Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

An idea I have to help Miho improve her writing/English/computer skills once we arrive in the states is to start a blog entry for her. Maybe develop or get some web software that allows for pictures and such so she can enter a diary. Generally, I've heard that it's good practice for people to use diaries to hone their skills in English; it forces them to use it. For a beginner it might be tough, but it's good because it gets them just playing with the language. The point is that mistakes are okay (everyone makes them) but to constantly practice. Also, it helps build their confidence when it comes to using computers. My goal would be to get her doing more web designs and help translate my material in the long term. There's a lot of potential here if she takes what she wants seriously. Some exercises to improve her skills are: 1) pick 5-10 (new) vocabulary words per entry and have her use them. 2) As reinforcement, make her reuse those words the week after in a test-like format. My old 8th grade English teacher had us doing this for building our vocabulary. I am quite grateful at this stage for such exercises. 3) Have her utilize a new grammar pattern each time and force sentence variation. 4) Find common idioms to boost her competency in daily conversation. 5) Assign topics to focus the four items above. For the technical side, I would like to have Miho become more self-aware of various technologies and less fearful of them. Start simple like yahoo vs google, spyware, Mozilla, email (how it works), basic networking, and some security. Also, teach some practical skills like MS Office (namely Word and Excel). These items along with her English and Japanese proficiency would help endear her for better job opportunities. Also, slowly get her into things like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc. As I mentioned, many women tend to be quite good at the design aspect for the web. As I don't have an eye for design, it would be great having someone with good capability in this field. I hope to see great ambition in her. Her problem at the moment is that she doesn't know what she wants and so her view is limited of what she can and can't do. That hurts her confidence, relegating her to bottom line work. Yet if one can nurture that confidence and ambition, you could see a great deal of change and improvement.