English is from head to toe.

I joined a new project last Tuesday. Right away, I had a three-day meeting in English. Whew... The funny thing is that there was no native English speaker in the meeting. German, Belgian, South African and Japanese.

I was tired from 3 days in English. It was hard. However a harder thing is waiting for me. I'm going to Singapore on business and stay there for about two weeks. Two weeks in English.

I have to catch up tons of new things of the project. It's hard to conduct that in English. I want to get used to this situation as soon as possible. I'm sure that this experience would prepare me for working abroad.

My bad listening comprehension #17

The sentence which I heard wrong today is:

The learning purpose pretice cheep.

Can you guess the correct sentence?
First, there isn't the word "pretice." It sounded such pronunciation to me, so I thought it was a new word for me. I guessed this sentence meant that a person had lost sight of his purpose of learning or something like that.

The correct sentence is:

The learning curve is pretty steep.

Even after knowing the correct sentence, "curve is" sounds nothing but "purpose" to me, I listened it over and over again though.

My hearing wrong of the past:
http://sandfriend.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-bad-listening-comprehension-16.html

Book: The Girl with the White Flag

(I read it in English.)

In August, 6th is the day the city of Hiroshima was atom-bombed, 9th is the day the city of Nagasaki was atom-bombed and 15th is the anniversary of the end of World War II. So when I was a kid, there were a lot of TV programs featuring wars in every August. However, there are few those kinds of programs recently. It's a pity.

I always think those programs are very welcome and everyone should watch them. I mean, everyone should know how wars were horrible.

This book was written by a Japanese woman, who survived a terrible horrible ground war in Okinawa when she was 7 years old.

Many of the people who survived the ground war in Okinawa or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki describe, it was like nothing from this world, it was just a scene from hell, or it was inferno. Not only solders, but also many civilians had to experience such things.
In the ground war in Okinawa, about 240,000 people died. Among them, civilians were about 100,000.

Major attacks toward Japanese civilians by the US.

6th Aug. 1945, Hiroshima atomic bomb. Number of the dead --> about 260,000
9th Aug. 1945, Nagasaki atomic bomb. Number of the dead --> about 150,000
10th Mar. 1945, Great Tokyo Air Raid. Number of the dead --> about 85,000

There are still people who are suffering from the after effects of the bomb's radiation. The number of dead by atomic bombs are still increasing.

By the way, regarding 9.11 Terror Attacks which American were terribly shocked, made a big deal, and even they started the war, the number of dead was 2,973. I wonder if how many people will suffer from the after affects of the attacks 60 years later.
Compared with what I listed above, 9.11 Terror Attacks are really small, tiny things.

Atomic bombing is one of the most horrible things which human have done in history, as well as the Holocaust.
Fortunately for the US, they won the war, so they justified atomic bombing as necessity things to finish the war. And most of American people believe it, because they don't know about the real devastation of atomic bombing, even they don't intend to know it. It was hundreds of times as horrible as 9.11 Attacks. If you know the real devastation, you can never say atomic bombing was necessary.

The most horrible thing is, although the US saw the horrible situation of Hiroshima after atomic bombing, they did again in Nagasaki, only because they wanted to experiment. It's hard to believe. I think if people find the real devastation of atomic bombing and those were conducted by themselves, they would go stark raving crazy due to what they did.