Lucy TP-9

I picked up Yuki at CIES today and we headed to All Saints Cafe. I explained to him that everything was vegetarian or vegan, a concept he thought was interesting, and he seemed alright with it, more so than Kader had been, anyway.

Yuki ordered his first cream soda, and loved it. You could pick any flavor to put in to your soda that you wanted and that let us go over a lot of vocabulary on flavors- vanilla, amaretto, caramel. There were probably 30 different flavors to choose from.

Afterwards we sat down and got straight to work. I told him I really wanted to work with him on pronunciation...We used manythings.org to work on pronunciation of similar sounds.

Pronunciation Practice

First, I asked Yuki to listen to the computer pronounce a word and then two words after it. One of the words after the original word would match the first word. For instance "Ferry"....1.) "Very" 2.) "Ferry"

I then asked him to identify which word matched the original word by holding up his hand, for #1 or #2.

I was a little shocked to see that it was true, Yuki had trouble even recognizing the differences in the sounds, much the less recreating the sounds himself. 

We ran through a lot of these exercises. 

Next, I had Yuki identify whether a word had a 'soft' ending or a 'hard' ending. He did better here.

We took a break and walked about the place a bit, upstairs to where the old arcade is located. He loved seeing games he recognized. Especially games with Japanese allusions- a samurai game, etc. 

When we came back to it, I had Yuki work by himself, picking out which article would be correct in some fill-in-the-blank questions. It took a while, but Yuki finally began to improve towards the end of our lesson.