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.

Pronunciation Diary

Hello Hello!

I have to admit that I pulled this off for a long time now, but guess what: I was watching my favourite series when I suddenly realized that the main character pronounced the word controversial in a weird way. Immediately I decided to see whether his pronunciation was wrong or whether I have always pronounced it the wrong way. Here are my findings:
I looked it up on 3 different pages and it turns out that they all pronounce it like this. In the series, however, it was pronounced controverSIAL. He really pronounced every single letter and stressed the a. I guess the actor made a mistake there.
I'm giving you this little story just to make clear what finally gave me my motivation to get this done.

Well, let's start with the pronunciation model. The question of all questions: do I choose British or American pronunciation?
Even though I have to say that I like the British accent far more I think I will stick with the American one. There are two reasons for that: Firstly, I think it's the easier one and secondly, I'm watching many American series and therefore am used to the American accent more than to the British accent.







This already brings me on to something I consider important when you want to learn proper pronunciation: have some input from natives. In my case this is watching series and movies in their original languages, which is most frequently English. This is simply the easiest way to get in touch with English in my everyday life as I  don't know any natives here in Graz - besides our teachers.

Pronunciation is so important because, as it is mentioned on antimoon.com:

"Pronunciation is definitely the biggest thing that people notice when you are speaking English."

This quote applies to us even more because we are no natives and therefore a good pronunciation is something we have to learn. It doesn't just pop in naturally as it does with our mother tongue, we have to put an effort into it. 

I did have some pronunciation-related fun when I was working in Ireland. I was helping some people with their horses who came from another part of town and did not know me at all and did not know that I was not a native. After a while they asked me where I am from because I didn't sound "Greysteel born and bred", as they put it. They reacted rather surprised when I told them that I was not even from Ireland but from Austria. Just like those, many people were surprised when I told them that I was from Austria, they seem to be expecting German speakers to speak terrible, terrible English.

The pronunciation pages are all very useful, even though I am not more than halfway through now I already realized many things. I particularly liked the link to the Warwick University webpage.

One thing I know I have to take real care of is the following: 

When I talk really quickly I often start to swallow some syllables or pronounce sounds wrong even though I actually know how to pronounce them correctly (e.g. different pronunciation of v and w). This usually only happens when I get excited and start to talk really fast and don't think about the right way of saying things any more. I do hear my mistakes, however, and correct myself as soon a make the mistake. Still, I would sound far better if I didn't make those mistakes in the first place.

Vocab learning!

So, I honestly have to say that I'm already pretty fed up with vocab learning. It's not really the having to learn itself, it's only that besides all the other things we have to do - and there are billions of tons of homework and projects as you all know -  it just seems to be of so little importance at some times. Of course I know that it is very important and so I'm trying my best not to lose track of it and to improve my vocab as much as possible.

I do have several approaches to vocabulary learning, some of them might be better than others and some of them might be worse - I don't claim to have the perfect system or anything like that.
I will explain my strategy by the example of the Porter words.

When I am working my way through one of the exercices I start by reading through all the words we have to use, if I don't know one of them I look it up in an online dictionary, usually pons.eu. I then write its meaning directly above the word itself. The next thing I do is that I proceed with finishing the exercice, usually by using the process of elimination. This actually works pretty well and I do finish most of the units with little or no mistakes at all.

 ^^ This is what my pages look like in the end: The blue words are my translations, then I circle/write down the right answer with a pencil and then correct myself with some colored pen.
Sorry for the poor quality, by the way, but apparently this is all my phone is capable of.

My next step is writing down the words/expression I don't know or which I seem to forget all the time down in a vocabulary notebook. If two words are very similar or easily mixed up I write them down one below the other with a little blizzard next to them as a sign that I have to be careful with those. If a word is high/low register and I didn't know it before or it's not obvious I write that down next to it. Also, if there are some easy or good synonyms/explanation I try to write those down as well.

I then try to go through these words every now and then to commit them to my memory - it is a sieve sometimes, I swear!

When a PC comes up I usually make my own vocab lists once again because I think words are easier to remember if you have to write them down yourself.
These vocab lists are often a little confusing for other people as I usually go through the words and then create my own (weird) links. That works pretty good for myself, however, and so  I don't really care. ;)
I print them out then I go through them over and over again. It's the actual word, a synonym/antonym or whatever comes in handy and the translation.

^^This is what my lists look like

When creating the last list for PC1 I even went through the whole book, okay Unit 1-6, again and read every single sentence to check if I know the word and also in what context it can be used.

I do also use vocabulary.com but actually I don't like it that much. I prefer not looking at a screen 24/7 and so I try to summarise as much as possible and print it out. This is far less distracting for me. Also, I'm very prone to headaches if I use a computer too much and we already have to work so much on it all the time, so I try to avoid it as much as possible.

Generally I'm content with my tactic and so far my results (at least in the PCs) were always good, so I guess my system is okay. I don't know anything about the last PC, so I guess we'll find out soon whether it really works or whether I have to adapt my system.

In addition to these real study techniques I also do some other things and use some other sources, but I am not sure if they really count. Anyway, I will just mention them here:

1. I try to read English books as much as possible. Currently I'm reading the second part of the Game of Thrones series and I just love it. Even though I just don't really have time to read or if I do have time I am too exhausted so that I can't really concentrate, I'm trying to do it as much as possible. What comes in really handy is a cool feature of my kindle: a built-in dictionary. If I don't know a word I can simply click on it and it shows me an explanation/definition
2. In addition to that I'm watching some movies and series in English. Right now it's Perception: an absolutely amazing series about an uni professor who's a paranoid schizophrenic in addition to being a genius and helps the FBI to solve cases. Even though I love it and think it's simply amazing it's nothing I can watch without paying attention because the language is really difficult and unusual (at least if you're not a native speaker). Plus, they often speak really, like REALLY, fast, which makes it even worse. Nevertheless, I just love it and hope it helps me with my English skills.
3. I liked several English pages on Facebook. I know, I know, not the best source. Anyway, these three, for example, are really cool: Word Porn, Truth Beckon and I fucking love science. While Word Porn is all about nice quotations and beautiful words, Truth Beckon posts links to articles and inspirational quotes and I fucking love science informs you about new scientific achievements.
4. When we have to write a piece of homework for one of our English classes I always try to weave in new vocabulary, usually looked up in pons.eu or thesaurus.com. Some words reoccur often and I tend to just remember them after a few times. Of course this system contains a certain risk of misusing a word, but if possible I try to look it up in coca or a similar site before using it. If I don't have time for that, however, or don't really find anything I still just use it, because how else would I find out how to use it?

Okay, I think that's about it.