The purpose of this blog is to be the learning diary of the ALMS course. Here I'm going to update my English learning process and all kinds of activites related to the course. Learn more from the Abouts (or go to the actual website http://almsblogjulia.tumblr.com/. )
The course is ending this Friday for my part, but I think keeping this kind of journal isn’t half as bad of an idea. This course has been mostly fun, expect a few frustration failed meet-ups with the E1T1-group, but that’s fine.
Action: I have problems with prepositions, so I did a few post notes about them, and scattered them around the apartment. It's easier to learn when you come accross it, ypu see it, and go away. Next time when you pass it you remember it again and it sticks in the memory better. It's like positive feedback :D Focus: eyes, post notes Reflection: positive feedback.
Action: I started reading an English book during my bus drives. They don’t take so much time, only 20 minutes to the campus, but I was amazed how much one can read during that time (i take myself as a slow reader, so to me it’s a wonder). I also read whenever I felt like it.
The book is called Tailchaser’s Song, and it tells about a cat Tailchaser, who goes to look for his friend and heads to the First Home, the place where their ancestors lived and where the present royals stay at the moment. During his trip he gets in many troubles and gets new allies and meets new friends.
I still haven’t finished the book, but it’s divided to three parts, where the first part contains the journey. I’m in the middle of part two, but it clearly holds the event’s, when decisions are made and friends are heading to their own ways. About the part three i have no idea, but I'm expecting something very big, because there are so many untangled strings left.
The book is easy to place on the lap and just start reading. The characters aren’t too exaggerated, they’re just right and balance each others. The language is a little bit hard, thought, because the cats and other animals have their own languages and vocabulary for things (compare to like The Lord of the Rings), so it sometimes gets confused to read. But that’s the biggest problem with me and fantasy novels, so I can’t help it.
So far I have only positive opinions. Even thought it’s not 100% fantasy novel, but there’s the quest, the journey, the allies and rivals, adversities here and there, and many things that are explained way later on. Most of these qualities are in a fantasy novel, but I think talking animals do count as fantasy, so here you go.
focus: reading. Just reading.
Reflection: reading is fun, especially in English. Why did I quit this??
Action: To kind of leveling up the listening challenge (plus i was very stuck with Doctor Who, there’s this very scary episode i didn’t want to watch alone, so i had to wait for the chance to watch it with somebody), I started watching the BBC -channel’s series Sherlock. The casual English isn’t as fast as in Doctor Who (except when Sherlock was talking), it contains lot of material, object and activity vocabulary (it’s kind of action rich series) and there also was a few dialects, which were nice to listen to. I watched all three seasons, expect I skipped the Hound of Baskerville -episode, because in my opinion, it wasn’t challenging enough (by plot I mean).
focus: listening the dialects, focusing on the way things were presented out loud
Reflection: i feel like my pronouncing is trying to become more UK like, their dialect is so great sounding. Although, my boyfriend has wathced Modern Family now and I have accompanied him, and the US dialect is pushing back i guess...
Action: i went to spend my weekend to my friend’s place, because i asked her if she’s comfortable speaking English the whole time and she said yes (which i kinda knew already, she’s so comfortable to talk to and listen to! She also talks so casually and she didn’t seem bothered by my mumbling~).
So, I mostly read a book (I'm going to tell more about that later), or watched Doctor Who episodes, which I mentioned at one post earlier I'm doing for listening practice. Other than that, we mostly chatted because we hadn’t seen such a long time and she showed all these cool You Tube-videos where a couple of semi-famous channel holders live in Korea or Japan or go to Taiwan and then they tell about the culture there, all kinds of foods they eat and make, how some things seemed weird or funny to them when they came to stay there, etc. They were so entertaining, and I have finally understood that i.e. Korea and Japan are very different, unlike Finland and Sweden (let’s face it, we’re pretty much similar in most ways).
I think the best things during the weekend was that when one couldn’t remember a word, we tried explained it or when all failed, just said it in finnish. if after thinking about it for a moment nothing came up we went to google translate and depending of the result our reaction were so great and sincere, like
‘oh yeah, that word, i should have remembered that’ and a soft face palm,
or
‘wha? it’s literally that? it makes so much sense!’
I went to er place as early as i could, and we didn’t sleep that much during the weekend, that’s why there’s so many hours.
focus: getting to use English casually, get more courage to speak and mess up.
Reflection: It’s more comfortable to talk to some people than others, but when found the right person English just kinda bubbles out!
Activity: I haven’t been updating recently, but there hasn’t been anything big to update. During these two first meetings we mostly played thins game called __________, and if we chatted, it was in the middle of the rounds. During this last meeting we mainly talk about our own studies, the program and the teachings’ weaknesses, and kept a very short presentation about our own major and answered each others’ questions.
