Allison TP - 4

I met up with Yasuko earlier today during lunch for our second tutoring session. I was curious to find out how she met her husband, a Spaniard, since she is Japanese. The only solid information I got was that they met in London I think on vacation. She was a little bit flustered because she had to give a big presentation to her Speaking class today on the soothing sounds of the Japanese culture. Although I was prepared to do some pronunciation exercises with her today, we decided that proofreading her presentation would be better. I reckon that we'll try and do those specific pronunciation exercises next time. However, the main thing we did work on with her presentation was her pronunciation anyways.

The presentation was centered around a quaint video that she made including sounds that one would generally hear during the four seasons. I actually learned a decent bit from the video. Apparently, the primary instrument that you hear when you listen to traditional Japanese music is the koto. It sounds sort of like a harp and similarly has long strings.

Like last time, Yasuko had a great deal of trouble pronouncing the letter "l" so I had her repeat a few words beginning with that letter such as long, love, and lonely. Some of the words she had difficulties with were delicate, meditation, Buddhism, different, and recommend. We also worked a bit on the letter "f" by repeating words like free, for, and food. The only glaring error I noticed in her presentation was that spirit was misspelled as sprite. Unfortunately, it was too late to edit the video, but I told her just to explain the error to her teacher first so she can demonstrate the knowledge to recognize such an error. After we went through everything, she appeared to look much more confident about her imminent presentation. I hope it went well for her and I'll be sure to ask about it next week.