Pronunciation post 2

As you might have realized from my previous blogpost, I love all the different American accents and therefore I am aiming for sounding American as well when I speak English.

Now, when trying to improve the pronunciation of words there are different approaches you can take. In my opinion it is essential to listen and talk to native English speakers because only that way you can really observe how they talk and pronounce words.

If you quickly need to know how a certain word is pronounced, online monolingual dictionaries are very helpful. You simply type in the word you are looking for and then there is usually a button that you can click on to hear the correct pronunciation. Some dictionaries even provide British AND American pronunciation.

In my opinion the most helpful, besides talking to natives, is to watch videos online that focus on English pronunciation. YouTube offers hundreds of videos that help you improving pronunciation. I already put one video about differences between British and American pronunciation in my previous blogpost.

Many native German speakers have trouble pronouncing v and w correctly in English as well as trouble distinguishing between b and p. For some words this is also the case for me. To practice the pronunciation of these letter, tongue twisters really help. Here are some examples that you can practice with:

Very well, very well, very well ...

Wilma virtually wishes every weekend for very wild weather.

Peter batted better than Pat poured butter, so Peter told Pat he batted poorly and better pour the butter better before he batted.

 

In order to improve my American English pronunciation I like to watch videos by Amy Walker. She is really natural and her videos are not only entertaining but also very helpful in acquiring an American accent. She covers all important aspects of Standard American English; from the different vowel sounds to the melody and rhythm of American English.

She suggests that you use a mirror to watch yourself when you repeat the words after her. That way it’s easier to realize which muscles are engaged while speaking. I thought it was really weird to watch myself in the beginning but it really does help to get the pronunciation right…  so don’t worry about what you look like – just do it!  ;-)

In case you got curious and want to check out Amy’s videos as well, there you go:

 

 

How to do an American Accent – Part 1

 

How to do an American Accent – Part 2

 

How to do an American Accent – Part 3

 

How to do an American Accent – Part 4

 

How to do an American Accent – Part 5

 

 

 

Pronunciation post 1

Studying a foreign language doesn’t only mean to acquire new vocabulary and different grammar structures. Pronunciation is another very important part that you should focus on when trying to learn a new language. English is spoken in many countries around the world and due to numerous accents there are a lot of correct ways of pronouncing certain words.

Correct pronunciation of words is so important because if words or even single letters within a word are not pronounced correctly, misunderstandings between people might be the consequence.      

I’ve studied English for more than 10 years and I feel pretty confident when I talk to native speakers. I’ve lived in the states for 2 years which gave me the chance to observe how Americans talk and pronounce certain words. Nevertheless, as I am studying English at university, I really need to work on correct pronunciation in order to speak the language perfectly one day.

Since I already lived in a few different regions of the US I was able to hear many different accents. In Colorado, the Midwestern Accent is predominant, which by most people is considered the most pleasant American accent. When I lived in New York, I quickly realized that people there talk completely different than in Colorado and even within New York there are different accents depending on where you are. I personally love the New York accent; it’s my favorite English accent. When I was in Texas and Oklahoma over the summer I learned how the Southerners talk. Their accent is sometimes a little hard to understand for non-English natives, especially when you hear a real cowboy talk, but it’s also an accent that I really like.

 

For those who are interested, here’s a video that describes the main differences between American and British pronunciation:

 

 

Here’s a video by Amy Walker speaking in 21 different English accents:

How i plan on studying for PC2 (Vocabulary post 2)

As I’ve mentioned in my blogpost about vocabulary learning strategies, words are the basic components of every language. Therefore, if you want to learn a language, you will not get around studying lots and lots of vocabulary.

Since I have decided to study English and Spanish at the University of Graz, I constantly have to be on top of studying new words in order to pass my exams and of course to improve my language skills in both languages.

In January I have a massive vocabulary exam for English class for which I have to learn more than 700 words. Of course not all of them are going to be completely new to me, but there are some that I’ve never heard of before. Many of those words have more than one meaning and I have to make sure that I am aware of all the different meanings. A great number of the words that I will be tested on in January I’ve heard or read before and I understand what they mean but I don’t really know how to use them correctly within a sentence. This is something that I definitely have to work on because knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t help you as long as you don’t know how to use it within a sentence structure.

When facing such a large number of words you need to have some kind of strategy because without any form of organization you will most likely not be able to learn all of the words in time. Thankfully our teacher provides a list of all the words on vocabulary.com for us, so we have all the vocabulary that we need to know for the exam listed in one place.

Now, here is my strategy to learn 700 words in less than a month. The first thing I will do is to skim trough the list and create three lists of my own. The first list will contain all the words that I have never heard of before and that I don’t know at all. The second list will contain words that I am for the most part familiar with but where I maybe don’t know all the different meanings or where I am unsure of how to use them correctly. The third list will contain words that I already feel very confident with.

