perjantai 14. joulukuuta 2012
sunnuntai 2. joulukuuta 2012
You'll never be lonely when you like to read
I spent the weekend with my family and that was good, even though I now feel more tired than ever. My lovely, wild and noisy family... There are things they talk so much about and then there are things they do not mention at all. My dad has cancer. I found out in the summer after my exhange year. My parents did not want me to worry while I was travelling and it seems that they do not want us to worry now either. My dad refuses to talk about it. And I understand.... But it makes me feel so tired! I have never been this tired in my life.
When I worry too much, or when I feel lonely, or when there is no-one to talk to I read. That has always been my strategy, my way to survive. You'll never be lonely when you like to read. (You can find that in Goodreads!) That is why I became so happy when I found the slides from the last lesson. I watched http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html and it was funny. The best part was, of course, the fact that Google has decided to digitize so many books! I am wondering now how they are going to select the books that will be digitized? There are so many books in the world... They said in the clip that we are loosing our interest in history. Is it so? It was a good point that the year 1950 is important to people who used to live then but maybe not so much for people who were not even born yet. If they do digitize some books from the 1950's they have to select books that have become classics already.
Since I was not able to join the lesson on Friday I would like to answer some of the questions that were treated in the lesson. The first question was:
Do you have a favourite genre? Umm... I guess I do not have a favourite genre but I do have some favourite books from different genres. For example, one of my favourite books of all time is Wuthering Heights. From the same genre is Amor de Perdição (1862) written by Camilo Castelo Branco. I have a special relationship with this book: it was the first time I fell in love with a Portuguese romanticist. (Even though some people say that Camilo was actually not a romanticist but a realist That is exactly what is so fascinating about him!) I love Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of House of Usher was somehow similar to "The Yellow Wallpaper", wasn't it?) and Goethe. So I have to admit that there is something that I love about in Romanticism, the darkness and the mystery. The feeling that there is something wrong with the world. (I guess everybody has that feeling sometimes?)
I like to read about mythologies and fantasy worlds. Many people find that somehow childish but I loved The Lord of the Rings (before the films!) and I still do. I admire Tolkien's imagination! Thanks to Harry Potter I learned how to read in English in primary school. It was impossible to wait until the Finnish translations were ready. I got my first Kalevala in primary school and I loved it. That time I also read Sinuhe for the first time.
I read all Jostein Gaarder's books when I was in middle school and Sofies verden is still one of my favourites. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is great and so is Mikhail Bukakov's The Master and Margarita, Tolstoi's Anna Karenina... How can you select your favourite books anyway? There are houndreds of amazing books in the world! Last year I found a new favourite genre! I started to read African literature written in Portuguese. Mia Couto became my favourite writer from Africa. He is a genius!
Do you enjoy the classics?
Yes I do! But there are some exceptions. In Finnish literature there are some classics I just hate like Sillanpää's Hurskas kurjuus (1918). I mean how can a book be THAT depressing? I have a certain limit for bedbugs and dirt. (I forgot this book in Greece when I was reading it and I had to by a new one for library! In my opinion, they could have survived without it as well!) Have you ever read Finnish Realism?
Have any books made a significant impact on you?
Many books have had an impact on me, but now I remember one book that helped me through the culture shock once back in Finland after living in Brazil. If you have not read Ranya ElRamly's Auringon asema (2002) yet, you should! It is a book about a girl who does not know where she belongs to. Her father is Egyptian and her mother is Finnish. The book is a story about a young woman who does not know who she is and does not know her place in the world. (She will find out her place eventually.)
Do you generally reflect upon your reading?
Yes I do, as you already know if you have read this blog at all! This is the first time that I am doing it in English.
I see now that I have been reading too many articles for my thesis and too few books just for fun! This autumn has been one of the hardests I have ever had. I feel I have drown myself in work with too many courses and the thesis and I have totally forgot to enjoy reading. I cannot wait for Christmas holidays!
P.S. I totally forgot to write about poetry and that is a shame! Maybe next time...
