serum

is americas education system losing out to the UK? from bbc Bilingual primary school to open The government is encouraging language learning in primary schools The first bilingual state school in England is set to be approved - with lessons in French and English. The project in the Wix School in Battersea, south London, is to be supported by the French embassy. Pupils joining the bilingual class will follow the national curriculum but will study all subjects in both languages throughout the primary school. The initiative is the result of co-operation with the Lycee Charles de Gaulle, a French school in London. Both the Wix school and the Lycee Charles de Gaulle will admit 14 pupils each to the bilingual class from September 2006. This will be repeated every year, creating a "bilingual stream" at the Wix school, alongside classes taught solely in English. The Lycee Charles de Gaulle's primary class and the Wix school occupy different floors of the same building and have built up co-operation over a period of time. 'Immense asset' Wandsworth Council says it is responding to parents' desire for their children to learn languages at a younger age, and wants to offer children the chance to become bilingual early in life. Once children leave the Wix school they would move to an English comprehensive. However, Wandsworth hopes to open more bilingual schools in the future, both primary and secondary. Wandsworth cabinet member for education Malcolm Grimston said: "A second language is best learned when you are young. And if the language becomes the medium for teaching the curriculum, the skills are obtained even more naturally. "To be bilingual is an immense asset both culturally and in employment." The bilingual class is expected to be oversubscribed, but the authority stressed that the usual admissions arrangements for state primary schools would remain. Admissions rules "We are not trying to cream off the more linguistically able," spokesman Steve Mayner said. "All applicants will have to meet the usual criteria, and the final deciding factor would be the distance of their home from the school, and whether they had siblings here." "We expect applications from children from a variety of backgrounds. Children whose parents are French would not be given priority either," Mr Mayner said. The bilingual curriculum is currently being developed by the head teachers of both schools. The proposal is being considered on Tuesday by the education overview and scrutiny committee, which will also report on the school's curriculum and admissions arrangements in September. In response to longstanding concerns about the lack of foreign language skills in England, the government has promised that all primary school pupils, aged 7 to 11, will receive language lessons by the end of the decade.

the only zombies living in cambodia are the expats. chillin along the mekong in phnom with a key of heroin in their pocket, a missle launcher in their right hand and a 8 year old kid in the other.

i love how everyone is on a first name basis here.

my girlfriends japanese bra size is D victoria secret B. on the growth hormones remember most asians are usually lactose intolerant and just recently monsanto opened a japanese company here so give it a few years before the hormone juice kicks in. right now girls are beginning to chow on mcdonalds and the flat butt is finally shaping into something to look at.

dont say jap. what does she look like to you oriental?

we`re talking about a country that is made up a lot of small breasts. i wouldnt be suprised if american A cup was a japanese b or c. youre going to need to take alll the little titties out there and divide them into smaller groups. the sizes therefore wont correspond. :king: japan tittie size translator 2005.

kiss the goat

the creature. didn't know there was a band. ok i was just checking. i had friends in a local band called bunyips.

just curious. did you name yourself after the creature bunyip or the band bunyip?

id stay solo and pay the rent hike, but thats just me. im very food protective like a lion chasing hyenas and nothing pisses me off more than going shopping and coming home to find your dinner has been eaten by your roomate while his friends suck down your highgrade beer. :hatred:

yeah first time in my life i can say im happy. but it does get lonely at times, people in general are kind of dumb - japanese and western, not to mention i have trouble speaking and writing english. i feel im losing it :shook:

not to get off topic but living in a foreign country has basically cut my media umbelical cord and i feel great. the news is controlled out here and journalists are always apoligizing for writing the truth, and i cant stop hearing about how supposedly the foreign residents (.7 % of the total population) commit 99% of the crimes. yet i see groups of motorcycle kids ride donuts around the police everyday and they just ignore them. but in cutting off my fix of media im damned if i do damned if i dont. on one side its great because i wasnt in america during 9/11 and i avoided that as well as the majority of bushs term, and all the media crap and other americans opinions on the war etc. except for a telephone call from my grandmother that americans need to find the muslims terrorists responsible...uh grandma they died when the plane hit. and that my mother recently started taking shooting lessons. to protect herself in the upper class suburbs?? but the downfall is the masssssss amounts of useless data that my brain seems to crave like heroin. things like what the hell is an ipod, when the next grand theft auto is coming out, what movies are good and what suck even though i havent seen them. i guess because life can be boring and it fills the gaps. whos dating who, who thinks michael is really innocent, who got voted off the island of some fake show, what happened in whatever boring tv show last night, monday night football scores... feed the desire to stay on top of things. now i have a tv but i just rent videos, i get my news when i want it by looking on the internet, and nobody out here that i know is that possessed with pop culture. so i had to fill my time with other things like reading, studying, exercising, painting, working and i dont think i would have been able to do that as easily as i could here. sorry for the rant.

i love bush`s plan for the war on aids in africa. he cuts all money to any clinic that offers abortion, contraception, or safe sex information. and suggests that africans be chast. too bad momma bush couldnt keep her legs closed. :yuck:

though its rather funny seeing americans in japan get frustrated when the japanese can`t understand english. white people in general just expect everyone on the whole damn planet to speak english or die. americans should be required to learn a second language starting in elementary school. spanish, being one of the easiest language to learn, should be one of them. average european speaks like what 3?

