Introduce Yourself!

Let's get to know each other a little bit more <img title="Smile" src="http://www.italki.com/Scripts/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-smile.gif" alt="Smile" border="0" />

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Purpose of Studying English What sometimes annoys me is that people often talk to me as if American accent or spelling is the only proper style of English. Of course I like the US; I listen to a lot of American music, and some of my favourite actors are American. However, it's definitely not right to claim it to be the one and only "correct" form of English when there are so many other styles around the world. For me, the purpose of learning English is not to become an American, but to smoothly communicate with others who don't speak my native language and be able to understand them better. I know that I will never be able to completely lose my Japanese accent, but I am not ashamed of it one bit. Learning other cultures and languages does not equal to losing my own identity, and I think there is no need to imitate American (or other) accent too much as long as there's no problem in communication. What do you guys think?

Grammatically, what does "Cute as!" mean? In conversational English, what do native speakers mean when they say "That's cute as!" or "Awesome as!" ? Is the word "as" just emphasising the adjective, or is any phrase or word dropped after?

我第一次尝试写在中文 你好！我叫清香。我是日本人。我住在东京。中文是非常困难的。尤其是发音比英语困难得多。如果有任何错误，请纠正。谢谢～ Oh god, these sentences took me like half an hour to write... and writing/ reading should be easy for me as I can kind of guess the meaning from the symbols. I don't even wanna imagine how long it will take to learn the correct pronunciation for every word... *sigh*

What is the difference between the words "ridiculous" and "ludicrous"? They both seem to be very similar in meaning and spelling. Is there any difference or are they identical?

First notebook entry: Introducing myself An easygoing and friendly Japanese girl, whose interests are mainly in learning different cultures and getting to know a lot of new people. Although my English is not perfect, I can communicate fluently enough in it, so feel free to talk to me about anything! And I'm willing to help those who are learning Japanese too :) As for my third language, I've done French course for a term or something at school and that's why it's set as my learning language at the moment, but I don't actually know any language other than Japanese and English since I've forgotten most of what I learned in there. So! I'm keen to start learning any language from now, and want a language partner to help me out. Well, thanks for stopping by and nice to meet you.