I'm visiting my friend, Ben this summer and spending 17 nights at his place, to participate an early music choral workshop. And after that, my husband coming to join me and we are spending another week seeing around DC area!! We both are so excited about this big summer plan! Big thanks to my friend, Ben, and his family, to let us stay.
To take this opportunity, meaning to visit the capital of the huge country, The United States of America, I thought it might be good for me to learn about American history, and more. As you may know.... I was a bad bad BAD student in my school days so all of the words my history teacher was telling me sounded "Latin" for me so I remember very little of those.... almost nothing both history of my country and other ones... terrible!
Learning English has made me realize the joy of learning not only about English language but also about everything through the window of English speaking! I want to talk about art, culture, potics, social problems, sports, and history in English with my friends, but to do so, I have to have a certain amount of knowledge with each subject, that's maybe the biggest gift my English learning gave me!
As I was reading the DC area guidebook in Japanese, I became to realize how many historical and poilitical places the capital district has! I thought like, "I want to know more about American Presidents, what they did, how they became the Presidents! I want to know how the first immigrant entered this country and created the united states. What about the native people? How were they treated? I used to enjoy watching the woman's doctor Michaela Queen TV drama where native people were treated badly and the doctor's family helped them to survive. If I know a bit more about American history I could enjoy my visit to DC much more!"
Reading through difficult books would be almost impossible for me.. I assumed, so I chose these books.
The book on the left side called "What Young Americans Know about History". It's writted both in Japanese and English. So I could quickly grab the meaning by reading the Japanese section and it makes me easier to understand the English section. I hilight especially the names of the people, places, things I want to remember. It helps!!! I want to finish the first reading-through and do the second reading in English only next time, hopefully, by the time I get to the capital! I've come the second third so far, the time of after the Great War and the begining of the automobile era!
The tiny book in the center is called "The United States Constitution -what it says, what it means- A Hip Picket Guide" This is a thank-you gift from WNYC radio station. I donated a small amount to their fund-raising a few years ago and chose this right away among other gift. I wanted to know what is written in the US constitution, however, it was too difficult for me to read through and understand it at that time due to my limited English ability. Then I forgot about the book! As the day was coming nearer to visit DC, I remembered this one day and picked out this from the back side of my bookshelf. I haven't started reading this yet but I think it might be good for reading on the board, right?
This trip has already given me a great gift to me!
I cannot wait to participate the choral workshop and meet a lot of new people!
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