もちろん単語力が高い方がいいに決まっていますが。）ここ2年くらいNewsweekやTimeを読んできて分かったことは、何故日常会話などではまったく使われない奇妙な単語が出てくるかというと、その一つの大きな理由は例の「同じ単語の繰り返しを避ける」という、私から見たらある意味馬鹿げた一種の強迫観念から来ていると思います。要するに最初に出てきたごく普通の単語を2回目以降に言う時に、その単語とほぼ同じ意味の別の単語を使いますが、その時にシソーラスを見てわざと難しい単語を選んでいるんではないかと。この場合、最初に出てくる単語の意味さえ分かれば、2回目以降は「ああ言い換えているんだな」と思えば良く、一々辞書を引かなくても問題はありません。
大体このレベルの単語はネイティブでも知らない人は結構いて、要するに大学入試用とかで覚えているみたいです。写真の右2冊はネイティブが自分の語彙を増やしたい時に読む本です。私はこれらの本を買いそろえましたが、結局単語だけ覚えるというのはある意味効率が悪いので、まだほとんど読んでいません。

The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of English writing course at an English school AEON:

Topic: How do you feel about legalized gambling?
Style: Formal

Gambling in general is illegal in Japan as stated in the article 185 of the Japanese penal law. There are, however, so many special laws that define some types of special gambling as legal. Among them, there are keiba (horse race), keirin (bicycle race), kyoutei (boat race), auto-race (motorbike race), and some lotteries such as takara-kuji or TOTO. In addition to those, a popular type of gambling called pachinko and pachi-slot still exists. By playing pachinko or pachi-slot, you can get money. Although there have been a lot of controversies whether pachinko and pachi-slot are legal or not, they are allegedly legal recently.
What is most surprising is the amount of sales for each type of legal gambling. Among all leisure industries in Japan, pachinko and pachi-slot occupy 30.5% of money spent, namely 21,626 Billion JPY ($197 Billion) in 2017. The sales of all other legal gambling was around 4 Trillion JPY ($36 Billion) in 2015. Although other gambling sales are just 20% of those of pachinko and pachi-slot, the incomes are crucial for many local governments in Japan. While there are a lot of negative things about gambling, legal gambling is practically a necessary evil in Japan.
If we play devil’s advocate, there might be some positive factors in gambling. In gambling, we can learn how our fortune goes or flows in relation with your counterparts. If we can gamble just when we are lucky and can stop it when we are not, it will bring big success. Do not forget the Cicero’s words: “Non solum fortuna ipsa est caeca sed etiam eos caecos facit quos semper adjuvat.” (Not only the goddess of fortune is blind, but she makes him also blind whom she always helps).
Now that the Japanese government is trying to install casinos around Japan, this topic is quite viral and controversial. We can see not only people in serious gambling addiction, but also Japan itself relies too much on income from gambling. For what is Japan profited, if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul?

TOEICのスピーキングテストについて評価の正確さに大いに疑問を持ち、それに変わるより良い試験がないか色々調べて、アルクがやっているSSTというのが対面式（人間相手にしゃべる）で良さそうだったのですが、これは残念ながら団体受験専用でした。個人も受験可能なTSSTというのもあるのですが、それは電話でしゃべるものです。
それからTOEFLのスピーキングは、問題形式がほぼTOEICのスピーキングと同じで受ける意味が無いと思いました。
で結局、IELTS（アイエルツ）というブリティッシュ･カウンシルがやっているテストを受けることにしました。ただ、スピーキングだけはなく、4技能すべての同時受験です。この試験のスピーキングがいいのは、個室の中での人間の試験官との対話で試験されるということです。変な制限時間はありませんし、問題が聴き取れなければもう一度しゃべってもらうよう頼むことも出来るようです。
ただ問題は、試験の実施回数が少なくて、結局今申し込んだら横浜の試験会場ではようやく取れたのが5月11日のでした。また料金も税込みで￥25,380とかなり高いです。更には本人認証として使えるのはパスポートのみであり、その画像をアップロードして登録しないといけません。結果は4技能それぞれ、レベル0から9までのバンドスコアで出ます。私のTOIEC L&Rレベルだと、目標は7～7.5です。
まあ、まだ時間はあるからゆっくり対策を立てます。
ちなみにAEONの先生にもより良いスピーキングテストがないか相談しましたが、その先生のお勧めもIELTSで私の選択と一致しました。
いわゆるPros＆ConsでIELTSを評価すると、
良い点（Pros)は、
（1）スピーキングのテストがマンツーマンの対面式である。
（2）4技能を同日に試験。（時に2日の場合もあり。）
（3）TOEICの最高スコア990はIELTSでは9が最高に対して7.5に過ぎず、上級者の英語力の進歩をきちんと測定出来る。
（4）結果によって、イギリスの大学への留学の場合などの英語力の資格証明になる。（TOEICは昔は認められていましたが、今は外されました。）
だと思います。
悪い点（Cons)は
（1）実施場所と回数がTOEICに比べはるかに少ない。思い立ってもすぐ受験出来ない。
（2）拘束時間が長い。最長で朝8：30ぐらいから19：30までの可能性有り。（試験時間そのものは2時間40分ぐらい）
（3）料金が高い。25,350円もする。
です。
後は受けてみないと分かりません。

TOEIC 237回の正式な成績通知が今日届きました。でリスニングは今回初めて495点の満点だったんですが、各パートの正解率を見る限り、何でこれで495点が取れたのか非常に不思議です。おそらく100問の内の正解数はせいぜい95～96問ぐらいだ思います。それで満点となる理由ですが、
（1）最近のリスニングは高得点者を少なくするために、一部で異常に難しい問題が混ぜられている。しかしそれを単純な正答率で点を付けると、過去のそれほど難しくなかった時の試験との整合性が取れなくなる。なので単純な正解率の平均によって調整が行われ、100%の正答率ではなくても満点になる。
（2）今回のパート2で3択の選択肢のどれが正解かほとんど判断できない問題が確実に2問ありました。（私が受けたバージョンは、パート1の写真にコインランドリーみたいなのがあったものです。）リスニングについてはここ数年最低毎日90分は英語を聴いていますから、問題が聴き取れないということはほとんどありません。しかしこの2問については聴き取れたとしても、選択肢でどれを選ぶべきかが非常に曖昧でした。おそらくこの2問はあまりに正解率が低かったので採点から除外されたのではないかと思います。この2問を除けば、後間違えたのが2問くらいなら十分満点の可能性はあります。
ということで、先日S&Wのおかしさ満点の採点について疑問を呈しましたが、L&Rはそれよりはましとはいえ、何かとても変なテストになってきているように思います。