After doing that I will start to look at my first list and create a glossary that includes translations of the words, different meanings of the words as well as example sentences in order to make it possible for me to learn how the words are used correctly and synonyms and antonyms of every word. I will do the same for the second and third list but it will take me much less time, because those words are not completely new to me. Websites such as vocabulary.com, thesaurus.com or various online monolingual dictionaries will help me creating my three lists.

When I am done making my vocabulary lists I will start going through the first one because it’s the most important to learn the words that I don’t know at all. As soon as I feel confident about the first list I will concentrate on the second and third list.

Looking at 700 different words, it seems very hard to believe that I will be done creating my three lists and studying them all in less than a month. The most important thing is to stay organized and to study every day because 700 words you won’t be able to learn a week before the exam. I feel confident about my strategy and I think it’s manageable to learn all the words by the end of January if I put enough work and effort into it.

 

 

Great Profits during the Great War

Great Profits during the Great War

For English class I had to write a summary of the article "Great Profits during the Great War", in The Guardian from the 28th of October 2013. Now my task is to correct the summary I wrote and to figure out what I have to work on to improve my summary writing skills in the future.

 

My first attempt:

This article raises the question if British innovators nobly donated their money to the cause or if warfare was just profit for them. 16 million died during the Great War but millions more of pounds and dollars were spent on armaments and the routine expense of war. It is clear that patriotism alone wasn’t always the main rationale for industrial activity in wartime. Marconi Company made it possible to monitor all communications by providing its wireless operators and training to facilitate the armed services’ use of wireless communications without demanding any upfront payment. In 1915 the United Kingdom established its national Department of Scientific Industrial Research (DSIR) because it was clear that the German model of state investment of research could win wars more decisively than just British heroism. The DSIR forced companies to offer their services to the state. Increased state support for science and industry was having a noticeable effect as the aeroplane and the tank were introduced into warfare. After the war hundreds such wartime innovations were rewarded. Telecommunications, especially the Fullerphone, had also been of great importance. Since Marconi had intercepted hostile conversations and its “direction finders” had tracked German navy and airships in the open sea, their wartime contribution was more richly rewarded than that of Fuller.

 

The corrected version:

The article in “The Guardian” from the 28^th of October 2013 by Elizabeth Burton and Graeme Gooday raises the question if British innovators nobly donated their innovations to warfare or if warfare was just profit for them.

16 million people died during the Great War but millions more pounds were spent on armaments and the routine expense of war. It is clear that Patriotism alone was not always the main rational for industrial activity in wartime. The Marconi Company made it possible to monitor all communications by providing its wireless operators and training to facilitate the armed services’ use of wireless communications without demanding any upfront payment.

In 1915 the United Kingdom established its national Department of Scientific Industrial Research (DSIR) because it was clear that the German model of state investment of research could win wars more decisively than just British heroism. The DSIR forced companies to offer their services to the state. Increased state support for science and industry was having a noticeable effect as the aeroplane and the tank were introduced into warfare.

After the war hundreds such wartime innovations were rewarded. Telecommunications, especially the Fullerphone, had also been of great importance. Since Marconi had intercepted hostile conversations and its “direction finders” had tracked German navy and airships in the open sea, their wartime contribution was more richly rewarded than that of Fuller.  

 

All in all I didn’t do a bad job on this summary.

In order to improve it I had to add the source at the beginning of my text and I also had to divide it into paragraphs. The beginning of my summary was a little confusing, so I read the article again and tried to write it a bit clearer and less confusing.

In order to improve my summary writing skills I have to make sure that I write my summaries in an appropriate register, not using contractions or too informal words. I also have to remember to state the source at the beginning of my texts and I have to divide my summaries into paragraphs.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

This blog post is about a video we watched in English class. The video is called “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” and it is about the financial crisis of 2008. My task now is to write a before-and-after blog post based on the summary of the video that I had to write for homework a while ago. The second summary is the corrected version.

Before:

The credit crisis is a world-wide financial fiasco affecting everyone. Traditionally investors went to the US Federal Reserve to buy treasury bills to grow their wealth. After 9/11 the interest rates were lowered to 1% in order to keep the economy working. Because of that banks were able to borrow money cheaply and as a result they went crazy with leverage. Leverage means to borrow money to amplify the outcome of a deal and it’s a major way banks make their money. Wall Street had the great idea to connect homeowners to investors through mortgages. Here the Collateralized Debt Obligation, which is basically dividable into a safe, okay and risky slice, plays an important role. Hedge funds and risk takers invest in the risky slice in order to balance the risk. Now money was given to sub-prime-mortgages because if homeowners default on their payments, lenders get the houses that keep increasing in value and therefore banks would even make profit when they sell the house. Unfortunately house values started to drop and the brokers were sitting on their houses as nobody wanted to apply for mortgages anymore. This results in debts and everybody gets bankrupt.  