When I worry too much, or when I feel lonely, or when there is no-one to talk to I read. That has always been my strategy, my way to survive. You'll never be lonely when you like to read. (You can find that in Goodreads!) That is why I became so happy when I found the slides from the last lesson. I watched http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html and it was funny. The best part was, of course, the fact that Google has decided to digitize so many books! I am wondering now how they are going to select the books that will be digitized? There are so many books in the world... They said in the clip that we are loosing our interest in history. Is it so? It was a good point that the year 1950 is important to people who used to live then but maybe not so much for people who were not even born yet. If they do digitize some books from the 1950's they have to select books that have become classics already.
Since I was not able to join the lesson on Friday I would like to answer some of the questions that were treated in the lesson. The first question was:
Do you have a favourite genre? Umm... I guess I do not have a favourite genre but I do have some favourite books from different genres. For example, one of my favourite books of all time is Wuthering Heights. From the same genre is Amor de Perdição (1862) written by Camilo Castelo Branco. I have a special relationship with this book: it was the first time I fell in love with a Portuguese romanticist. (Even though some people say that Camilo was actually not a romanticist but a realist That is exactly what is so fascinating about him!) I love Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of House of Usher was somehow similar to "The Yellow Wallpaper", wasn't it?) and Goethe. So I have to admit that there is something that I love about in Romanticism, the darkness and the mystery. The feeling that there is something wrong with the world. (I guess everybody has that feeling sometimes?)
I like to read about mythologies and fantasy worlds. Many people find that somehow childish but I loved The Lord of the Rings (before the films!) and I still do. I admire Tolkien's imagination! Thanks to Harry Potter I learned how to read in English in primary school. It was impossible to wait until the Finnish translations were ready. I got my first Kalevala in primary school and I loved it. That time I also read Sinuhe for the first time.
I read all Jostein Gaarder's books when I was in middle school and Sofies verden is still one of my favourites. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is great and so is Mikhail Bukakov's The Master and Margarita, Tolstoi's Anna Karenina... How can you select your favourite books anyway? There are houndreds of amazing books in the world! Last year I found a new favourite genre! I started to read African literature written in Portuguese. Mia Couto became my favourite writer from Africa. He is a genius!
Do you enjoy the classics?
Yes I do! But there are some exceptions. In Finnish literature there are some classics I just hate like Sillanpää's Hurskas kurjuus (1918). I mean how can a book be THAT depressing? I have a certain limit for bedbugs and dirt. (I forgot this book in Greece when I was reading it and I had to by a new one for library! In my opinion, they could have survived without it as well!) Have you ever read Finnish Realism?
Have any books made a significant impact on you?
Many books have had an impact on me, but now I remember one book that helped me through the culture shock once back in Finland after living in Brazil. If you have not read Ranya ElRamly's Auringon asema (2002) yet, you should! It is a book about a girl who does not know where she belongs to. Her father is Egyptian and her mother is Finnish. The book is a story about a young woman who does not know who she is and does not know her place in the world. (She will find out her place eventually.)
Do you generally reflect upon your reading?
Yes I do, as you already know if you have read this blog at all! This is the first time that I am doing it in English.
I see now that I have been reading too many articles for my thesis and too few books just for fun! This autumn has been one of the hardests I have ever had. I feel I have drown myself in work with too many courses and the thesis and I have totally forgot to enjoy reading. I cannot wait for Christmas holidays!
P.S. I totally forgot to write about poetry and that is a shame! Maybe next time...
perjantai 30. marraskuuta 2012
The Yellow Wallpaper
This is undoubtedly not my day! I woke up in the morning and the electricity was off... So, no coffee this morning, I thought. But as I learned later, coffee was the least of my upcoming problems. Since I live far away from the center I went to the bus stop more than one hour before our class was about to start but this time it was not enough... The first bus did not come, which was natural: there was a blizzard going on. The second bus did not come either. When the third bus did not appear I realised I was in trouble. The other bus stop was four kilometres away and there was no guarantee the bus would come there either... Welcome to Finnish winter wonderland!