About the game:( I forgot the games name, so i’ll update this later, sorry about that ^^;)
focus: The game cards for playing, ears for listening, eyes for observation, mouth for speaking
Reflection: Reflection games aren’t any fun, when one’s tired. It’s nice to listen to people talking about miscellaneous subjects, like going from math studies to how one of the lecturers have a funny reindeer jumper during the last week of December.
This was only one time session for getting tips about easier vocabulary learning.
Activity: This was mostly either discussing about own methods and/ or problems with vocabulary, and the rest of the session went mostly for checking all kinds of links about different kind of helpful methods or games or alike. Some of the links seemed usable and helpful (I think it’s okay to put some of the links here, especially which i found useful… I’ll add them later on and put a short description how I see it and what our counselor told about them).
(links here)
ozdic : feed a word, and it gives you; the subscribing adjectives you can use; verbs that work with it; prepositions for different kinds of describing; much more.
usingenglish.com: feed a word/preposition, and it gives all kinds of verb+preposition -pairs it can be used as, and much more. It also provides tests for learning purposes.
dictionary.cambridge.org/ : you can choose from English-English dictionary to grammar and English-other language -dictionary. There you can get a simulated pronouncing either in UK or US English.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/sounds/index.html : Here you get videos of pronunciations of different phonetic alphabetics and it’s examples of use.
ted : videos of people speaking topics from A to Z. Here you can listen to a video of the session, and a text containing the whole video dialogue. You can skip to a part you want to go by clicking the text part of it, and either read it at the same time or look up the sentence you didn’t quit get from the video.
http://www.englishvocabularyexercises.com/ : Contains both regular and academic vocabulary lists and games for them. It contains a link to a grammar check and games too.
http://visualdictionaryonline.com/ : as it states, a visual dictionary. You choose a topic, look for an object and it gives you a picture of it and states the different parts of it.
Quizlet: avaivable also as an phone application from Appstore and Googleplay, but requires signing in either with facebook, google+ or email. Contains all kinds of vocabulary games and/or create class, where you can invite friends.
http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/3366 : A synonym game, where from every right answer FreeRice.com apparently donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nation World food program.
Here are links which require downloading, and i can’t do that with the department’s laptop, but i’ll put tehm here in case someone (or me later) wants to try
http://ankisrs.net
The counselor who held this shower had such a gentle accent, it was nice to listen to, even thought it took much effort to keep up with.
focus: Discussing about our own learning abilities and habits, the holes in there, and how to fix them. Listening the one who knows more.
Reflection: More tips for learning from different kinds of perspectives.
Activity: This time Michael taught us how to do good guacamole, and Noora binded it to the very idea of aesthetics. We made notes both from the food-making and the discussion of the aesthetic topic. (It was my job to scan them and share it with everyone, but yeah, still need to do that...)
focus: Keeping up with the introductions (the cooking part), discussing about opinions and speaking your mind and making notes from it (getting the main points) (the aesthetics part).
Reflection: Guacamole is quite good, this was the first time i ate it. Aesthetics pretty much depends on the person and the culture they live in.
Activity: This time one of our group members told us about his trip to Dubai. Mostly listened tales of his adventures there, and asked all kinds of questions. I have never been to Dubai (or even near the country) so i was very much interested about the culture and habits of the place. (I think it’s not my place to tell about what he did there, for that’s in my opinion personal information.)
focus: keeping up with the story, asking more information you got questions from.
Reflection: Active listening is hard, but worth it.
This was only one time session for getting tips about easier vocabulary learning.
Activity: This was mostly either discussing about own methods and/ or problems with vocabulary, and the rest of the session went mostly for checking all kinds of links about different kind of helpful methods or games or alike. Some of the links seemed usable and helpful (I think it’s okay to put some of the links here, especially which i found useful... I’ll add them later on and put a short description how I see it and what our counselor told about them).
(links here)
ozdic : feed a word, and it gives you; the subscribing adjectives you can use; verbs that work with it; prepositions for different kinds of describing; much more.
usingenglish.com: feed a word/preposition, and it gives all kinds of verb+preposition -pairs it can be used as, and much more. It also provides tests for learning purposes.
dictionary.cambridge.org/ : you can choose from English-English dictionary to grammar and English-other language -dictionary. There you can get a simulated pronouncing either in UK or US English.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/sounds/index.html : Here you get videos of pronunciations of different phonetic alphabetics and it’s examples of use.
ted : videos of people speaking topics from A to Z. Here you can listen to a video of the session, and a text containing the whole video dialogue. You can skip to a part you want to go by clicking the text part of it, and either read it at the same time or look up the sentence you didn’t quit get from the video.
http://www.englishvocabularyexercises.com/ : Contains both regular and academic vocabulary lists and games for them. It contains a link to a grammar check and games too.
http://visualdictionaryonline.com/ : as it states, a visual dictionary. You choose a topic, look for an object and it gives you a picture of it and states the different parts of it.
