Hello!
Are you paying for a ChatGPT Plus subscription at OpenAI?
Then you can use these custom GPT chatbots to help you study and enjoy English!

🗨️ English Assistant GPT
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-icLmB67fM-english-assistant

💬 Chat anytime with a friendly English learning and teaching assistant.  You can practice using English or ask questions about the English language.

🏰 Easy English RPG Adventure Game GPT 🏹
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-wtmIEcQOm-easy-english-rpg-adventure-game

🐉 Enjoy using English anytime with a fun and easy fantasy RPG chat game adventure! ⚔️

📖 Easy English Reading Story Generator GPT
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GrY28Sjae-easy-english-reading-story-generator

📚 You can practice your English reading skills anytime with these interesting short stories in very easy English.

With all these chatbots, in just 5 minutes a day, you can improve your English fluency like magic!

Enjoy!
Jeffrey

NOTE:
These GPT chatbots are only available for ChatGPT Plus paid plan subscribers.  I am sorry, but they don't work for free ChatGPT users yet...
I hope maybe in the future!

新たな楽しい方法で英語を学びましょう：ファンタジーアドベンチャーゲームで！

世の中にはたくさんの英語教師やレッスンが存在しますが、新しい英語学習法の提案です：ロールプレイングゲームで英語を学ぶというものです。楽しく、エキサイティング！私が若かったころ、コンピューターがまだない時代には、友人たちとダンジョンズ＆ドラゴンズというゲームで遊んでいました。本や地図、サイコロを使ってテーブルを囲み、頭を使ってオリジナルな物語を作り上げました。しゃべり倒して、大いに楽しみました。私はその時のことを良く覚えています。

英語を学びたいなら、たくさん話す必要があります。これは難しく、退屈なことかもしれません。ですが、このゲームなら楽しめます！ZOOM、ダサイコロ、そして私たちの頭を使って物語を作りだします。ゲームの仕方がわからなくても、私がついているので大丈夫。思いのほか簡単です！

魔法使いからあなたに特別な依頼があるようです。冒険です！英語でたくさん話しながら、失われたアイテムを見つけましょう。さあ、出発です！

こちらから私たちの冒険に参加して、無料体験を楽しんでみてください！

ダンジョンズ＆ドラゴンズの新作映画を見てきました。かなり楽しかったです！

派手で大げさなストーリーではなく、深刻で思い雰囲気もありませんでした。まるで本物のD&Dのロールプレイングゲームをしているような感覚でした。

映画はスリリングで、暖かいシーンもありました。そして、たくさんの面白い部分もありました。クリス・パインをはじめとするキャスト全員の演技も素晴らしかったです。

私は「ロード・オブ・ザ・リング」のような大作のストーリーも好きです。ですが、最近のファンタジー作品はすべて「ゲーム・オブ・スローンズ」のようです。作品の雰囲気が暗くて深刻すぎます。ですので、久しぶりに楽しい映画に出会えてとても嬉しいです！

みなさんもぜひ観てください！楽しんでいただけると思います！
そして、もし本物のD&Dのロールプレイングゲームを試してみたくなったら、ぜひこちらにご参加ください！

英語を学ぶのにとても楽しい方法です！

For ESL English students, learners, and teachers...

My friend Steve Quasha has produced an excellent new textbook for learning Business English.  The topics, activities, and projects are all very useful and updated to today's business world.  It engages students to use the materials and their smartphones to research and actually use the language they are learning.  And every topic cycles through all four modes of communication: Speaking, Listening, Writing, Reading.  Also, the listening audio and pronunciation videos are easily accessible online through smartphone QR codes.

If you are learning English for business communication and skills, I highly recommend this textbook, and I am happy to help you work through it.  You can order it here.
Then contact me for a free trial ZOOM lesson.

And if you are teaching Business English at a school or privately, I definitely recommend giving this a try!

https://www.englishbooks.jp/catalog/index.php/Think-Big-for-Business-c-9220

We're starting to really have fun with this English in the Living Room thing...  This time we talked about traditional American "coffee cake" which doesn't actually contain any coffee...  and of course we ate some too!

