My pronunciaion - Part 2

A few lessons ago we had to record ourselves in class in order to have our pronunciation analysed. We had to read out a text we had written ourselves, a text we haven’t seen before and we also needed to describe a picture. A couple of weeks later we received our feedback and had to start working on improving said flaws.

The most common mistakes that I seem to make is the wrong pronunciation of the consonants “d” or “t”. I seem to have difficulty in distinguishing the two different ways of pronouncing the d and t in the words e.g. “tin” and “dame”. A video on a subpage of the BBC website  helped me solve this problem by showing me how those two sounds are actually produced. Even though both sounds are created by touching the tip of your tongue to the back of your top front teeth, they still sound different. The trick is, in fact that when pronouncing a t, a puff of air is supposed to leave your mouth. You’ll see that I am right if you try out the following: hold a thin piece of paper in front of your mouth and say the words “dame” and “tin”. If you do it correctly, the paper will sway a bit when you pronounce the "t".

Another sound I seem to struggle with is the pronunciation of the “v” and the “f”. The same website I mentioned above also had an interesting video on this topic. The “f” sound like in the words “fat” or “coffee” is produced by touching your lower lip to your top teeth and blowing air out of your mouth. When you pronounce the “v” sound like in e.g. “move” or “very” your lips and teeth are supposed to touch in the same way but they are supposed to create a vibrating sound. 

The last sound that I would like to improve on is the "ae" sound as in “lap”, “back” or “trap”. Only after getting my pronunciation feedback I realised that I never ACTUALLY pronounced one of these words correctly. After listening to the correct pronunciation and the explanation of how the vowel is produced, I had a hard time pronouncing words like “stamp” or “trap” because the new way of pronouncing the words felt so foreign to me.

Altogether, I realised that there are still a number of flaws in my pronunciation but I am glad that I now am aware of them. My pronunciation is nowwhere near perfect but I love a good challenge and that is why I am definitely going to try and improve in order to get as close to perfection as possible. :-)

Porter Words

For our upcoming Vocabulary exam on Thursday Vanessa and I decided to prepare the vocabulary we were assigned to study together. We first split the units up into two sections and each of us had to prepare one section  according to the following criteria: We needed to find a definition, a synonym or an antonym and a helpful example sentence for every word.

Preparing the vocabulary like this is undoubtedly time-consuming but for me it is also incredibly helpful: While I prepare the vocab, I subconsciously start to process and save bits and pieces. I  only realised how well this worked for me after I finished preparing my part. I realised that I could already remember the majority of the words and therefore only had to properly study the 160 ones Vanessa prepared.

I used to need only very little time for studying vocabulary because it was one of the things I managed to remember quite well. But ever since I came to university, my concentration has deteriorated and nowadays I tend to need much more time. Regaining my ability to concentrate hasn't been easy and for that reason I had to find a way of studying that would save me as much time as possible. For me personally, studying with the help of recordings or with pen and paper turned out to be most effective. Some people study with the help of the Internet or they use cue cards. I don’t really want to invest my time into cue cards and studying with the help of the Internet just doesn’t work for me because I can’t keep up my concentration. What I like to do, though, is to record myself phrasing the information I want to remember but I only ever choose to study this particular way when studying vocabulary. It is a quite helpful technique because all you need is a decent smartphone to record yourself and a little time to listen to your recordings afterwards.

Another way that has always proved to be a success is to write learning material down. Things that I can’t learn by heart by simply reading them over and over need a different approach: I need to take a pen and write the information down. The written record of what I write down is unimportant and I usually bin them afterwards. It is the simple process of writing it down that helps me save the information and in 99% of the cases this method is effective. 

Currently, I am still studying for the upcoming (or rather "postponed") exam and I have to say that I am making quite the progress. I'll just have to keep studying  and hope, fingers crossed, that all will go well.

Giving a Pecha Kucha Presentaion

 

When I was introduced to the concept of a “Pecha Kucha” presentation, my mood turned from splendid to rather annoyed. Seeing as I don’t like giving presentations in general, the prospect of having to get accustomed to a new type of presentation did very little to brighten my mood. I was lucky to be allowed to choose my presentation pal because Vanessa is probably the only one who can bear my incessant nagging about how much I dislike giving presentations.

Vanessa and I didn’t find a topic for our presentation right away. In fact, most of our fellow students had already picked their topics while we were still racking our brains about what to choose. Thanks to Vanessa though, we succeeded in finding an awesome topic. She showed me an article she found in some newspaper or magazine which talked about multilingualism in Luxembourg. The decision was easily made, seeing as we knew nothing else we could possibly talk about.

After having agreed on the scope of the topic, we started researching right away. The sources we found were useful as well easily understandable and for that reason research took up little time.  Vanessa might disagree on that but I think that doing research was the least time-consuming and least annoying part of the preparation process.
Someone who also played an essential role in the preparation process and therefore definitely needs to be mentioned in this post is Selma. Selma is a student from Luxembourg who currently attends university here in Graz. We sent her an email and asked if she’d like to meet up with us. She agreed and helped us add the finishing touches to our presentation by translating certain English phrases into Luxembourgish and by teaching us how to say them. 

When it came to preparing ourselves for the presentation, I have to admit that I did better than I thought I would. I succeeded in learning my whole presentation by heart and only wrote certain key phrases or the first two or 3 words of different sentences down. When the fateful day was finally upon us, I was nervous nonetheless. Altogehter, I think we actually did a decent job though. We worked very hard to succeed in timing our presentation perfectly and the effort paid off in the end.

When it was all over I realised that it was only half as bad as I had expected it to be. It was less time consuming and nerve wracking than I anticipated. Still, I don't particulary enjoy this kind of presentation because it puts you under a lot of pressure. You NEED to say the things you prepared for every single slide  in exactly 20 seconds (no give or take!). If you talk to slow, you can’t continue on speaking because the next slide appears on the screen and it is your partner’s turn. Both Vanessa and I worried about this particular aspect of the presentation for WEEKS because we felt like it was just bound to go wrong. In the end,  we received pretty good feedback from our fellow students though, which proves that we did quite a decent job and that it was all worth the effort.