Sonntag, 15. Dezember 2013

Acedmic paper in progress

To be completely honest, my paper is not going to great so far. This task appears to be a lot more difficult than I expected. Additionally, although I love my topic – Bears in the EU – it is rather hard to find interesting sources. I still haven’t decided on my thesis statement or my scope yet. I am not sure whether I want to focus on the legal aspect, the trophy trade or do a kind of snapshot of the conditions bears live in. This topic would be so much more interesting if it didn’t have to tie in with the EU. As of now I am seriously contemplating changing my topic to something like the debate about the United States of Europe.

Donnerstag, 12. Dezember 2013

Pronounciation Diary - Day 1

!!! I actually decided to really get into English pronounciation and dedicate a whole seperate blog to this topic: http://ohenglishwhereartthou.blogspot.co.at/ I will try to organise it better when I have written more posts.!!!

Often it is not so much what you say, but how you say it.

For example, I have got this one friend, who always manages to drag me along to his weird events just because he manages to sound so convincing. He manages to provoke action with his way of speaking.

On a larger scale this also true with accents in a foreign language. When I was studying Physics in Vienna we had one lecture which was partly in English. Of course our professors all were geniouses BUT their thick German accent just made them sound so uneducated. It really crushed their credibility. We actually came up with a name for that - the aesthetic paradox!

Yet even though our professor sounded funny, after listening to him for a while it was clear that he was an expert on his field. And since our field of expertise is languages we really really ought to get down our pronouciation! For the sake of our credibilty!

So I came up with a structured plan to help me improve my pronounciation.

Block 1 - erasing every last bit of German in my English...

Because....unlucky for us, a German accent doesn't sound charming like the French one.

v/w sound
the/ three

Block 2 - different accents

identify
imitate
Australian
British
American
after Erasmus in Dublin - Irish