Back home my cousin called and told she had to cancel our weekend plans of celebrating my brother's birthday because her husband's aunt went into a coma. I hope she is going to be all right! I looked out from my window and felt a cold press in my heart. My husband is cruising somewhere out there with his friends. (I know, Finnish men are crazy but they do go cruising with their friends even if it is minus 9 degrees and there is a snowstorm going on.) I cannot reach him because he's on the sea. Oh, winter why did you come today?
The least I could do was to sign myself to Goodreads and start reading "The Yellow Wallpaper". I loved it! This is the kind of homework I love! So here I shall write some thoughts about the text:
What is first found out when The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is opened is that the writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an exceptional woman, at her time. She was an "utopian feminist", a sociologist, novelist, writer and a lecturer for social reform. The book is told to be a semi-autographical story about depression, something the writer herself suffered from as well.
The story is about a woman and her husband who live in a strange house while their permanent home is renovated. There were four main themes in the story, and those were women's rights, madness, inequality in a relationship between husband and wife (on 19th century), and romantic style. In this text all themes mentioned will be treated and some close reading will be done.
The narrator
First of all, the narrator of the story is unreliable. She admits it herself. She sees herself as a suffering person and describes how her husband is not sure she is in full mental health. "He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try." The narrators tendency to unreliability creates a strange atmosphere to the story. The reader does not know who to believe. Obviously, the narrator thinks everyone is against her: "The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look." But what if these arguments are just mad's suspicions?
The narrator has another important dimension: she is a real romantic heroine. She enjoys solitude and she is a writer. (In secret! What could suit better for a romantic character?) In romantic literature main characters are ofter crazy. In this dimension she is similar to most of Edgar Allan Poe's characters.
Women's rights
"Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good" she says in the story. It seems that whatever she thinks "personally" does not matter. Her husband's attitudes and needs come first. The husband means to be good but he smothers his wife by treating her like a baby: "And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head" and "What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that—you'll get cold." "I am a doctor, dear, and I know."
The husband tries to have control in everything concerning his wife (sleeping, eating and even speaking) and he does not value the only thing his wife really likes, which is writing! "He hates to have me write a word."Writing is something that must be done in secret if the writer is a woman. And she writes because that is the only thing that gratifies her: "I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me."
The narrator feels like a caged bird but what liberates her is her imagination. Even if she has nothing to do, she feels like "I am a comparative burden already!" and every step she takes is controlled but no-one can control her imagination. So she starts to look around and create a fantasy world around her. She pays attention to an old wallpaper in her room and creates a story of a woman (and women) that lives behind it.
The wallpaper
The wallpaper is interesting. It is described carefully, in many different lights as she observes it from her bed where she spends most of her days. This indirectly tells the reader about her condition: sick people or people with weak mental health stay in the bed for the whole day. She tells how she suffers but her husband does not understand: "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him." When she describes the wallpaper, different senses are portrayed. Firts there is only the sight, then there is the smell: "Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!" "A yellow smell." This could be a smell of a sick person and reflect and image of the narrator. Or the narrator could be right and the wallpaper could be haunting. The reader is left in a sense of insecurity.
The narrator finds out that there is a "real" woman in the wallpaper:"The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out." "Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over." This is the point where a reader starts to understand that the woman in the picture, in the wallpaper represents the narrator herself, and at the same time all the women in the world. She feels herself a prisoner and even starts to think about doing something insane to be free: "I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try." Just like the narrator would like to jump out of the window, the imaginary woman would like to be free: "that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her."
In the end of the story the narrator and the woman in the wallpaper are actually becoming one. "Here are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" A greeping woman from the wallpaper is an allegory of subordinated women who try to liberate themselves. They are not walking but they are creeping. That is something that only a sick person or a resigned person would do.
Women coming out of wallpapers!
