Sea Shepherd!

Hello everybody!

How's it going?
I'm a little frustrated because of all the studying, so I decided that I'm gonna do something else now. Since my brother is a huge fan of Sea Shepherd and keeps telling us all about it I decided that I want to check out their website and see if the things my brother tells us are actually true - because they do sound kinda unbelievable from time to time. ;) When I clicked my way through the website now I decided that I would like to blog about it as it's really interesting and I think we should spread the word about the terrible things that are going on and what Paul Watson and his supporters are doing about it.

So, let's start at the very beginning: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an international non-profit organisation that fights for the protection of marine wildlife. You may have heard about it a few weeks ago when it made the headlines because it stopped a Japanese whaling fleet from hunting down whales in the Southern Ocean. Anyway, Sea Shepherd was founded in 1977 by Captain Paul Watson, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace. Watson fought for animal rights all his life, starting at the age of nine. He parted form Greenpeace because he saw the need for a special focus on marine wildlife and also, because he wanted to become more active and also radical in order to protect wildlife even more. Today, he is regarded as a guardian of marine wildlife who does whatever he can in order to protect sea mammals. He is wanted in a number of countries world wide.

^^ Captain Paul Watson

Sea Shepherd is operating in numerous campaigns all over the globe. These include fights for the protection of Bluefin Tuna, Dolphins, Reefs, Seals, Sharks and Whales. Even though their actions might seem radical I personally can not bring myself to condemning them because I share the opinion that you have to act a little extreme in order to really change something. Sea Shepherd is not hurting anyone, they are simply fighting for the lives of absolutely amazing, fascinating and intelligent creatures, who are not able to protect themselves. Also, Sea Shepherd is only bluffing in many of their operations and the actions they carry out never actually hurt anyone.

Terrible actions are carried out all over the world, like the annual killing of hundreds of dolphins and small whales in the cove of Taiji (Japan). Other well-known examples are the annual slaughter of whales on the Faroe Islands, the annual seal "hunt" in Canada and many more. Each of these so-called traditions are barbaric and need to stop. If humans keep killing animals, not only marine but all of them, we will slowly but surely reach a point when there are no more to kill. Then we will not only have caused a horrifying number of species to become extinct, we will also have managed to destroy the fragile ecosystem we live in - and nobody knows the consequences this will have!

It might be true that these traditions derive from an ancient need of people to survive in the arctic, for instance, but seriously, this is not necessary any more! Even in the northernmost town in the world you do have access to a grocery store and a clothing store, there's simply no need to kill whales or seals to survive any more. Some other of these hunts claim to do it under the guise of science, but once again, seriously, why would science need a few hundred dead whale bodies?!

Personally, I think that Sea Shepherd is doing the right thing protecting good-hearted creatures that can't stand up for themselves. 

There are several ways in which you could support Sea Shepherd like donating money or goods (they do have a wish list online), buying merchandise articles or by volunteering either on shore or on the sea. Here you can watch the recruitment video for Operation Relentless 2014 in the Southern Ocean. I have already considered applying for one of the operations, but this may will have to wait until I'm done with my studies.

Should really getting involved be a little too much for you at this point, how about simply informing yourself?
I know that these movies are terrible to watch and will leave you all devastated, but still, I recommend watching

• The Cove (documentary on the slaughter in Taiji)
• Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist (documentary on Paul Watson) I found link where you can watch this one online, unfortunately it's the German version, but anyway, here's the link
• Dolphin Prison (documentary on the brutal treatment of dolphins all over the world)

and many more.

Also, Captain Paul Watson published a number of books - some of which are out of print, so rather hard to get

• Shepherds of the Sea (1979)
• Sea Shepherd: My Fight for Whales and Seals (1982)
• Cry Wolf (1985)
• Earthforce! (1993)
• Ocean Warrior (1994)
• Seal Wars (2002)

^^I hope you found it interesting and if I could awaken your interest in Sea Shepherd and the protection of marine wildlife it's even better! :)

My Pecha Kucha!

Well, it's time for a retrospective view on my personal Pecha Kucha experience.
My partner, Carmen Loderer, and me chose the topic German (or Italian) in South Tyrol.
We decided on this topic because we thought it sounded particularly interesting and we were fascinated by the fact that there is an area so close to Austria where bilingualism is completely normal.

Considering the fact that the entire preparation was rather stressful due to all the other things we had to do and prepare for university I think we ended up doing a pretty well job.

As we got contact details from two people who grew up in Bozen and now study in Graz we decided that we wanted to interview them in order to give our presentation a personal touch. When we finally were able to set up a meeting we met them at Tribeka and just asked them the questions we prepared and recoreded them.
The questions were:

1. Where exactly are you from?
2. In what way did you experience the ambivalence of German and Italian?
3. Do you speak both languages? Fluently?
4. What about your parents?
5. Are there any differences within South Tyrol?
6. What do people think about their bilingualism? Do they prefer German or Italian?
7. Do you use one or the other language for certain topics?
8. Are they basically happy that they belong to Italy but are bilingual nonetheless?
9. What is the general opinion in South Tyrol: Are people happy that they belong to Italy or would they rather be part of Austria?
10. Since you are in Austria now, do people here talk to you about the nationality of South Tyrol? If yes, what do they say?

