【連載】前号への評 第17回 ヨナタン・ブロ Jonatan Bulo "Talk to ladies, Watch the Vlogbrothers and Learn English!"

新論説集「マージナリア」運営委員会編集部です。今日は13日の金曜日ですね。日本をはじめ多くの国で採用されているグレゴリオ暦では400年周期で暦が一周するわけですが、その400年の中で13日が何曜日にあたるか数えてみると、じつは金曜日が一番多いのだそうです。Wikipediaで見ただけですので、気になる方は計算してみてはいかがでしょうか。

第17回の今回は、Jonatan Bulo　"Talk to ladies, Watch the Vlogbrothers and Learn English!" への評です。筆者の気取らない語り口、率直な主張が印象的でした。今回もまた、英語記事に対する英語の評となっています。まさに "Learn English!" というわけですね。

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▶宮田晃碩 Akihiro Miyata

Communication is difficult. This is not only that some feel difficulty with it, but it may be a difficult question for us all, for it may dominate the whole life. It is to be answered throughout life.
  As to using English, I feel really poor at this skill, and always totally confused. Just as Jonatan says "learning is all about relating the information you have acquired to your own situation," linguistic experience would also be related to the situation of your own. Because I have poor 'situation' in English, it is difficult for me to feel vivid reality in English.
  So what? Again says Jonatan "Start. Speaking. English." It is the simplest truth. New possibilities are grasped only by your own hand. And this connection of us including Jonatan and me, is a new possibility which can enriches our experience. The question answered through life, would be answered in communication.

▶鷲見雄馬 Yuma Sumi

It is hard not only for those who cannot express what they think but also for those who have so much knowledge to communicate with someone we never know who she is, their reader. Recently I read an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal; the writer, Steven Pinker says, “the curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose.” This is absolutely true, for you may have seen that technical terms sometimes make a writing hard to understand, that is, impossible to read (e.g. imagine some academic articles or the instruction for setting up the Internet). Communication is such a difficult task.
  Here Pinker tells what is important: “Hey, I’m talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them.”

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次週は、Simone Koers（シモーネ・クールス）　"And God saw that it was good" への評を御紹介する予定です。

それでは、ごきげんよう。