Chicago Marie`s pizza on Peterson between Elston and Pulaski Pita Inn on Dempster in Skokie.

in terms of illegals paying taxes it depends on the employer not the worker. if an orange grove owner hires illegals to pick fruit all day and pays them $4 an hour under the table in cash the illegal isn`t paying income tax, social security... however if the illegal works in the service industry he is paid with a check, by the minimum wage, and is paying into a system that he cannot collect from at the end of the year.therefore the fault lies on the shoulders of the employer not the employee to pay taxes.

notice that fake nose that the chick is wearing. seriously, that is the japanese interpretation of a westerner. anyone have a set of fake buck teeth and thick glasses with small beady eyes? i`m sure they would really appreciate that in the next ford motor show.

yo who wants to buy my collection of virtual jungle greens and icy grapes? i accept visa mastercard and paypal.

What is the most difficult language to learn? Richard Brecht Deputy Director, National Foreign Language Center Japanese is without question the most daunting language for a native English speaker to tackle, according to Brecht. "I would like to learn Japanese but I don't have enough time in my lifetime. That's very depressing," says the linguist, whose center is based at Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He notes that the State Department allows its students three times as long to learn Japanese as it does languages like Spanish or French. As Brecht explains it, the challenge with Japanese is threefold. First, there's the fact that the Japanese written code is different from the spoken code. "Therefore, you can't learn to speak the language by learning to read it," and vice versa. What's more, there are three different writing systems to master. The kanji system uses characters borrowed from Chinese. Users need to learn 10,000 to 15,000 of these characters through rote memorization; there are no mnemonic devices to help. Written Japanese also makes use of two syllabary systems: kata-kana for loan words and emphasis, and hira-gana for spelling suffixes and grammatical particles. Get beyond that and you're faced with a culture that, says Brecht, is "truly foreign for most Americans." With many languages, students start by learning introductions (Comment-allez vous? Tr?s bien, merci, et vous?) "But with Japanese, you can't even begin to do that with lesson one because of the social distinctions involved in making introductions," says Brecht. Age, social status, gender--"all these sociological factors make it so complicated that introductions can't be the first lesson," he notes. Finally, there's the issue of grammar. In English syntax, grammar is right branching. We set a topic and then comment upon it: "I saw the man who was sitting on the red chair, which was sitting beside the door." Japanese syntax is left branching-- "totally contrary to our approach," says Brecht. Thus, the sentence above becomes something along the lines of: "I saw the red, which was the chair, which was....." You get the idea. While exceedingly difficult, mastering Japanese is not impossible for English speakers, Brecht concedes. "There are thousands of students in our classes at SAIS who learn to function in Japan. It takes really good students and a lot of devotion." --Sue De Pasquale i don`t exactly agree with this article because i`m no brainiac and i can speak japanese. i`d say mandarin is a lot harder since there are way more kanji with tons more strokes and the tonal system seems like it would take a long time to master

sorry the list below doesnt have english and how long it take. GROUP I Afrikaans, Danish, DUTCH, FRENCH, Haitian Creole, ITALIAN, Norwegian, PORTUGUESE, Romanian, SPANISH, Swahili, SWEDISH Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency 480 GROUP II Bulgarian, Dari, FARSI (PERSIAN), GERMAN, (Modern) Greek, HINDI-URDU, INDONESIAN, Malay Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency 720 GROUP III Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, CZECH, Finnish, (MODERN) HEBREW, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, PILIPINO (TAGALOG), POLISH, RUSSIAN, SERBO-CROATIAN, Sinhala, THAI, TAMIL, TURKISH, VIETNAMESE Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency 720+ GROUP IV ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency 1320

i don`t understand why people seem to be so against to kabar. i mean its nice to have people on the board that are above the age of 16 and dont act like assholes, dickride, or act like the 90210 cast of the 12 oz graffiti board. i dont always agree with what he says but he is respectful and seems like a decent guy. maybe im just not on the boards enough to see what you guys do.

:five-o:

i wish i had a cd burner and i would. i have deck II which is dope. i like it much better than protools. i ended up getting a copy off my sound teacher.

yeah i know. ive been all over asia and i only felt unwanted in south korea. but on a positive note im thinking about going again to meet up with some writers in pusan to hopefully change my　mind. i did meet alot of nice people. its hard to put into words. i guess the atmosphere felt unwelcoming as i sat at a table for 45 minutes and watched everyone else get served that came after me. no one wanted to take my order from the picture menu mind you. i understand your suspicion on info coming from the US press. but even i fear them a bit. when they come to port in northern japan they blast the nk national anthem and have been told numerous times that they wont be let into the docks if they continue. they seem to want a fight. perhaps because of the past and the present way that nkoreans suffer in japan today. alot of them have been here since the cold war and have no visa, and either do their children that were born in japan. they literally are of no nationality. i believe they have alot of propaganda there and could easily be lead to believe that their poverty is due to japan and the US rather than because of kim jong il.

truthfully i think people should be able to walk the earth and work and live wherever they want. maybe without nation pride we can stop fighting eachother. but just to play devils advocate, im just curious why people think its ok to enter another country illegally and work, live etc, without any regard for laws. it shows disrespect and it implies that illegals are just oppourtunists. i wanted to live in japan. i did research on what qualifies a visa. americans are required to have a university diploma in order to recieve a 3 year visa and renew it by having a fulltime job sponsor it or get married and recieve a 1 year visa. i graduated, moved to japan, got a job, got a visa, and continue to renew it every 3 years through a company sponsor. if i dont qualify i believe i should get the fuck out of japan. plain and simple. why the hell is it ok for mexicans to crawl through sewer pipes into the US and come bus tables? not to mention steal waiters tips. sorry for that last comment. not all mexicans are theives just the ones i worked with at 5 different restaurants throughout my 7 years of waitering.