Quizlet: avaivable also as an phone application from Appstore and Googleplay, but requires signing in either with facebook, google+ or email. Contains all kinds of vocabulary games and/or create class, where you can invite friends.
http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/3366 : A synonym game, where from every right answer FreeRice.com apparently donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nation World food program.
Here are links which require downloading, and i can’t do that with the department’s laptop, but i’ll put tehm here in case someone (or me later) wants to try
http://ankisrs.net
The counselor who held this shower had such a gentle accent, it was nice to listen to, even thought it took much effort to keep up with.
focus: Discussing about our own learning abilities and habits, the holes in there, and how to fix them. Listening the one who knows more.
Reflection: More tips for learning from different kinds of perspectives.
In this session we only chitchatted, because we started with two members, one came late, and one was on a holiday.
Activity: The things we talked were pretty much trivial. We discussed, for example, about
how it’s easy and cheaper to patch up your own computer from parts than buy one ready from a store
headsets and headphones (i broke mine the very same morning and couldn’t find the warranty receipt, and i mostly whined about that...)
hmmmmm...
calculations i think? and how some things can be understood even thought it wouldn’t be the thing you study about (t.e. the math in the calculations), and the methods the departments are using and their reasonings
There was much more we discussed, but i have no memory of that anymore. It was fun to have a free topic -session, so you could come up with anything what was bugging your mind and just let it out and discuss about it.
focus: chitchat
Reflection: It’s quit hard to talk about whatever comes to your mind without making the subject changing every other sentence....
Action: As said, this time we played card games (mostly casino) because the one member, who had the turn to lead the topic for 45 minutes, had quit about a month before. I had played casino once before with my boyfriend, and i got such a poor experience from it.... but turns out it’s merrier the more participants there are! During the first play i did very badly, got only one point, but after that i got the idea of the game. It turns out it also depends a lot of the chances of getting the right cards on had and on the table.
For those, who don’t know, how to play casino, here some instructions:
There are a few changes on the values of the cards. On the table, the cards are their values are as stated on the card, ace being one. On the hand, there are a few expectations: all aces are 14, 10 of diamonds is 15(??) and 2 of spades is 16(??).
Four cards are given to all the players and on the table (divided by two at once, don’t know why) . Players check their cards, and the table cards are face up from the table.
During each turn, the player either takes cards from the table, or places one on the table. The player can take only cards, which combined will make the value of one card the player is holding, t.e. Jack(11) can be combined as 1(ace on the table)+10, 2+9, 3+8, 4+7, 6+5. (OBS! you can’t have the ace on the table with the ace on hand because 1 /= 14). The collected card are placed in front of the player on a pile for counting as the game ends.
If the player in turn cleans the table (as in takes the last cards on the table), they get one extra point marked in the final count down. The next player in turn has to place a card on the table, for the are no cards to take.
When the hand cards are all played, the dealer gives new 4 cards to each player. Now there won’t be placed any on the table.
When the pile ends, starts the final counting. Points are given from different achievements: the biggest amount of cards in total (1point), the biggest amount of spades (1point??), from having an ace or another specially valued card (10diam or 2spades)(1 point from each i think?? i could be wrong on this one...).
This can be played a couple of rounds, we didn’t have any point limit this time.
For the last 25 minutes we played a turn of slap. Slap is a game, where the whole pile is divided between the players, and in turns players place the top card from their own pile on the table. If there comes the same numbered cards in a row, the one who places (slaps/ hits) a hand on the pile first, gets the table pile. The one who collects all 52 cards, wins.
There’s also a special rule, which some decide to use or ignore. When there comes a royal (11, 12, 13) or ace (14), the next player in turn has hit the table pile whit an exact amount of cards ( with J hit 1, with Q hit 2, with K hit 3 and with ace hit 4). If the player doesn’t get another picture card during hitting, the one who placed the picture card gets the pile. This feature mostly distracts from the pair card slapping.
(Another special rule is a Sandwich rule, where there comes two same numbered cards, where there is one random card between them, like 6--4--6. These happen to appear more often than the pairs, so it makes the game more intense. We didn’t use this feature, it was already too intense with the pairs and picture cards.)
focus: Card-games, following the introductions and chitchat between the rounds
This time me and my friend both had the turn to teach, and we introduced a little bit the world of astronomy.
