Ishii home study 19Mar-25Mar

I did as follows.

NHK Radio Business Conversation: 21st Mar and 24th Mar, 30 minuites each.

Japan Times articles: 19,20,22 and 23, I think I spent more than 2 hours total.

SI

An interesiting word

I would like to report the word I find interesting.

'shibboleth'

How should it be pronounced?

This is from the Hebrew Bible, for distiguishing the tribal memeber from the outsider who could not pronounce 'shi' but 'shyu'.

So today, this word/phrase is used to distinguish the members of the groups from the outsider.

In a sense, it is simlar to Japanese words like 'ai kotoba', like Humie'.

The examples of shibboleth in the history....
Scheveningen(Ducth), Dutch people pronounce this word with separate"s"/s/ and "ch"/x/, while German people pronounce "sch"/syu/. The Dutch Resistance used this to ferret out Nazi spies during WW2.

Ba, bi, bu, be, bo Japansese used this syllabary group to detect Korean spies. Koreans would pronounce those pa, pi, pu, pe, po.

'Who's Jicho'and its answer 'Ishikawa 'is the shibboleth for Global-OA team, to distinguish other team?

Ishii 12th Mar - 18th Mar English study

Dear All,

I did as follows.

15th and 17th : I listened to the Radio NHK Business English conversation for 30 minuites.

12th, 13th,14th and 16th : I read Japan Times for 30 minuites.

Shinji Ishii