Building a Universe of Vocabulary

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe” is what a famous quote by Johann Wolfgang Goethe says. If you agree with him you’d better enlarge your vocabulary if you want to impress people with the tremendous size of your universe. Honestly, I have been following this philosophy for a while now and already in PC 1 my progress regarding vocabulary learning became somewhat evident. In order not to lose the momentum and with the final PC looming on the horizon

in January I advised myself to keep on working on academic vocabulary. So this is exactly what I am doing right now. In the process I am discovering the benefits of both, the AVL lists as well as the exercises in the Porter textbook. Meanwhile I have also become more familiar with the corpora I considered most useful for me. I have mainly learned to do with COCA, but also the British Corpus. As in one of my fellow students’ blogs I read that there will be 800 new words we are expected to know along with all their synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation and collocations I am convinced I will be using them frequently throughout the next weeks. Other strategies which will help me master the overwhelming number of new words will include the following:

+) Consultation of websites such as Onelook.com or The free Dictionary tdf.com Both sites are particularly useful for acquiring new phrases and idioms.

+)Skim reading fellow students’ blogs in order to find out about their strategies

+) Use of the good old flashcards to cope with words I really struggle to memorize

Of course even following the best of all plans will guarantee ultimate success in the exam but it will give me a better chance of a solid score for PC2. Heaving PC worries aside for a moment I also want to emphasize the importance of a wide range of vocabulary for the academic paper we have to write in the other part of SUK3. I may be just about finishing it, but I can already ascertain that I could not have done it as easily had we not done so many exercises related to academic language before. Reading through articles and academic texts when researching for the paper was easier as well as I did not come across too many new words in the process. The words I did not know

I immediately included into my vocabulary notebook to be prepared for future occasions. By and large things work out really well in terms of getting ready for the vocabulary showdown in January. For now I will stay cautiously optimistic and want to wish a merry X-mas to all the readers and followers out there in the universe filled with vocabularies (and X-mas cookies these days ;-))

The Pronunciation Diagnostic Exercise

Now that the results of the Pronunciation Diagnostic Exercise have been revealed it is all about improving on the weak points of my pronunciation. First of all, I will consult websites featuring pronunciation tools which help me check the words I erred on for their correct pronunciation. Therefore, I will go to Demidex.com where you can find British and American Pronunciation and a good definition of words. Secondly, I will look for sounds similar to those I mispronounced in order to thoroughly exercise difficult sounds. I will start with words resembling the tricky sounds of ‘spiral’ and ‘aluminium’ as I got them wrong in the diagnostic exercise.

Another useful task is practicing the pronunciation of entire word families. This not only is a repetitive exercise, but also is a good way to prepare for words where the pronunciation differs greatly. This can happen with nouns, adjectives or verbs within the same ‘word family’ as the emphasis of a word sometimes changes as the number of syllables grows. In order to dedicate to pronunciation even more I will take the pronunciation test provided by antimoon.com. Such tests are particularly helpful as you are confronted with tricky questions .

Another way to boost my spoken English in order to render it more genuine is choosing difficult texts which I then record, just as we did with the picture description the reading exercise and the dialogue in class. This will give me the possibility to listen to my own voice as often as I wish and be as strict as possible with myself when I hear lazy ‘th’ sounds or other words pronounced in an odd or wrong way.

As I also want to improve my fluency and pronunciation in general I am convinced that watching youtube videos can take you a long way. Since there are numerous videos with not exactly serious content you have to be cautious when it comes to making a selection of appropriate videos. I consider lectures and academic speeches or news reports quite reliable. It is also essential to be careful when it comes to accents such as Australian. Moreover, you should be aware that ‘street slang’ or ‘ghetto language’ are no good examples. They may do more harm than good to your pronunciation. 

'Summary of the Crisis of Credit' Before & After

The crisis of credit

The video ‘the crisis of credit’ visualizes the worldwide financial fiasco. The relationships between homeowners, investors and the financial system at Wall Street are especially investigated. The underlying connection was defined by investors buying treasury bills. After the dotcom bust, interest rates dropped to one percent. For Investors treasury bills became unattractive, while borrowing became easy for banks, which used leverage to boost their deals. Banks then devised a plan to connect homeowners and investors through mortgages.

