Pronunciation Diary (Part II)

Hello everyone!

Although I knew that when it comes to my pronunciation there’s still a lot to work on, I was surprised at Frank’s feedback on the pronunciation test we did in class. According to his notes, I had problems pronouncing words I was actually quite confident about but on the other hand I pronounced words correctly of which I had thought I would never pronounce them the right way!

Here’s the list of the words I have mispronounced: 

·        model

·        knobs

·        aluminium pen tray

·        dinosaurs

·        $ 27.69

·        life vs lives
·        they’re  

Nevertheless, I have taken the feedback to heart and looked up the words I mispronounced on howjsay. I’ve practised the pronunciation several times, then I recorded it and listened to myself. A few of the words were already quite okay but some still sounded weird… I’ve also recorded myself with a mobile phone app called ‘Dragon Dictation’, which can be downloaded for free. This app records your voice and writes down everything you say – or at least everything the app understands. It can happen that you pronounce a word wrongly and that the app hears something completely different. You’ll find out easily when you look at the text the app produces!

I tried it again and again until I was (kind of) pleased with it and recorded myself again.

And now let’s move on to the fun part of this blog post!

Have you ever searched for the ten most difficult English words to pronounce? What do you think they are? Months? Legislation? Cucumber? Well on lexiphiles.com I’ve found a list (I’m sure there are several different ones on the Internet..) with ten words  that should be difficult to pronounce. 

#1 Rollerblading
#2 Miscellaneous
#3 Caucasian
#4 Deterioration
#5 Refrigerator
#6 Otolaryngology
#7 Tremendous
#8 Third
#9 Remuneration
#10 Entrepreneurship

After reading through the list I thought ‘Seriously? Rollerblading is the most difficult word?’. In order to prove how easy it is I tried to say it aloud and literally tripped over the second ‘r’. Although it is just a normal word for an everyday activity the word itself is not that easy to pronounce.

Apart from ‘rollerblading also a few other words were really difficult for me. For example the word ‘third’, although being the shortest word in the list, has its twists. Not only the ‘th’-sound but also the ‘r’ always seems to sound weird out of my mouth. Other words, however, like ‘deterioration’ or ‘tremendous’ were easier for me. A reason for this might be that pronunciation is something that depends very much on the person itself.  I’m sure every student has a different word in his mind when he or she is asked to name the most difficult word to pronounce. Therefore, it is also important that everyone develops his own methods and strategies to tackle pronunciation and to keep working on it individually!

 

Pecha Kucha!

The making of

When the term “Pecha Kucha” appeared for the first time I was a bit puzzled. Not only was the word tricky to pronounce but also everything behind the word, namely a presentation of only 6 minutes and fourty seconds seemed only to be invented in order to annoy students at the ITAT. I have to admit: when our teacher told us we should prepare such a Pecha Kucha presentation for our English class I was everything but happy. I accepted my fate and together with my friend Dunja we chose “Bilingual Schools in Austria” as a topic. At first we started working on it individually: Everyone collected as much information as possible and pasted it in a Google document. When the deadline came closer and closer, we used class time in order to sort out what we can actually use for the presentation. Since my mother knows the headmaster of a bilingual school, we interviewed him via email and used the information he provided as a source for the presentation. Apart from this, Dunja talked with two children she knows who attend the GIBS. While working on it I increasingly sympathized not only with our topic but also with the Pecha Kucha presentation itself.

The preparation of our presentation went fine since we had many different sources and worked well as a team. The only problem we had, appeared during the recording of our transcript. Since we haven’t practised it before, we had to cut out and shorten down a lot of things so that the presentation wouldn’t be too long. If we ever have to prepare such kind of presentation again, I would definitely pay more attention to the length of the transcript beforehand so we don’t need to change everything again when recording the transcript. 

The product

All in all I was pleased with our presentation. Of course, we still made a few pronunciation mistakes but I guess it was quite okay. I had thought we would have problems with the time management (talking only 20 seconds for every slide), but since we had changed the transcript so often, we could perform it more or less smoothly.

When watching the other presentations, I was amazed at the topics: I still can’t decide which topic was the most interesting one. Everything was very well researched and the students knew a lot about their topics. Also the presentation themselves were good if not excellent. This has shown me that a Pecha Kucha presentation can be great fun to prepare and also interesting to listen to!

Me and my academic paper...

Hello everyone! Although the last few weeks were quite busy for me (exams, assignments, presentations etc. – I guess you know what I’m talking about!), I’ve finally found time to start working on my academic paper. Apart from my introduction and an approximate idea what the content will be like, I had almost nothing. In the days I tried to organize my sources – and I was more than successful! Thanks to our university’s online library, I could easily print out the three articles I need for my paper without having to go to the ‘real’ library and search for hours and hours for the magazines. The articles are quite long but easy to understand. So far, I’ve fully read two of them and excerpted the most useful parts. Concerning my online sources, I’ve skimmed through all of them but I still need to read them carefully in order to find out what I can use for my paper.  Reading my sources has definitely helped me to gain a better insight into my topic and to figure out what I can actually write about. I plan to start writing this weekend and to write at least 400 words so that I can enjoy the Christmas holidays without having to worry too much about my paper!

