Dear English Diary 01 – Bumping Into a Beginning －拝啓、英語の日記 ～始まりにぶつかること－

Tuesday 16^th July, 2019

I have started a diary.  I read somewhere that if you are going to be a good diarist then you should imagine that you are writing a diary to another person, not yourself.  So I am going to imagine that I am writing this diary for Ren, my grandson.

You can’t even read Japanese now, let alone English.  But maybe one day you will read it to practice your English.

So here is a message for you, future Ren: When you came to my house last week, you took off your nappy and peed on the floor.  I hope that now you are old enough to read English, you are treating your poor grandmother better.

I have started studying English again.  My teacher is a nice young man from Scotland.  I bumped into him on the street.  Actually, he bumped into me.  That’s because he is blind.  I was talking with my friend, Haru – you should call her, “Mrs. Haruyama”, Ren.  But I call her Haru.  Her husband died last year, so I like to meet her and keep her company.  We were chatting on a street corner when suddenly I felt something hit my leg.  It was the white stick of a blind foreign man.

“Watch out!” shouted Haru.  I thought it was a silly thing to say, since he had already hit me.  Haru often says silly things.  I think it’s because she is a piano teacher.  When I was a little older than you are now, I had a piano teacher, and she often said silly things too, like, “You have the fingers of an elephant!”  Elephants don’t have fingers or, if they do, they are so small that I have never noticed them.

So I spoke to this foreigner and asked where he was going.  “Back to my English school,” he said.  That’s when I decided to study English again.  So I followed him to his English school and started taking lessons at Nerima English.

I’ll tell you more about it in my next diary entry.

Toyoda Chihiro

Nerima English student

Vocabulary:

a diarist – Someone who writes a diary

not A, let alone B – no A so certainly not B (which is harder, more difficult to imagine, etc.)

to pee – to urinate; to release water from the body (eg. Into a toilet)

to bump into someone – to meet someone; to hit someone accidentally

to keep someone company – to spend time with someone to prevent them from being alone

blind – unable to see; having no or badly damaged eyesight

Watch out! – Be careful!/ Pay attention!

silly – ridiculous; making no sense