After having carried out our interview we finally were able to start the real work, namely writing our transcript and finding pictures for our presentation.
As neither of us had enough time to meet up very often we decided to make use of our dear friend, the Internet, and created two google docs. One for the transcript and one for the slides. When we knew what exactly we wanted to mention in our presentation we divided the presentation up in what we thought was a logical way. This lead to both of us twice presenting four slides and then two slides each in the end again. The google docs facilitated our work considerably as this way everyone could just work on the Pecha Kucha whenever he had time to do so. In addition to our interview we met up twice, once when we were done with our transcript to record the whole thing and the second time when we were done with everything and just worked our way through the whole presentation to get used to it.

I have to admit that I actually don't particularly like the whole concept of a Pecha Kucha. Even though it was  a challenge, I prefer it to be free with my timing and the question of how many slides I will use and what I will show in these slides. Nevertheless, it was an interesting experience and I think everybody should try this form of presentation at least once. 

The feedback I got was mostly interesting and pleasant but sometimes surprising.

• One or two people said that I should have talked louder, but most said I spoke clearly and loud enough - so I guess this depended on where you were sitting in class. 
• Most listeners commented me on my pronunciation and said that everything was easy and good to understand. Nevertheless, two of them mentioned that I mispronounced two specific words (unfortunately I don't remember them).
• Many, many listeners complimented us on our timer and said that it was really cool - one girl even asked me whether I could do it for their presentation as well. :)
• In general most people said that everything was well-explained and the pictures were nice and suitable - one person, however, said that the timing of our pictures and speech didn't fit, which actually really surprised me.
• A majority of the listeners said that I read too much, but I want to explain where this comes from: I did not actually read the sentences because I did not even have full sentences on my notes. The thing is that if I only have bullet points and certain phrases in my notes I have to actually look at them a lot in order to give a fluent speech. I might should have practiced this a little more often.

• All in all, I am pretty content with our Pecha Kucha and the feedback and I think that our presentation definitely was as good as the others.

Should anybody be interested in looking at our transcript and the slides again, here are the links to our google docs:

• Presentation
• Slides

Pronunciation Diary Pt 2!

Hello my dear fellow students!

I hope I'm not the only one who completely forgot or just didn't get that we actually have to write two blog entries about pronunciation. :)
Anyway, here's my second one, I hope you'll enjoy it.

First of all, I have to say that I was really surprised and even more pleased when I read my feedback. Apparently my pronunciation already is on a pretty good level.
In my comment section I found exactly three mistakes:

Spalt

AE is "easier", but BE is "much nicer".

spiral

paediatric nurse, post-natal psychology

I have to admit that the first one surprised me. I actually was entirely sure that I spelled spiral the correct way, but I checked on it now and realized that it is actually pronounced like this. 

The other two mistakes are, in my personal opinion, forgivable, as they belong to rather specialized vocabulary and are not really part of our everyday speech. Of course, I should have checked on these two words, just to make sure they are pronounced the way I pronounced them, but honestly, it did not even occur to me that they might be pronounced in another way then the one I thought. Anyway, here are the links to the correct pronunciation - listen to it, it might surprise you as well:

paediatric nurse

post-natal psychology

To be perfectly honest, I have reduced my work with the pronunciation pages and links to a minimum, which is mostly due to the fact that I feel completely weird and crazy and out of my mind if I sit in front of my laptop repeating things someone in a video said. 

This does not mean that I stopped to work on my pronunciation, however. I have two rather close friends, one from Northern Ireland and one from Australia, who both agreed on skyping with me once a week and help me with my pronunciation. These sessions usually last about half an hour to an hour and really help me a lot. Whenever I am uncertain of the pronunciation of a word I just can ask them, and whenever they notice a mistake I'm making they correct me. This really helps, especially because I don't consider it as studying but as fun talks with my friends who help me to improve my English. Also, I realized that I'm getting surer of my spoken production and don't have to think about the way of saying things that often any more. 

Another thing I started doing was not only watching movies and series for fun any more but actually listening to the actors' pronunciation. Now, whenever a word sounds weird to me or I thought it would be pronounced differently I write it down and look it up on howjsay to check the correct pronunciation. If there is anything new to me I repeat the word several times.

To give you an impression on how this works I will demonstrate it here:

here's the link to a video I found from the series Perception - sorry that I didn't just post the actual video here, but apparently blogger does not want me to and claims not being able to find the video I want to use. Anyway, I was watching this part of the series a few weeks ago and here are my notes:

hallUcinate: Even though I know the word I would probably not have stressed the second syllable as much as she does, so to remind me of that I underlined the stress when I wrote it down in my notebook. 

figment: If I had read the word I would probably have pronounced it the same way as he does in the video, but as I did not even know the word I decided to write it down nevertheless. Just so you kno, it means Fantasieprodukt/Hirngespinst, or simply something that you/your mind makes up.

neurochemical impulse: I did know the pronunciation of neurochemical, but I was rather surprised that you barely can hear the u in his pronunciation of impulse. Apparently it is correct (even though it might have been aggravated by his way/speed of speaking), so I'll take this pronunciation up from now on.

I do the same thing with words I read in books. As I'm reading part two of the Game of Thrones series right now, this happens pretty often, because the language that is used in there is pretty far from the everyday English that I'm usually using and that we're learning in our classes. 

dour: Yes! I would have pronounced it like the second version he's saying. (mürrisch)

crows: I know, I know, a well-known and old word for us, but I ALWAYS catch myself saying crAus instead of croUs.

morose: I would not have stressed the s...a thing to remember! (griesgrämig/mürrisch)

maul: Yes! That's the way I would have said it. (Dreikanter/Schlägel -> must be some hammer-thingy for fighting)

So, as you can see, my list is growing quickly, and about once or twice a week I skim through it to remind myself of the correct pronunciation of complicated words.