Someone tell me, is it really worth spending my time on this thing?

There are two main ways of guessing what a word means; Context Clues and Word Part Analysis.

Context clues is the way of taking an educated guess of what a word means by looking at the surrounding words. There are three types of context clues, “comparison or contrast”, “examples or summaries” and “definition or restatement”.

The first method, “comparison or contrast” is when you assume the meaning of a word because you know that it means the opposite of a word you know the meaning of already. For instance, when you come across a word that says something like:-

“Unlike his hard working older brother who was able to enter a great university in Canada, the younger one is lackadaisical”.

In this sentence, you know that the older brother is a hard working person but the younger one is “unlike his brother”, therefore you can assume that the younger one is the opposite of “hard working”, or is lazy. So you can assume that “lackadaisical” means “lazy”.

The second method, “examples or summaries” is when you guess the meaning of the word from the examples given. For instance if you come across a sentence that says:-

“Playing woodwind instruments, like saxophones, clarinets and flutes, is always tiring”,

you can assume that “woodwind instruments” are the blowing type of instruments with reeds.

Finally, “definition or restatement” is when you take an educated guess of a meaning of a word by looking at the word that precedes the word that you don’t know the meaning of. For instance in the following sentence,:-

“I felt indignant, or unfairly treated when I was compared with my brother,”

you can assume that “indignant” means “feeling unfaily treated” because the “or” in the sentence indicates that the word “indignant” can be a subsitute of the phrase “feeling unfairly treated”.

I think thats pretty much it for comtext clues, next is word part analysis.

I know this is slightly out of order, but I’ll be talking about my summer holiday, as it is my assignment for this class.

After spending, or wasting one week at my house in Japan I flew to San Francisco then headed for a summer program called Summer Institute for the Gifted (SIG) in UC Berkeley with a cab which my parents requested.

I was soooooo P-ed off when I got to UCB because the cab driver didn’t know where in UCB I was suppose to get off (he was suppose to ask the SIG office where I was suppose to be dropped off; the office). So, I had to look for the office by myself. I guess this is America.

But after that thinngs went alright and I went to my first class, which shocked my becuase everybody was soooo nerdy. Although later I got to know kids who are normal so that was cool.

Also, there was this one kid who used to live in Beijing but got exiled from China becuase he did somethng real bad (which I’ll keep it confidential).

The courses that I took were philosophy, which was unbelievably boring and psychology which was alright; I got to study about how kids want to marry their mum and how all our actions are based on our sexual conception (I find these stuff funny and interesting but I don’t believe in most of them, I’ll probably get into that later).

ANNNddd my long, but short three weeks passed by and here I am back in Japan.

After I got back from SF I went to Mr. Skinnyman’s house in the mountains but you can read about that on his blog.

Jay Chou, my hero, is now known as the most successful artist in East Asia, and his newest album will be released in…..5 (?) days…i think (HELL YEAAAHH)

So, probably next week will be one of the most exciting week of the year for me.

At this point, probably most of the people reading this blog doesn’t care about who I am talking about,  because they don’t know who this “Jay Chou” guy is. So I think it would be smart of me to say why he is my hero and how I got to know him.

The first time I came across him was when I when to Indiana University Piano Academy. One evening before lights out, this one Chinese kid asked me to trade i pods with me for the night, and I thought I didn’t have a good enough of a reason to say no, so I lent mine to him and he gave me his.

I started flicking through the songs on his ipod, and started to listen to random Chinese songs that I can’t even understand or read the names, and I must say that my first impression of most of these songs were’t very good; in fact I was laughing and them because I thought they were really gay (or out of fashion). I was moving on from artist to artist and was looking forward to what else I can find that I can laugh at, and then, i reached a figure that read  “周杰倫” (Jay Chou). When I started playing the first song under this artist, I was shocked and confused at the same time because I was anticipating music that I can laugh at and make fun of. I realized that this artist was bad at all, and infact probably “better” (meaning more…artistic, catchy and sophisticated) than the majority of the artists that I know of.

So, I came back to Japan and downloaded his songs and…. this is where I’m at now.

I have more to say but this is starting to become really draggy so I’ll probably come back to it some time.