 

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all enjoy the last few days of 2013 and find time to relax!

Textkompetenz: Why the EU should intervene to stop Hungary from a dictatorship

Here's the link to our text: http://heroldflux.blogspot.co.at/2013/12/why-european-union-schould-intervene-to.html

Pronunciation Diary

PRONUNCIATION – not only a trick word when it comes to the right spelling but it’s actually quite difficult to be good at it!

Speaking honestly, I’ve always neglected working on my pronunciation skills. In the last few months here at the ITAT I’ve definitely improved my grammar, learned a lot of useful vocabulary and also my text writing abilities have (hopefully!) improved. But pronunciation? I remember Fiona telling as over and over again that the “v” in “village” is something totally different than the “w” in “weather” and that “to comment” should never sound like the noun “a comment” but apart from this my pronunciation was for me something that I thought will “improve by itself”. Sure, if you are constantly in touch with the English language your pronunciation automatically improves but in order to really sound like an English native speaker, you have to go into detail and learn more about different accents, how tricky words are pronounced the right way and what you as an English student should definitely avoid.

And is there a certain accent I aim for? Well, I think this question is difficult to answer. I think both the British and the American accent sound good but as I’m more used to listening to American accents and as it sounds more natural to me, I will definitely aim for an American accent.  After listening to some of the American accent tutorials on our pronunciation practice page, I also searched for useful tutorials on Youtube. Here’s what I found:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYLZUcjTZAs

In this video, a Canadian English teacher called Melanie explains that most Americans don’t pronounce the “t” if it comes after an “n”… For example, the word “interview” would more sound like “innerview”. The same goes for the “d” after an “n” like in the word “understand”.  I was really impressed by this video because I had never realized it before! I also watched a few of Melanie’s other videos and I tried a few exercise. Of course, not everything worked out that good and some words still sounded a bit weird when I tried to pronounce them correctly, but in one of her videos Melanie says that it takes at least 21 days to get used to a new speaking habit. I think this is the most important thing you have to keep in mind when you practice your pronunciation: It will take you some time to sound like an American/Brit but if you work hard on it and practise every day you will be able achieve your goal! 

By the way: Melanie has her own webpage where you can learn vocabulary or read more about different grammar chapters. (http://www.englishteachermelanie.com) 

Do you remember the disturbing “English” song Frank showed us in our class last week? Well, here’s a similar video, with the title “Skwerl”… Have fun with it, maybe you understand more than I did ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY

I hope you all have a great week and enjoy the Advent season! 

Comment on 'summary1'

Summary of “Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese’ deflation grave”

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in The Telegraph of October 23, 2013 analyses Europe’s debt crisis. (1)

According to Evans-Pritchard, more and more European states are suffering from the recent “trend” (2) of deflation as prices are falling and debt is increasing. Spain and Italy, for instance, are pushed into runaway debt trajectory and even Germany, renowned for having a flat inflation (3), is said to be in danger of deflation too.  Debt itself is already difficult to overcome but with deflation, the situation becomes lethal. Basically, Europe is now feared to end up in the same situation like Japan (4), sliding into a deflationary trap which will have hardly any turning back.  Nevertheless, possible solutions are proposed to try to, no matter how, break out of the impasse (5). The ECB, for instance, should do whatever it takes to keep inflation high enough to lower the risk of deflation in any vulnerable country. Another way to protect Europe from a complete deflation disaster would be the ganging up of the Club Gang (6) on Germany and forcing the country to accept inflation.

No matter which way Europe chooses to stabilise (7) deflation and debt, measures must be taken before Europe ends up in the same deflation lodge as Japan.

[200 words]

Here are my comments:

(1)    I think it would be better to change the word order in this sentence in order to make it 'easier' to read and get rid of this comma: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard analyses Europe’s debt crisis in The Telegraph of October 23, 2013.

Still, this sentence is a good start/introduction!

(2)    I think the word 'trend' is not the best choice in this sentence. Maybe you could just skip it and write something like: '…are suffering from the recent deflation as…'.

(3)    I looked up the word 'inflation' on the COCA and the most frequent collocation for it was 'low'. Therefore, I would change it to 'a low inflation'.

(4)    It is very good that you mention Japan in this context as it explains the title of the newspaper article. 

(5)    You chose a very fitting metaphor in this sentence! But shouldn’t it be 'break the impasse'?

(6)    In the text it was the 'Club Med', right?

(7)    Maybe it would sound better to write something like 'fight deflation', but I guess 'stabilise' is also correct!

In general, I think your summary is very good! What I liked most is that you used metaphors like 'to be pushed into runaway debt trajectory' or 'to break the impasse' as they help to depict the actual problem. Apart from this, the clear structure and logic of your summary helps understanding the matter. In my summary I tried to divide the main part into three smaller paragraphs which was not such a good idea. Your summary shows me that one can still write everything in one paragraph and still have a good organisation. I also liked that you referred to Japan and thus explained the title of the article very well. This is also something I will definitely do in my next summary. However, there are some words and phrases I might have written differently.