 

After:

Source: “The Crisis of Credit Visualized”, a video by Jonathan Jarvis from the website crisisofcredit.com

The 2008 credit crisis is a world-wide financial fiasco affecting everyone.

Traditionally investors went to the US Federal Reserve to buy treasury bills to grow their wealth. After 9/11 the interest rates were lowered to 1% in order to keep the economy working. Banks were therefore able to borrow money cheaply and as a result leverage increased. Leverage means to borrow money to amplify the outcome of a deal and it is a major way banks make their money.

Wall Street then connected homeowners to investors through mortgages. Here the Collateralized Debt Obligation, which is dividable into a safe, okay and risky slice, plays an important role. Hedge funds and risk takers invest in the risky slice in order to balance their risk. Now money was given to sub-prime-mortgages because if these homeowners default on their payments, lenders get the houses that keep increasing in value and therefore banks would even make profit when they sell the house. Unfortunately house values started to drop due to a higher supply of houses than demand. The brokers could not sell their houses anymore as everybody was bankrupt and therefore nobody could apply for mortgages anymore. In the end the financial system froze.

 

Thankfully, my first summary wasn’t completely terrible but I could definitely have done much better. I made a lot of stupid mistakes, especially register mistakes, as I wrote way too informal. I also forgot to mention the source of the text in my first summary, which is definitely something I have to remember from now on.

As Henry was reading through my summary I realized that some sentences were a little confusing and that I should have proofread it more often or even better, I should have asked somebody else to proofread it for me and let me know if the text makes sense.  

In order to improve my academic vocabulary and get used to writing in a more formal way, Henry recommended that I read newspapers, such as the Atlantic or the New Yorker. I will gladly take that advice and hopefully improve my grade soon. J

 

What I need to work on:

-        make sure to use an appropriate register for my writings

-        proofread texts many times in order to make sure that there are no mistakes of any sort. (ask somebody else to proofread it as well)

-        make sure that I mention the source that I am using at the beginning of my writing

 

Here’s the link to the website where you can watch the video:

http://crisisofcredit.com/

 

Vocabulary Learning Strategies (Vocabulary post 1)

What I am doing to improve my vocabulary

Words are the basic components of every language. Therefore if you want to improve your language skills it is very important to constantly learn new vocabulary. I read a lot of English books in my free time because in my opinion this is the best way to get a feel for the language and to learn how to use certain words and phrases correctly. If I come across a word that I don’t know, I add it to my vocabulary list and figure out its meaning and use. Whenever I am not busy I read through my list and try to remember as much new vocabulary as possible. The most efficient time to do this, for me personally, is before I go to sleep because by then I am relaxed and can focus solely on the words. My goal is to learn around five new words a day. This might not sound like much but if I do this day in and day out, it really adds up in the long run and the progress is noticeable. Another thing that helps me a lot to build my vocabulary is watching English movies or TV series. If I need a break from university, this is relaxing on the one hand and passive language learning on the other hand. Of course everyone has their own approach to vocabulary learning but for me the most fun and successful way is to combine it with what I like to do in my free time.

Vocabulary.com is also very helpful when it comes to learning vocabulary. I had never used this website until Frank showed us in class how useful it can be. The website is very well structured and easy to use. In my opinion, the best thing about Vocabulary.com is that you can create your own personal vocabulary lists. This can be done very easily and quickly and there is no limit to how many lists you can create. Especially when I am studying for our upcoming progress check I find that feature of Vocabulary.com very helpful, because I can simply remove all the words that I know already and create a list with just the words that I still need to study for the exam. Another positive thing about Vocabulary.com is that it is also available as a cell phone app, which is free. If you are waiting for the bus and you have a few minutes to kill, you won’t get bored and you are doing something useful at the same time. If you are doing your homework and you are not sure about the exact meaning of a certain word, the Vocabulary.com app will get the answer in a jiffy and you don’t even need to switch on a laptop or computer. I find this app really useful and convenient, so I would recommend that everyone download it onto their phone as soon as possible.

Being a book lover, I find the Porter book and the English Vocabulary in Use book that we used last year very helpful. I like to be able to fill out vocabulary exercises because that way you learn the meaning of the word as well as how it is used within a sentence. These language learning books usually provide an answer key which allows you to check your answers right after you filled out the exercises. This is extremely important to me because that way you know right away if your answers are correct and the chance of learning a wrong meaning of a word is minimized. Since the Porter book focuses on Academic English, it will be very helpful to me this semester when it comes to writing the academic paper because with the help of that book I should be learning mainly words and phrases that are commonly used in formal, academic writing.