Obamamania

It's been described by its publishers as a huge hit in Japan - a compilation of the speeches of Barak Obama has sold well over 400.000 copies, and students at an English class in Tokyo are even memorising the new President's words to improve their own pronunciation and understanding.

Barak Obama's message of change has been well received in Japan where politics is often characterised by grey figrres and backroom deals. The clear language of the speeches makes them an obvious choice for teaching material. But the new President's words are said to hold particular appeal.

And so, in shops across Japan the face of the new American President is a fixture on the bookshelves, as well as on the nesstands. And for students, the question of whether they'll succeed in improving their English can be answered - 'Yes we can'.



1. a huge hit → it means sth. popular, sth. happended successfully
e.g: IPod has been a huge hit in recent years.

2. a compilation → it means sth. was compiled, gathered together
e.g: This book is a compilation of poetry.

3. addressing → it means to announce a speech to the public
e.g: Sarah is going to address the meeting in this afternoon.

4. convention → it means a meeting or convocation, an event that lots of people attend
e.g: I need to attend the convention at 3 p.m.

5. grey figures → it means the money that no one knows where it is
e.g: Does he really know where the grey figures is?

6. backroom deals → it means that do sth. secretly
e.g: He won the game by the backroom deals.

7. to hold particular appeal → to support a special event
e.g: The councilor did a lot of thing to hold particular appeal.

8. perseverance → keep working hard, never give up
e.g: Laura won the dancing championship because of her perseverance.

Group 5 Self-evaluation

The topic of our group is talking about 'does being slender stand for beauty'? Well, I think our topic issue is good, and it is really happened around us. Nowadays, people, especially young girls, all want to be as thin as models. However, being to slender will hurt your health, and it does not mean beauty, just like what we mentioned in the video.

We decided our topic at the second meeting, and we also distributed everyone's job. We tried to let everyone can finish the job singly because it was difficult to match up with semester sister's time. We searched a lot of information that can support to our topic. We had thought that there must be lots of videos about our topic on the Internet, however, we wrong. Tara (was in charge of finding video) got in trouble finding the videos. She only could find a relative news on the youtube. Fortunately, it was pretty fit to our issue.

In order to show our idea, we shot a video. We bought lots of food and we were very full up on that day (XD). We needed to notice our gestures, tones and memorize the scripts. Semester sister worked hard on this because her scripts were a lot! Sometimes she laughed during the shoot, it was very funny! By the way, it was a pity that we could not share the NG parts to the classmates.

After we all got the information, one of us need to gather these information together. The finished video was not pretty good. Therefore, there were some problems we have to improve. First, the volume of the video was not loud equally. Some parts were not loud enough, other parts were too aloud. Plus, when it went to the part we explain how slender does not mean beauty and it showed some very slim models' pictures, it was too monotonic. We should use more relative photos and add some background music to make the video more vivid.

Though our video has some defects, we have tried our best to do it. I really learned some experience from this project.