III. THE PERFECT CONTINUOUS TENSE

Study Tip: Slow Practice

Practice slowly. Your mind remembers the content and not the speed. Your mind does not remember speed, it is the content that you need to know so well, that speed comes naturally. If you practice at a pace where you feel out of control, your body remembers the tension, so you are practicing having a tense body. Then when you do it, you will do it with tension because you include 'tenseness' with content. So, you need to 'unlearn' tenseness.

Focus on which parts of your body become tense when you learn. Try to relax these parts. One way to do this is to purposely tense up the muscles which become tense when you are learning. Then, try to slowly relax these muscles. Your mind will remember these muscles and remember which ones to relax.

It is easy to do things in 'cramming' panic mode. If you start early, you HAVE time—don't act as if you are in a hurry. If you are in control of slow speed, you will naturally be in control.

Mitsuka had left to his university class early in the morning. There had been a typhoon the day before, and it had rained heavily all night. But by the morning, the rain had stopped and Mitsuka left home and took the bus to the subway train station to go to his classes. But it took an unusually long time to get to the train station. The traffic was terrible. Then, when the bus crossed the bridge right before the train station, he saw that the water in the river had risen unusually high. Luckily, the dykes on each side of the river had stopped the water from flowing into the area around it.

But when Mitsuka got to the station, he found out that the rain had flooded the subway and the trains were not running. But rather than taking the bus, which had taken one hour to reach the train station from his home, he decided to walk instead. He crossed the bridge and started to walk along the road to his home. He had been walking along the road, but he had not been looking at the river behind him.

Then, he looked back and noticed that water had started to come over the sides of the dykes. It had been starting to flow across the road in front of him. A man had been trying to cross the water on his motorcycle, but the fast flowing water swept his motorcycle away from him. Then Mitsuka decided that he had to get out of the area as fast as possible. He had been walking across the road, but he quickly decided to go towards a big hill to the west of him. Finally, he got there, and he was happy to be safe.