【Hotel Reservation：ホテルの予約】今日のレッスン

今日のTopicはHotel Reservation

約2週間ぶりのオンライン英会話でした。もうさすがに同じ先生に緊張することはないけれど、やっぱりお休み期間が空くと英語が出てこないですね。そして最近ちょっとばたばたしてて、音読もさぼり気味だったので口も回らない(^^;

今日はホテルの話題だったので、タイの安いホテルに泊まった時にドライヤーが無くて、スタッフさんに外にいれば乾くよって言われて笑った話をしました。先生はフィリピンの方ですが、「日本みたいに夜お風呂入るんじゃなくて、日中に入るから乾かさない人もいるかも～」ってお話してくれました。「キューティクル傷まないの？！」って言いたかったけど出てこなかったので、「髪の健康が保てなそう」みたいな言い方になってしまった。

そろそろこのオンライン英会話ともお別れの日が近づいています。寂しい。でもお気に入りの先生がインスタ教えてくれたので嬉しい。これからも連絡取れる♡

Vocabulary

・break a leg：good luck
・24‐7：毎日24時間、7日間
・roll out the red carpet：丁重にお出迎えする
・suite (n.)：スイートルーム

suiteってスイートって読むんですね。スイートルームってsweetだと思ってました。

要約練習

英会話なかったから要約練習もだいぶ昔のものになってしまった。今は引っ越し準備や友達に会ったりで要約練習する時間もなくなり、Twitterでの英語学習も滞りもどかしい日々…。留学前ってこんなに忙しいんですね。おかげさまで最近は20時にはほぼ意識なし。

How to get better at the thing you care about 4/24

When we are struggling with challenges in our lives, the reason is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone.
The school belongs in the learning zone, but it tends to become the performance zone because many students feel that if they make a mistake, others will think less of them. We need to spend more time in the learning zone.
The learning zone is when we concentrate on what we haven’t mastered yet for improvement, and we have to expect to make mistakes. It maximizes our growth and our future performance. 
Meanwhile, the performance zone is when we concentrate on what we have already mastered, and we try to minimize mistakes so that we carry something as best as possible.
If we try deliberately alternating between those two zones, we can go through a better life.

Who counts as a speaker of a language? 4/27

She, as a linguist, says we incorporate social categories into our understanding of language.
Several kinds of research show us that you count as a speaker of a language unconsciously, like with skin color. For example, when you see the speaker’s picture, like an Asian, you can’t understand well despite the native speaker’s voice audio because you think it is a non-native speaker. 
So, social categories really influence the way that we understand language.
And if you ask her a question like, “Who counts as a speaker of a language?” she doesn’t have a simple answer.
But she insists what becomes the problem is that our underlying biases are projected onto language.
Lastly, she asked us what it really means to be a speaker of a language.

Civilization on the Moon-and what it means for life on Earth 4/28

When People start to live and work on the Moon has some problems. These are coordinating access to scarce resources, colonialism, cultural heritage, and reproducing the systemic inequalities of today’s capitalism.
And the most interesting thing about living on the Moon is how to use our social technologies, like norms, customs, and laws.
The Outer Space Treaty has two key ingredients. The first is a requirement for free access to all areas of the celestial body, and the second is that the Moon and other celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation.
It makes the condition, called the “commons.”
Now, autonomy and state sovereignty underpin international law, but the idea of “common” does not yet deal with our global and space institutions.
So we should develop new ways to address the Earth and the Moon.
And the space community is starting to discuss basic shared agreements.
We might solve problems on Earth through to suppose that we live on the Moon.

How technology changes our sense of right and wrong 4/29

As you’re thinking about right and wrong, remember that human sacrifice or public executions used to be a normal and natural world, and you need to consider why did something so wrong last long? and why did it go away? 
Now, thanks to technology, you get amounts of wealth, food, and other things produced by far fewer hands. And also the way of warfare changed.
If you enter no man’s land on the battlefield, you’ll be attacked by machine guns. SNS is the same, and you need to be in a trench. There is almost no middle ground to meet each other, to try and find some discussion between right and wrong.
If you take a position that “I know right. You’re wrong,” there is no discussion, no tolerance, no evolution, and no learning.
So now, in this polarized time, we should be conscious of humility and forgiveness. We have to understand that right and wrong change.