Lesson 3
Dear Teni,
Thank you for your third email. My comments and corrections follow.
Sincerely,
Prof. Sue Garreis
Dear Prof. Susan Garreis
Hello
Thank you for your reply and your corrections.
I hope you will learn something about America along the way.
-> Yes, I hope so. Thank you.
I am sorry it took so long for my reply.
-> This is no problem.
What a lovely family you have! Feel free to look.
-> Thank you very much. I'm glad you said that.
Japan has excellent public transportation. In the US, some large cities have very good public transportation. Washington DC has a really Metro system.
Outside of the large cities, public transportation is not great. We rely very much on cars to get us where we need to go.
-> Yes, I think I'm not mistaken when choosing to Study Abroad in Japan.
I think the United States is a big country so people usually use cars to move.
> Yes, we usually get where we need to go in a car. Partly, this is because we are such a spread out country. There are many rural areas where public transportation is not cost effective. Public transportation here has pretty much been confined to large cities. There is some inter-city linkage, but not much. Many people live in the suburbs, not in the heart of the city. They need to drive to work because public transport does not serve them well. When I taught at Villanova, I would rather have ridden the train to work. It would have been a three hour train ride one way. The trains did not run after 10pm, when my graduate class was done. In addition, taking the train would have been more expensive than driving. So I drove ninety minutes one way to get to and from my job. That is a typical American experience.
What time of year do you visit your family? During the summer break?
-> I usually go to visit my parents at Christmas because I don't have to go to school at this time.
> That's a nice time of year to visit. Here in the mid-Atlantic part of the US it is cold and there is often snow at Christmas. What is the weather like at your home when you make your Christmas visit?
That sounds wonderful! Manchester United is a great team. They are world famous. Even I have heard of them. Most Americans like baseball. This is baseball season. It is a summertime outdoor sport. My favorite team is the Orioles. They are headquartered in Baltimore Maryland.
-> Japanese also used to play baseball, I think I want to play with them if I get a chance.
> I hope you get the chance someday. You play baseball?
My grandson has played soccer for years.
-> Wow !!! That sounds wonderful !!!
With best wishes
Nguyen Hung Thien
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<Homework>
1. I usually write my messages on Sunday evening in Arnold MD. When I am finished, it is early Monday afternoon in Chiba. When do you first check for my reply to your message? Tell me the day of the week and what time of day you check.
-> Thank you for your email. I always check mail every day, at 9:00 am, Japan time zone.
2. Visit America's largest telecommunications company, AT&T. Click here for a recent press release. AT&T designed new cruise ship packages. What are the packages designed to give cruise ship travelers? (Hint: The answer is in the first sentence of paragraph three. Do not translate past the bold phrase “More Messaging, More Saving.”)
-> The packages designed to give cruise ship travelers are discounted rates on voice, messaging and data use while at sea.
> Correct!
3. Visit a large public university on the east coast, the University of Maryland, and see the Department of Accounting and Information Assurance.
-> I’ve visited this website, what a large university !!!
> It is very big. There are many degree programs offered. It has a school of law and a school of medicine. There are twenty-six thousand undergraduates and ten thousand graduate students.
4. Use any search engine to search the Net for "balance sheet." Tell me how many "hits" you have, i.e., how many documents have that phrase in it? Tell me what search engine you used. For example, I used Google to find "balance sheet." There were about 57,900,000 (fifty-seven million nine hundred thousand) hits. Using Bing, there were 24,400,000 (twenty-four million four hundred thousand) hits.
-> I used yahoo.co.jp to find "balance sheet", I got about 57,000,000 (fifty-seven million) hits, google.co.jp is about 56,600,000 (fifty-six million six hundred thousand) hits and about 62,200,000 (sixty-two million two hundred thousand) hits by bing.com.
> Thanks for your thorough answer.
5. How easy was this lesson for you?
-> The accounting was very hard.
> Can you tell me what made the homework very hard? Are the links hard to get to? Is the translations of the pages hard? Thanks for your input.
The English was somewhat hard.
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More talk about America's national pastime: baseball. Here is the Baltimore Orioles' website:
http://baltimore.orioles.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bal&tcid=mm_mlb_sitelist. I like to listen on the radio or watch a game on TV. It is very expensive to go to a professional baseball game, so I rarely ever do that now. What is your favorite sport? Have you attended a professional sports game of any time in either Vietnam or Japan? If yes, what was it like?
Attached to this email are three documents.
1. #3 Sources of American Accounting Information is the next lesson. We will learn of many different Internet sources of accounting information.
2. #3A-NTT-IncStmt2013 is the 2013 income statement for NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone). You will use that to answer a homework question.
3. #3B NYSE Non-US List is a list of Japanese companies that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Try to see the document on the web.
If the print is too small to read, use the larger print document that I made to answer your homework question.