Wallpaper is made for decorating. It has no other function than that. It does not speak or show any kind of feelings. That was, not only wallpapers' but also women's duty in 19th century when the feminist movement was just about to begin. What a beautiful allegory! The writer says that women do not want to be pretty and quiet anymore: they want to come out from the wallpaper! Of course there are still other kind of women that are perfectly happy with their actual situation. John's sister is a good example: "She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!" But the narrator wants to write and she would like to have a "congenial work". So she gets angry: "I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth" and starts to free herself from the wallpaper.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!"
The Yellow Wallpaper is a wonderful mixture of romantic literature and early feminism. The main character is a real romantic antiheroine, as mentioned. Precise and careful description of the milieu is also something that is typical for a romance. There are also typical characteristics of horror. The excitement continues throughout the story and the climax is in the end. The structure of the story is typical for thrillers and detective stories. The story itself speaks for women. I love romantic literature, horror and science fiction and I find feminism quite important even in the modern world. So what can I say? This was the best short story I have read in a while!
Back home my cousin called and told she had to cancel our weekend plans of celebrating my brother's birthday because her husband's aunt went into a coma. I hope she is going to be all right! I looked out from my window and felt a cold press in my heart. My husband is cruising somewhere out there with his friends. (I know, Finnish men are crazy but they do go cruising with their friends even if it is minus 9 degrees and there is a snowstorm going on.) I cannot reach him because he's on the sea. Oh, winter why did you come today?
The least I could do was to sign myself to Goodreads and start reading "The Yellow Wallpaper". I loved it! This is the kind of homework I love! So here I shall write some thoughts about the text:
What is first found out when The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is opened is that the writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an exceptional woman, at her time. She was an "utopian feminist", a sociologist, novelist, writer and a lecturer for social reform. The book is told to be a semi-autographical story about depression, something the writer herself suffered from as well.
The story is about a woman and her husband who live in a strange house while their permanent home is renovated. There were four main themes in the story, and those were women's rights, madness, inequality in a relationship between husband and wife (on 19th century), and romantic style. In this text all themes mentioned will be treated and some close reading will be done.
The narrator
First of all, the narrator of the story is unreliable. She admits it herself. She sees herself as a suffering person and describes how her husband is not sure she is in full mental health. "He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try." The narrators tendency to unreliability creates a strange atmosphere to the story. The reader does not know who to believe. Obviously, the narrator thinks everyone is against her: "The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look." But what if these arguments are just mad's suspicions?
The narrator has another important dimension: she is a real romantic heroine. She enjoys solitude and she is a writer. (In secret! What could suit better for a romantic character?) In romantic literature main characters are ofter crazy. In this dimension she is similar to most of Edgar Allan Poe's characters.
Women's rights
"Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good" she says in the story. It seems that whatever she thinks "personally" does not matter. Her husband's attitudes and needs come first. The husband means to be good but he smothers his wife by treating her like a baby: "And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head" and "What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that—you'll get cold." "I am a doctor, dear, and I know."
The husband tries to have control in everything concerning his wife (sleeping, eating and even speaking) and he does not value the only thing his wife really likes, which is writing! "He hates to have me write a word."Writing is something that must be done in secret if the writer is a woman. And she writes because that is the only thing that gratifies her: "I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me."
The narrator feels like a caged bird but what liberates her is her imagination. Even if she has nothing to do, she feels like "I am a comparative burden already!" and every step she takes is controlled but no-one can control her imagination. So she starts to look around and create a fantasy world around her. She pays attention to an old wallpaper in her room and creates a story of a woman (and women) that lives behind it.
The wallpaper
The wallpaper is interesting. It is described carefully, in many different lights as she observes it from her bed where she spends most of her days. This indirectly tells the reader about her condition: sick people or people with weak mental health stay in the bed for the whole day. She tells how she suffers but her husband does not understand: "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him." When she describes the wallpaper, different senses are portrayed. Firts there is only the sight, then there is the smell: "Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!" "A yellow smell." This could be a smell of a sick person and reflect and image of the narrator. Or the narrator could be right and the wallpaper could be haunting. The reader is left in a sense of insecurity.