Action: On the night before we did the presentation with Prezi (it’s like PowerPoint, but it’s on the net, you can do it and play it anywhere Internet is available and with a friend). It took 5 hours, and it covered almost all the fields of basic components of space (not including the whole cosmology theory, only the background radiation part): stars, their phases from birth to “death”, Interstellar Medium (gas, dust and molecules), galaxies, solar system and space.
The presentation took about 1.5 hours, and we divided the introduction turns by which one of us had wrote the part on presentation. The folks said they’d enjoyed the session, one even had bought a friend along, who’s interested about space.
Here’s a link to one simulation we showed there, it shows the scale difference from atom to local universe.
After the session, we went to eat and do calculations to my friend’s and chitchatted all the way there.
focus: Astronomy, keeping things interesting and simple, entertain the audience.
Reflection: presentations are hard, even thou you’ve tried to prepare yourself for it. Themed vocabulary should be learned for the event before hand close to perfect.
I had a long time wished to start watching the Doctor who -series from netflix. I had actually tried to watch the show when it aired on YLE2 -channel, but i’m so bad with remembering weekly things, like TV-shows, so i missed most of the episodes... So now i wished to try again and give it a second chance. During the 3rd episode i realized the British accent was very hard for me to understand, so i turned the English subtitles on and made myself listen to the blubbering. After 13 episodes (already in season 2, whiii!) the mumbling -like English has become much more clearer. Seems like the hard work is paying off!
Action: Watching TV show from bbc, called Doctor Who.
focus: listening and getting used to the accent.
Reflection: British talk fast, and there are so many different dialects!
This time, too, was my time to lead the topic, and i chose to talk about music. We talked about our favorite genres and bands and/or singers, played a few favorite tracks from YouTube, and even talked about singing as a habit and.
Action: The other topic we talked about was was “what would we do and/or go to if we had the time ans resources this fall/any season”. My answer was to go this fall hiking or biking in Lapland, because the nature is so beautiful on fall and i haven’t gone there during that time of year ( only on winter). The other one where i would go if i had time and resources in anytime would be Japan, because the culture is so fascinating: it’s both different and the same kind as Finnish culture, and the land and language is so beautiful. The others also said they would travel abroad (like India, or Rome and Amsterdam).
focus: sharing opinions.
Reflection: Different people have so many great dreams!
During this groups session we learned about tea and playing a guitar.
Action: Playing guitar was the first in turn. I have always been fascinated by that string instrument, but have never actually really played one. When i was younger i did play a piano and a flute (the one you play on the side, not in front), so i do have some experience in music. It was actually new to me that it does matter which fingers you push the strings with, because for example playing E and Eb are one finger apart from being the same. This learning session really fire up my passion to learn more, and i did ask that same day to my sister lend me her old guitar (i have yet to retrieve it, but there’s no hurry, right?).
Next we had tea drinking and how to make it right. My friend is quite fond of green and white tea (she aren’t so much into black tea, which is a pity because i love gray tea, meaning having tea with milk, and i like to add some honey with it). There’s a trick to make non-bitter green tea, and the key thing is water temperature. The green (and white) tea leafs need to be poured to a 70-80 C water, that way it wont be bitter. the second thing is not to let the leafs be there too long, other vice it will get bitter and is mostly the common reason people don’t like green tea (me one of them, it really does get so easily too bitter). By the way, the water temperature does affect very much on most of the teas bitterness, that’s why no tea is supposed to pour into a 100C water, 90C is much better if you need a higher temperature.
There are many kinds and different flavored teas, and there’s always a match for everyone. There usually are introduction how to pour the tea in which temperature and how long (and if there’s none or it’s said to be in 100C, you can always search from the net).
After the session me and friend went to eat ramen once more, and chatted in English, that’s where the last ½h comes from.
focus: playing guitar, making sense of the strings and notes. Drinking tea on how to make it “right”.
Reflection: I’m quite good playing guitar even thou I'm a complete amateur. Most people think when talking about tea it’s about the English typed one (tea + milk (+honey/sugar)), when it’s actually all based on the same tea plant, different tea types are just different parts of the plant and manufactured differently (usually the green tea -plant).
My update is a little late, but better late than never, right?
Action: This week was my turn to lead the topic the first time, so I was a little nervous, because I’m more like a listener than an ice breaker. I chose an easy topic, movies and tv-shows, after my friend was done with her game (which took quite long, but it was very entertaining so i didn’t mind at all, you guys missed the best part). Just like last week, there were just me and the other two, which i felt quite nerving because I think it’s harder to maintain the conversation with fewer people.
In the end it went well, we found both similar and differing opinions about movies and programs, which was expected because those are a matter of taste, plus we recommended each other many good tv-shows to watch.
focus: Sharing interests.
Reflection: There are so many good movies and shows going on, it takes another lifetime to watch them all... And even thought the age difference can be quite big, there’s always these few shows that interests both!