Families bought mortgage from brokers who connected them to lenders. Investment bankers secured abundant mortgages. Monthly payments of homeowners contributed to their growing wealth. This source of income constituted CDOs, collateralized debt obligations. The investors were selling them as safe, triple A rated slices and risky hedgefonds. When they asked for more mortgages, brokers had to refuse. As homeowners defaulting on their mortgage, the value of their houses increased. Lenders sold risky mortgages without downpayments. Prime mortgages were no longer available, only sub-prime mortgages. Gradually, investment banker’s income turned into houses. House prices dropped and default rates swept the country. Meanwhile, CDOs have grown worthless. Bankers failed to pay back borrowed millions and brokers were jobless. The Financial system was frozen and therefore collapsed.

[201 words]

The crisis of credit (revised)

‘The Crisis of Credit Visualized’ by Jonathan Javis is about the worldwide financial fiasco in 2008. The relationships between homeowners, investors and the financial system at Wall Street are especially investigated. The underlying connection was defined by investors originally buying treasury bills. After the dotcom bust, interest rates dropped to one percent. For Investors treasury bills became unattractive, while borrowing became easy for banks, which used leverage to boost their deals. Banks planned to connect homeowners and investors through mortgages.

Families bought mortgages from brokers who connected them to lenders. Investment bankers secured abundant mortgages. Monthly payments from homeowners contributed to their growing wealth. This source of income constituted CDOs, Collateralized Debt Obligations. The investors sold some as safe, AAA slices and some unrated hedge funds. When they asked for more mortgages, brokers refused because they had none. As homeowners defaulted on their mortgage, their houses’ value increased. Lenders sold mortgages without downpayments. Prime mortgages were no longer available, only sub-prime mortgages. Gradually, the investment bankers’ income turned into houses. House prices dropped due to oversupply default rates swept the country and CDOs became worthless. Bankers failed to reimburse borrowed millions and brokers were jobless. The financial system was frozen and therefore collapsed.

[203 words]

Personal comment

The first version of the summary was slightly flawed in some points. First of all because I used small letters were there should have been capital letters. For example as I introduced the title of the video, but also when describing what CDO stands for. Another weak point of my summaries seems to be that some phrases and sentences are still too wordy and would need some condensing. Prepositions are also among my most common mistakes. Lastly, what is a vital if I want to avoid all kinds of mistakes in my future writing I was told to devote time to proofreading my texts. I already tried to put this into practice and hope that it will take me a long way when it comes to improving my written efforts

Where am I now with my pronunciation in English part1

Listening to your own recorded voice is very helpful if you want to find out which are the English sounds you really struggle with. As I listened to the tape we recorded in class I could figure out easily were my problems are. I could identify that sometimes I tend to be negligent when it comes to producing the ‘th’ sound. This becomes even more challenging if it is combined with an ‘s’ before or after it. The ‘th’, however, is not my only problem with pronunciation. I have also noticed that words which are not very commonly used can be troublesome as well. This is especially true for English words were you can still discern well their latin, but also greek origins. They often include odd sequences of vowels which prove tricky. I am talking about demanding words such as ‘onomatopoeia’ or ’homogenous’. What matters is that you really know how to pronounce them as wild guessing usually does not take you a long way. In such cases it once more becomes evident how crucial it is to put considerable effort into pronunciation practice. This is particularly important as the Porter words are Academic vocabulary, which feature a high proportion of such words.

Here is a video which discusses the influence of Latin and Greek on English, and their importance for the academic language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDiNHIjj54Q

What else I found out about my pronunciations is that I have issues with words which hardly differ from one another. Disregarding small differences in the spelling of words, however, can lead to massive confusion. I should therefore make sure to account for theses small disparities, as narrow as they may appear. I definitely want to devote more time to making sure I know how to pronounce the words I come across. Therefore I will write them down as I read them in order to check their pronunciation. A good way of doing this is consulting online pronunciation practice pages. If you want to know more about them and my experience with the pronunciation of silent letters just feel free to return to my blog soon.