The narrator finds out that there is a "real" woman in the wallpaper:"The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out." "Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over." This is the point where a reader starts to understand that the woman in the picture, in the wallpaper represents the narrator herself, and at the same time all the women in the world. She feels herself a prisoner and even starts to think about doing something insane to be free: "I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try." Just like the narrator would like to jump out of the window, the imaginary woman would like to be free: "that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her."
In the end of the story the narrator and the woman in the wallpaper are actually becoming one. "Here are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" A greeping woman from the wallpaper is an allegory of subordinated women who try to liberate themselves. They are not walking but they are creeping. That is something that only a sick person or a resigned person would do.
Women coming out of wallpapers!
Wallpaper is made for decorating. It has no other function than that. It does not speak or show any kind of feelings. That was, not only wallpapers' but also women's duty in 19th century when the feminist movement was just about to begin. What a beautiful allegory! The writer says that women do not want to be pretty and quiet anymore: they want to come out from the wallpaper! Of course there are still other kind of women that are perfectly happy with their actual situation. John's sister is a good example: "She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!" But the narrator wants to write and she would like to have a "congenial work". So she gets angry: "I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth" and starts to free herself from the wallpaper.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!"
The Yellow Wallpaper is a wonderful mixture of romantic literature and early feminism. The main character is a real romantic antiheroine, as mentioned. Precise and careful description of the milieu is also something that is typical for a romance. There are also typical characteristics of horror. The excitement continues throughout the story and the climax is in the end. The structure of the story is typical for thrillers and detective stories. The story itself speaks for women. I love romantic literature, horror and science fiction and I find feminism quite important even in the modern world. So what can I say? This was the best short story I have read in a while!
keskiviikko 28. marraskuuta 2012
The Independent Work Module
Hello! It is time to reflect on my learning process during the autumn. I shall review my Independent Work Module and see if I have succeeded or not in accomplishing my goals for this semester. So, lets get started!
First, I can happily announce that each week I have certainly done more than the 3.5-4 hours of independent work required for 2 extra credits. In the proposal I wrote that: "Since I'm studying for my Master's I need to do lots of independent reading at home anyway, and without this English course I couldn't even get any credits from that reading". This has been the case and I am happy that I have managed to tie all my courses together. This has paved way for deeper learning in each course.
What I did not know in the beginning of the course was the fact that I would not have enough time to page through every single beginner's guide book to conversation analysis (for example Jack Sidnell's
Conversation Analysis, An Introduction) since I had to read from three to five articles each week. Instead of writing a review on Sidnell's book, I wrote critiques about some of the academic articles I have read. I have found that habit extremely beneficial, not only for the English course but also when it comes to my thesis. For the audience, I am afraid, it must have been boring sometimes and I am sorry about that, but writing a short critique every time I read an article has been so useful that I think I am going to continue that after the course. Maybe not here in the blog but on my own computer just for the sake of learning.
I have watched many odd films during the semester and I have ended up writing about some of them here in the blog as well. So, I guess writing a critique, a review or a comment is the most natural way for me to act when it comes to different types of phenomena in this world. Maybe I should think about writing as a career instead of teaching. What do you think? I have been reading and watching the news in English but I have not written so much about it. One thing is for sure. Watching news makes me feel sad and I do not like to wallow in that kind of feeling! Maybe that is why I find it so hard to write about important things like the climate change or the financial crisis.
Like any other person I do watch funny clips from YouTube or TED sometimes. Another way of improving language skills is to do it at work. Even if we feel like we are situated at the edge of the Western world we do have many tourists and immigrants in Helsinki these days and when it comes to learning English, meeting these kinds of persons is perfect for practice. After the year I spent in Lisbon I have been missing some kind of international buddy group and during this autumn I luckily found one (or to be precise one of my friends did and she invited me to join this group). So I have been participating in some ESN events. Next week they are having a pre-Christmas party... I cannot imagine a better way of having fun and practising English!
