Pronunciation diary blog 1

As pronunciation is one of the major topics of this years SUK3 English course, students were asked to do tasks and exercises in order to improve their pronunciation by the end of this semester. I personally have gone through some of the websites that are listed on the Pronunciation Practice Page and found some very useful ones. The first one, which I liked a lot, is called "antimoon.com". Not only is this site helpful for the improvement of pronunciation, but also for making the decision of choosing either American or British English a lot easier. Especially the recordings, which can be listened to at the subpage "Choosing between American and British pronunciation", can help you to compare both accents. After having listened to them, I decided for British accent.

Apart from "antimoon.com", I also visited a website called "hojsay.com". I think that although it seems a bit boring, the site itself is actually quite useful when you want to look  up certain words and their pronunciation.
While surfing through various other websites, I learnt that the ones offering videos are probably the best ones to make progress as you can hear the words and wordings and also the motion of lips while producing them. It makes their imitation and repetition easier. For me,this is the best way to study  pronunciation rather than just having words written down and their pronunciation in phonetics spelling. What I'm trying to say is that exercise is very important to improve and correct your pronunciation.

I personally think that I should have a closer look at the articulation of "f" and "v". Even though I think that I know how to pronounce them correctly, I often do not pay enough attention on these two phonems when i speak rapidly. This is one aspect which I want to focus on during this semester. The second one is the famous "th", which is, especially for German native speakers, particularly difficult to pronounce. I have already started to practice these phonems by using a website called "learnersdictionary.com" and I think it is quite useful.

To sum up, my aim for this semester is not only to succeed with the right pronunciation of those three phonems mentioned above, but also to improve my pronunciation in general by trying to drop the German accent as much as possible while speaking English.

Feedback on anonymous summary

I am going to give some feedback on the following summary called “Summary- Euro Crisis”:

The financial condition of Europe is getting worse and worse, claims Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in an article he wrote about the Euro Crisis in The Telegraph. Europe is already standing with one foot in the grave concerning economy due to policy errors and massive debt rise within European states. In Italy and Spain for example, the debt already became too large and led to extremely dangerous runaway debt – and therefore became impossible to pay back.
This an illustrational example of how dangerous deflation can become once you lose control over a country’s financial balance. One solution mentioned in the article would be to prevent deflation by causing inflation. However, countries with better economic conditions like Germany are not affected by the crisis yet and therefore not willing to renounce the benefit they are deriving from the deflation. Clearly, they do not realize the magnitude of the problem and that they eventually will be affected by the crisis too. Consequently, debt is rising steadily and if we do not combat the crisis, one day all European countries will have to face serious consequences and it will be difficult to break the vicious cycle.  [200 words]

In general, I think that the author mentioned all important arguments of the source text but there are a few points which I would change.  The first sentence seemed to me like a direct speech but the quotation marks are missing. If the author wanted to express indirect speech, he or she should have used simple past tense. I also didn’t like the expression “debt became too large”. Apart from that I noticed some missing commas. Even if the author of this summary did insert all the important information of the original article, I think that he or she didn’t succeed in linking the sentences. While reading it, I had the impression that various information was forced to fit together. This is actually what we were told not to do while writing a summary.  What I like about the summary is the fact that it consists of exactly 200 words which, I think, is difficult to produce. 

EU Project: The European Economic Area

The European Economic Area

The European Economic Area (EEA) is an agreement which was set up in January 1994 to create a fair internal market. The agreement unites 27 EU Member Countries with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) states, namely Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Under this contract, these EFTA countries have been enabled to participate in the EU’s internal market, which has led to a growing industrial sector within Europe. All members of the EEA and the EU are granted the same four freedoms: free movement of goods, persons, services and capital. Consumer protection, company law and social policy are also covered as well as cooperation on several issues such as research and technological development, education, tourism, etc. The EEA agreement guarantees equal rights and obligations within the single market for citizens and economic operators. However, its regulations do not affect the primary sector, such as agriculture and fishing because the focus of the European Economic Area mainly lies on the industrial sector. In conclusion, the EEA has become one of today’s leading economic powers in the world, especially due to its excellent cooperation within the member countries. 

[185 words]

Comment on how Academic Paper is going so far

I have already done some research on the internet and found several websites that might be interesting for my academic paper. The only thing that worries me a bit is the fact that I have chosen so many subtopics for my paper so that I'm afraid I might not be able to cover them all. I hope that I still will be able to manage to do it as I don't want to give up my paper topic (Sikhs in Britain). I find it really interesting and I absolutely want to write about it. Apart from the websites, I also found two books that might be interesting for my paper. The only problem is that it would take too long to order them so I'm trying to somehow get online versions of them. I have also started to write the introduction but I think it's very difficult to stick to academic English. This is actually the most challenging thing about writing the academic paper. Despite all these small hurdles, I hope that I still be able to finally hand in a well-written academic paper.