As you can see,
the Cream Tea website is written in both Japanese and English. We hope
that you will be able to use this site as an enjoyable way of improving
your understanding of the English language. Alternatively, you can
choose just to view everything in Japanese!
The articles are
initially written in English by people whose first language is English.
They are then translated into Japanese by people whose first language is
Japanese. In this way the use of language in both these instances should be
entirely natural.
The language
study elements of
the site appear in various ways-
In our articles we
have attempted to use the type of modern colloquial English
that is
currently used in everyday speech in Britain today and which you would
encounter on a visit to Britain.
The English language
is rich in its use of colourful expressions and fascinating sayings. We
have tried to include many examples of these as they occur naturally in
our texts. Even if you never actually use them in
speech yourselves, we
think it is helpful and interesting to be able to understand them
when you come across them and compare them to similar ones in
Japanese.
As we have already
mentioned, the articles
on the site are available in both languages.
The articles are composed in Britain and the English version of the text
is uploaded on the Cream Tea site first. The Japanese version is added
later, so there will normally be a slight delay before the two versions exist
together on the site. We hope you will use this time to explore the
English version and see how well you understand the text before the Japanese
explanations appear. Once the two versions are there we hope that you
will use them for comparison.
We have tried to vary
the complexity of
the language used in the articles. Some of the texts are suitable for
quite advanced students but we have also endeavored to include some
simpler texts too. For instance the article called 'Cats' has some
basic sentences for easy practice.
We want to make the
language study an important part of this site. For this we need your
input; let
us know what we should include and how we can help you to get the most
out of this aspect of the site. We don't try to
explain everything in the articles at once; we are awaiting your
questions and comments.