In summary I see that English is a natural part of my normal week and I could not spend a week of my life without using it. What this reflection diary has created is the awareness of the importance of English in my daily routines. It makes me want to learn even more. I guess the next step could be for example living in an English speaking country. (Until now I have only lived in countries where they speak Finnish and Portuguese.) I would love to have a Brittish accent one day! Maybe I will start my learning during our Interrail trip next summer. I am quite sure by now that the first stop on our honeymoon is going to be London...
P.S. Oops! I almost forgot the Idiosyncratic dictionary! I must say it has been quite helpful too! You see, many terms in my area have not been translated into Finnish yet and it is good to think about how to describe them for the Finnish audience. Some of these translations might seem strange since I made them myself! Let me introduce to you my Idiosyncratic dictionary:
-Adjacency pair = vieruspari
-Change of state = aseman muutos
-Circumvent = kiertää
-Cogently = vakuuttavasti
-Counterpart = vastinpari
-Embedded corretions = piilotetut korjaukset
-Engine = moottori
-Epistemic = tietoa koskeva, episteeminen
-Epistemic gap = tiedollinen aukko
-Epistemic stance = episteeminen asennoituminen
-Epistemic status = episteeminen asema
-Excruciatingly = sietämättömästi, musertavasti
-First pair part = etujäsen
-Hedging = suojaus
-Insert expansion = välilaajennus
-Interjacent = välissä oleva
-Interchangeable = vaihdettava
-Juxtaposition = rinnastus
-Latency = viive, latenssi
-Longshoreman = ahtaaja
-Notwithstandig = huolimatta
-Overlapping = päällekkäinen, limittäinen
-Post expansion = jälkilaajennus
-Preference = preferenssi
-Pre-sequence = etiäinen
-Recipient design = vastaanottajan huomioiminen
-Rebuff = torjunta
-Sequence expansion = sekvenssin laajentuminen
-Second pair part = jälkijäsen
-Subsequently = myöhemmin
-Turn-taking organization = vuorottelujäsennys
-Transgress = rikkoa (määräystä)
-Transition-relevance place = siirtymän mahdollistava kohta
-Trigger = laukaista, käynnistää
-Utterance = lausahdus, äännähdys
-->And Englishmen say Finns have long words!
First, I can happily announce that each week I have certainly done more than the 3.5-4 hours of independent work required for 2 extra credits. In the proposal I wrote that: "Since I'm studying for my Master's I need to do lots of independent reading at home anyway, and without this English course I couldn't even get any credits from that reading". This has been the case and I am happy that I have managed to tie all my courses together. This has paved way for deeper learning in each course.
What I did not know in the beginning of the course was the fact that I would not have enough time to page through every single beginner's guide book to conversation analysis (for example Jack Sidnell's
Conversation Analysis, An Introduction) since I had to read from three to five articles each week. Instead of writing a review on Sidnell's book, I wrote critiques about some of the academic articles I have read. I have found that habit extremely beneficial, not only for the English course but also when it comes to my thesis. For the audience, I am afraid, it must have been boring sometimes and I am sorry about that, but writing a short critique every time I read an article has been so useful that I think I am going to continue that after the course. Maybe not here in the blog but on my own computer just for the sake of learning.
I have watched many odd films during the semester and I have ended up writing about some of them here in the blog as well. So, I guess writing a critique, a review or a comment is the most natural way for me to act when it comes to different types of phenomena in this world. Maybe I should think about writing as a career instead of teaching. What do you think? I have been reading and watching the news in English but I have not written so much about it. One thing is for sure. Watching news makes me feel sad and I do not like to wallow in that kind of feeling! Maybe that is why I find it so hard to write about important things like the climate change or the financial crisis.
Like any other person I do watch funny clips from YouTube or TED sometimes. Another way of improving language skills is to do it at work. Even if we feel like we are situated at the edge of the Western world we do have many tourists and immigrants in Helsinki these days and when it comes to learning English, meeting these kinds of persons is perfect for practice. After the year I spent in Lisbon I have been missing some kind of international buddy group and during this autumn I luckily found one (or to be precise one of my friends did and she invited me to join this group). So I have been participating in some ESN events. Next week they are having a pre-Christmas party... I cannot imagine a better way of having fun and practising English!