Thank you to Sanseido Sweets for making a very nice coffee cake right here in Miyazaki, Japan!
https://www.facebook.com/sanseidosweets
https://instagram.com/sanseido_sweets

This is for fun, so there's no schedule...  but we will probably continue to do it about once a week in the early evenings (local Japan time).  If you subscribe to the channel AND setup the notification bell, you will get alerts whenever we go on--

I hope you will join us sometime!
Jeffrey & Kumi

Sofa Eikaiwa LIVE! (Armchair English)
A relaxing English session with Jeffrey & Kumi.  We will talk about culture and many other interesting topics.  Come join us in the living room and ask questions LIVE!

Greetings,
Kumi is trying to learn more English for her business and asking me a lot of questions about it.  So we decided to stream the answers on YouTube to help anyone else studying business English.  We will talk about business vocabulary words and special grammar points, especially connected to financial and tax accounting and law.

Come join us in the virtual office!

Hello everyone!
We recently decided to stop watching TV shows, and start our own fun show for entertainment instead!  We still sit down on the comfy sofa, but now we chat in English on a live YouTube stream.  It's pretty casual, and you can join us by watching and commenting and we will do our best to answer back in the video...

This is for fun, so there's no schedule...  but we will probably do it about once a week in the early evening (local Japan time).  If you subscribe to the channel AND setup the notification bell, you will get alerts whenever we go on--

I hope you will join us sometime!
Jeffrey & Kumi

Sofa Eikaiwa LIVE! (Armchair English)
A relaxing English session with Jeffrey & Kumi.  We will talk about culture and many other interesting topics.  Come join us in the living room and ask questions LIVE!

So happy I got the chance to see my favorite Japanese musician Yamashita Tatsuro in a fabulous live show! His live voice is even better than on recorded CDs, and the band is always right on time with the melodies-- And when he sings in English it's perfect and it feels like he's singing just directly to me-- It had me dancing in the aisle!

Yes, awareness of correct mouth positions is the foundation of proper pronunciation, and visuals are an important part of that.  But don't just throw down some cutaway views from the anatomy textbook and expect students to get it.  No one imagines that's how the inside of their mouth looks.  Use simple line drawings, exaggerating only the relevant parts used in the production of each sound, and use gestures and mirrors to ground the images in the physical stuff.

I do have a complete method for teaching and learning English pronunciation that ties mouth positions, phonics, and spelling into one comprehensive system that is easy and effective to use because it is grounded in the learner's experience.  If you are interested in learning how to teach it or use it, even just the parts that you particularly need, please contact me here.

In the meantime, please enjoy this silly little meme...

While the International Phonetic Alphabet is absolutely invaluable to the field of linguistics, it probably isn't the most efficient tool for simply learning a foreign language.  Physical awareness of the correct mouth positions grounded in the most commonly representative phonics & characters of the target language itself are likely much more practical and effective.

For example, the American English vowels from the IPA chart could generally be represented as:

FRONT:  ee / i / e / ae / a
MID:  u / o / au
BACK:  oo / oe

These could hold down the basic vowel sounds and regular spellings, with alternatives such as "ea / oa / ei" taught as they come up in a common representative word.

(By the way, this particular representation also has the advantage of easily extending into an easy to understand explanation of the Final/Silent-e Rule...)

Of course, at the university level I do think it's fine to introduce the IPA as a useful tool.  Some academic abstraction is to be expected there.  Also, I think the power of the IPA for learning a second language comes from the layout of the chart itself rather than the universal symbols (which are more useful for linguistics).  So I definitely advocate for basic familiarity with the organizing principles behind that chart layout.  I just think it's more practical to drop actual phonetic patterns from the target language into the chart than try to memorize all the extra symbols...  So I still wouldn't make it the subject of intense study or testing unless there is a strong linguistics component to the course.

Yes, I have personally gotten a lot of mileage out of the IPA in my work in the various fields of linguistics, philosophy, poetics, education, and foreign language study.  But I am also exactly the kind of nerd who learned to read and write Tolkien's lovely Elvish script in junior high school.  Most students don't have this level of interest in obscurities, and they probably shouldn't be forced to memorize a third-party set of symbols just to learn and use a second language...

I do have a complete method for teaching and learning English pronunciation that ties mouth positions, phonics, and spelling into one comprehensive system that is easy and effective to use because it is grounded in the learner's experience.  If you are interested in learning how to teach it or use it, even just the parts that you particularly need, please contact me here.

In the meantime, please enjoy this silly little meme...