Author Archives: les

I live in Ikoma, Nara, and own the Ikoma Smith’s School of English franchise. I love it here! I have been in Japan for ten years now, and am raising my son here with my wife.

the results are in

April 19, 2010 – 2:47 am

Well the results are in now, and here at Ikoma Smith’s School of English. We are in a winning situation. All the kids who wrote the listening test passed, for a 100% pass rate. I am amazed at my students, they really seem to like the tests.  some of the kids ask their parents very [...]

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Kitchen Timer English

April 15, 2010 – 3:56 am

Have you ever noticed how some students ask you to repeat what you say much more frequently than other students?
If you’re like me…

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Meet the Maker

April 7, 2010 – 7:11 am

Tomorrow, I have an opportunity to meet our founder, Mark Smith.  He’s coming out to my school (スミス英会話　生駒) for a bit and I hope to gain a lot from meeting with him.  I thought about it, and realized that a guy as successful as he is certainly has to have a lot of knowledge and [...]

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Cool New Software

April 5, 2010 – 2:45 am

Tonight I’m trying out some software.  This software is called Dragon Naturally Speaking and it lets me dictate into my computer and the computer writes Out all the words that I say. So far I’m pretty

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Tests

March 22, 2010 – 6:48 pm

Learning English is a tough task, and one of the things that makes it tough is goal setting. It is really hard to set clear concrete goals for something that you cannot do. It is harder when the task is in a different language because then the thoughts are all foreign, and you [...]

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The Lesson Sandwich

March 9, 2010 – 2:15 am

“Wait a minute,” I said to my friend, “How is the start of an Smith’s lesson like a piece of bread?”

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Learn English Vocabulary

March 2, 2010 – 9:43 pm

I was just thinking about how to learn English vocabulary. I like to give advice on how to study here in Ikoma (生駒).  I thought about using software like Supermemo, or Anki.  None of my students know about this software, but it is mostly English.  I wonder if there is any similar software in Japanese [...]

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My Christmas Vacation

February 20, 2010 – 8:12 am

My Father’s a really nice guy.
Last christmas, I went to Canada and I met him at the airport.
Then, from there we went to his house and I stayed at his house for the whole holiday.
It was really nice.
That is the script I use to reinforce the silent ‘h’ phenomenon I pointed out a few weeks [...]

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The ‘Soft’ T; the next step

February 12, 2010 – 10:25 pm

In English, not all t’s are the same.  We have an aspirated t and a stop t. I don’t wax on lyrical about this in class; I just want the students here at my スミス英会話生駒　(English converstation class inIkoma) to notice that a difference exists.  I can change how the ending of a word sounds.
These aren’t [...]

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Listening to The Baby for Eikaiwa Listening

February 8, 2010 – 6:26 am

The other day I was thinking about the role of listening in the 英会話 (eikaiwa) industry here in Japan.  A lot of students in my school (スミス英会話生駒）　have trouble repsonding because they have trouble with listening.

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