日: 2020年4月29日

Spring Flowers in the Garden

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I wanted to make the title “Spring Flowers in my Garden”, but actually it is not my garden. I have just stayed at my parents’ home for these several months. I cannot get back to the country where my university is because of corona virus pandemic. Anyway, spring season never stops and the peach flowers have already gone.

 

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Coming next would be flowers of azalea. Its white bud makes me think of vanilla ice cream.

 

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This is also a white azalea, Doudan-Azalea flowering downward. It seems to contrast to the red leaves in autumn, although we cannot see white flowers in spring and red leaves in autumn at the same time.

 

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This is also “Downward flowers” of silverberry. I planted only one tree of silver-berry (or goumi) in the garden. This means that I will not be able to get any fruit in the near future because there should be another silver-berry but a slightly different kind. In order to get fruits, most of fruit trees needs another tree nearby for pollination.

 

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Buds of an apple tree. For the pollination as I mentioned for silver-berry, I planted two apple trees in one place. They were Kougyoku and Tsugaru. This photo was probably of Kougyoku’s.

 

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Here is another apple’s flower that has already opened. This is Alpus-Otome.

 

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This is flowers of gooseberry. Maybe it is safe to say that the fruits look more beautiful than the flowers. If I can take a photo of gooseberry fruit, I would like to put it on this blog.

 

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Actually this photo and the below were taken two weeks ago.

 

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Yes, this is peach flowers two weeks ago. I am not sure if I will be able to eat sweet peaches from this tree in summer because I am just an amateur about fruit tree growing.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on Apr.20, 2020

Date: April 20th on Monday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 81 slides

Numbers of Students: 28

Fully attendant for 90min : 20,    Completely Absent : 3,

Shorter signing-in: 71, 41, 31, 19, 7 minutes.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 25. One out of 25 was recorded as completely absent. One student did not report the attendance by him?herself but was recorded with 41 minutes attendance. Probably the student came late and left early.

– 1st Questionnaire: 19 students responded. This was not a question but a questionnaire. The students were asked to answer which of the four summer festivals in Japan they want to come and see. The festivals were Nebuta in Aomori, Tanabara in Sendai, Bon-Odori in anywhere, and Fireworks in everywhere. Most of the students prefer fireworks.

– 2nd Quiz: 17 students responded. The quiz was to find a different type of conjunctive particle out of five sentences. Four sentences used “If” type conjunctive particles and only one sentence used “Even-if” type conjunctive particle. The students were asked to find “Even-if” type. All the 17 answers were correct.

– 3rd Quiz: 20 students responded. The quiz was to ask right connections between negative “-nai” and conditional conjunctive particle “-ba”. All the answers were correct.

Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This is a quiz to ask the right conjugation of verb ‘iku/ikimasu” for conditional form.

Teaching: 

– Listening to conversation between part time job workers.

– Review on hearsay expressions using “-souda”, “-rashii”. “He/she says”, and “It is said that”

– Feedback about a Test result; A small test was given to students on April 13. The result was explained to the students for further understanding about differences between hearsay and guessing

– Introduction of the conditional conjunctive particle “-ba” and verb conjugations for conditional form

Homework Assignment:  Students were asked to type verb conjugations to conditional forms.There were 30 verbs but 60 answers were required. 30 were conditional forms directly obtained from dictionary forms. 30 were also conditional forms but obtained from potential forms.

Issues and Problems:

I am not sure whether it is standardized teaching or not as to conditional forms that are obtained from potential forms. It might bring a severe confusion to students because it makes students think as if 5-dan conjugation verb were also conjugated to have -reba. Reba ending is only for 1-dan conjugation verbs, Kuru, and Suru (actually Ra-row 5-dan verbs, too). What I thought was simple. It is useful to know conditional forms coming from potential forms because Japanese use very often that kind of conditional forms in conversation.