Reflection on the Pecha Kucha experience

Reflection on the Pecha Kucha experience

Similarities between Austria and the Czech Republic

• Making of
• Actual presentation
• Conclusion

Having chosen a topic, which turned out to be rather difficult to implement into a "language themed bloc" of presentations Fabio and I did our best to create something worth presenting. In the beginning it seemed quite easy to find information to talk about but it was incredibly difficult to think of a connection to language. At first, we were planning to prioritize cultural differences with "language" as one of the points mentioned. Frank, however, pointed out, in a honest but spirit crushing way that he wanted something with language as its main focus. So, on the eve of our presentation, we had to completely restructure our presentation. Finally, as morning had broken, we finished our "masterpiece". 

As we were one of the last groups had to endure a seemingly endless number of great presentations showed us that our "masterpiece" was still far from perfect. Sitting in the audience only to give feedback is a really great feeling. But as we had yet to present our work I was really and I mean really grateful for the possibility of written feedback. Nothing would have been more embarrassing than telling other people how to improve their skills and then mess it up completely ourselves. Our presentation would, eventually, be completely messed up by wrong timing, insufficient preparation, a poorly chosen topic and nervousness. Only 12 hours after the completion of our work we had to present it in front of well-meaning, friendly and interested listeners, which to us, standing in front of them, seemed like a group of rabid, vicious wolverines ready to tear us apart. Miraculously, we are still alive, despite our bad pronunciation and our messed-up timing. 

To prevent any future wolverine attacks, and I was positive that there would be some, eventually, I decided to never do a “last minute” presentation ever again and if possible choose a my topic in a more intelligent way than to just pick the first newspaper headline that I can think of. As a listener, it was definitely an interesting experience. Listening to some French and some Eastern European students’ accents, trying to sound as “English” as possible, was as enjoyable as it was instructional.

Pronunciation Diary

Pronunciation Diary

After doing not so well on the pronunciation task we did in class two weeks ago, I decided to reflect on my mistakes. I have to say that my mistakes were mostly caused by my fast reading. I was a little late realizing that it was my turn, so I tried to be as fast as possible. Words like "carrying handle" should be rather easy to pronounce for, if I pace myself. My mistake with "aluminum" and "aluminium" however was due to really sloppy reading and the naive anticipation that there wouldn't be any tricky words in the text. To improve my pronunciation I read every vocabulary question I answered on vocabulary.com out loud. Then I checked its pronunciation online. This turned out to be really interesting because listening to a word pronounced in many different accents gives you the feeling that you could mispronounce the word in all possible ways and still sound, of course only by accident, like a native speaker. The accents in the North of Great Britain are quite something (Scottish, the Northern part of England).
I'm not particularly looking forward to the because of one simple reason: related words. I knew the word "ambiguous" and its correct pronunciation, but I had never heard the corresponding noun pronounced correctly (without background noise and properly pronounced.There is also a difference between knowing the right pronunciation and actually pronouncing a word clearly in a sentence. This becomes even more difficult when one is forced to speak fast and without time to reflect on the correct pronunciation of words. So, obviously I need not only a better pronunciation, but also a lot of time to study the "corresponding" words.

Vocabulary exercises (combined Vocab post/proof)

Vocabulary exercises

Today I had to realize that the "deadline" for this post was actually last night and I don't know if it will still be accepted. Nevertheless, I'm going to write one in order to practice for the upcoming exam. Although it seems that I was mistaken. A newly added part of the WBW informed me that my oral exam would be next week. Well, I was motivated to study anyway, so I visited the vocabulary.com website.
After doing around twenty of the "LEARN THIS LIST" exercises I realized that the most difficult part of the exam would not be the sentence containing the porter words, but the description. Some of the words are really rare like "ambiguity" or "amorphous" are not only hard to pronounce (but this will come later on in my pronunciation post), but are also rarely used. For me the hardest part was to come up with "related" words. Sometimes the related words are just so rare that they seem weird. Frank used a good example in his "fake" test last week. APPARATUS-> I know I am not a native English speaker but I never heard this word except for some scientists referring to their complete laboratory equipment as their "apparatus"(I hope I'm right).

Okay on to the next topic. I really enjoyed the "spelling bee" exercises. I got most of them right but as there are some words in the English language, which are (or at least I got the feeling) just randomly pronounced, I made some annoying mistakes. However, listening to movies in their native English language for the last five years has really sharpened my listening skills, as well as imporved my vocabulary.

In order to have any proof of studying the porter words I did some vocab exercices today. I have no idea at all how I should describe my learning system when it comes to vocabulary. I think that using vocabulary.com is a productive way, because the site will always tell you what the right answer would have been, as well as a complete description of the word or phrase you are working on. Here are some screenshots depicting my results. The next time I won't start at 11 pm and in   order to crack the highscore I should have stayed with the words of the first unit(not because they're easier but with 1.5 k points per 10 words, you get a lot more than in the units 5 or 6).