ポドカスト、ありがとうございました。私は少し分かりました。

Hi, everyone! I hope you are doing well despite this pandemic. I will be very happy if you check and correct my English diary below. Thank you. Wed, Aug 25, 2021 Recently the situation of the COVID-19 infection has been going on deteriorating in Japan. All the government is doing seem like stop gap measures, and people are becoming more and more hopeless, especially the people in Tokyo, which seem to be suffering from the growing shortage of medical support, like a pregnant woman infected with the virus, who lost the baby she was expecting, because no hospital was able to accept her request for emergency treatment. I cannot believe things like this are happening in this developed country. My town, which is about one hour by train from Tokyo, is not as densely populated as Tokyo, so things are a bit easier. However, even in my town a few day-care centres for kids have been closed due to breakout of corona clusters. Fortunately the day care to which I send my daughter every day is still fine so far, but I cannot tell whether there could be a cluster out break there at any time in the near future. Even if that should happen, my wife and I would be able to manage to deal with the situation, because we both are working at home and our daughter is 6 years old, mature enough to take care of herself, like playing alone quietly all day. Also very fortunately all my family are free from any disease at the moment, though my daughter used to suffer from serious asthma until last year. However, there should be a growing number of people with various problems like losing their jobs or having to refrain from receiving medical care due to hospitals reaching their limits. I feel very sorry for those people in serious trouble. How I wish the situation would get better as soon as possible!

Yes all correct

I also struggled with katakana(reading and writing). My teacher suggested I re-write the dialogues( 1 per week from my study book(Genki 1), in katakana only. I then read the katakana written dialogue to my teacher.(I also send a copy of my work to my teacher to check for mistakes). This has helped me memorize the katakana symbols and helped me read and pronounce katakana words more fluently. I also bought some katakana/hiragana flashcards which contain lots of commonly use katakana words (with english translation). Hope this helps. All the best with your studies. Nicola.

I bought a children's picture book called 'first 1000 words in Japanese', from Amazon. Though it is a children's book, I found it helpful to memorize new words, as they were accompanied by a picture. Also there is a book called 600 common Japanese verbs,(also on Amazon), which I find helpful.