Finding time for Eiken 2

It's been a while since my last blog entry. This site is ostensibly about eiken but we have not been able to find the time to get into eiken 2 studying. Older daughter is in fourth grade and between juku and piano, her free time is limited to a few nights a week and one weekend afternoon. Adding in eiken 2 studying as well feels excessive.

Falling back to video games

Instead, I have once again turned to videogames as an English studying tool. Unfortunately (?) she has alreayd more or less mastered reading "easy" English in videogames - menus, items, settings, simple dialogue, and so on. Essentially anything at the level of Diary of a Wimpy Kid is already too easy for her, and too low level for eiken 2 anyway.

Looking at past eiken 2 tests, the difficulty level is clearly far higher than pre-2. I see words like "concealed" and "unconcerned". I'm sure she will be able to answer most questions if only through the process of elimination. However, my goal is to get her to a place where the reading and listening portions are trivial, similar to her experience with pre-2. After that, we can drill writing for a month and hopefully pass eiken 2 easily.

Take that!!

To build higher level vocabulary, we started playing Phoenix Wright together. We are playing through the story one episode at a time and I am reading every single line of dialogue out loud. When my voice inevitably gets strained, my daughter would take over reading out loud, and I would jump in to help with specific difficult words.

As a consequence, Pheonix Wright catchphases have started to take over our daily life. Any time I make a mistake, my daughters will happily jump in with a correction, then throw in a "take that!!".

Just the price of studying English, I suppose.

More math tools for juku

I added a bunch of math tools in the "Others" category on this website. These are all math concepts that my daughter somewhat struggled with in juku and needed some extra practice. Turned out pretty well, I think. I'm not sure how much traffic this site gets (if any?) but they are open to everyone.

Z.