In summary I see that English is a natural part of my normal week and I could not spend a week of my life without using it. What this reflection diary has created is the awareness of the importance of English in my daily routines. It makes me want to learn even more. I guess the next step could be for example living in an English speaking country. (Until now I have only lived in countries where they speak Finnish and Portuguese.) I would love to have a Brittish accent one day! Maybe I will start my learning during our Interrail trip next summer. I am quite sure by now that the first stop on our honeymoon is going to be London...
P.S. Oops! I almost forgot the Idiosyncratic dictionary! I must say it has been quite helpful too! You see, many terms in my area have not been translated into Finnish yet and it is good to think about how to describe them for the Finnish audience. Some of these translations might seem strange since I made them myself! Let me introduce to you my Idiosyncratic dictionary:
-Adjacency pair = vieruspari
-Change of state = aseman muutos
-Circumvent = kiertää
-Cogently = vakuuttavasti
-Counterpart = vastinpari
-Embedded corretions = piilotetut korjaukset
-Engine = moottori
-Epistemic = tietoa koskeva, episteeminen
-Epistemic gap = tiedollinen aukko
-Epistemic stance = episteeminen asennoituminen
-Epistemic status = episteeminen asema
-Excruciatingly = sietämättömästi, musertavasti
-First pair part = etujäsen
-Hedging = suojaus
-Insert expansion = välilaajennus
-Interjacent = välissä oleva
-Interchangeable = vaihdettava
-Juxtaposition = rinnastus
-Latency = viive, latenssi
-Longshoreman = ahtaaja
-Notwithstandig = huolimatta
-Overlapping = päällekkäinen, limittäinen
-Post expansion = jälkilaajennus
-Preference = preferenssi
-Pre-sequence = etiäinen
-Recipient design = vastaanottajan huomioiminen
-Rebuff = torjunta
-Sequence expansion = sekvenssin laajentuminen
-Second pair part = jälkijäsen
-Subsequently = myöhemmin
-Turn-taking organization = vuorottelujäsennys
-Transgress = rikkoa (määräystä)
-Transition-relevance place = siirtymän mahdollistava kohta
-Trigger = laukaista, käynnistää
-Utterance = lausahdus, äännähdys
-->And Englishmen say Finns have long words!
tiistai 27. marraskuuta 2012
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The end of our independent work is coming closer and it made me realise I haven't reflected on audio and video as much as I have done with texts. Truth is that I watch so many films (lets say the average number of films I watch during the week is from three to five) that I mostly forget to write about them here. Another reason for my forgetfulness is that watching films (mostly in English) is for me a way to relax after studying. If you write a lot every day it's hard to remember to write even about the things you do just for fun. (I also feel embarrassed to write about some not-so-intelligent films I watch. Even if these kind of films could also be seen as a way to learn the language!) Anyway, I decided to write about the latest film I watched, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Since almost everyone knows Douglas Adams' book already I won't write a long description about the storyline. In short, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978-1980) is a story about Arthur Dent, an unlucky Englishman who gets kidnapped to the space (by his best friend, Ford Prefect) on the day that his house and the Earth is destroyed by aliens. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction parody but also a lovestory: Arthur's crush from Earth, Tricia (or Trillian) has also escaped the destruction of their home planet and is now hunting for an answer to the existence of the Universe. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the title, refers to an electrical travel guide Arthur gets to guide him across the adventure. The book's guidelines are quite hilarious and the whole opus is known for it's witty language.
Like most film versions of great books, this film doesn't beat the original but it's still very entertaining. I loved the voice of the narrator and Martin Freeman is a great choice for playing Arthur's role. He succeeds in giving a face to his cowardly brave character. I liked the film even if it felt pretty short compared to the book, of course.
Another thing I haven't been reflecting on too much during the autumn is my news reading (and listening) hobby. When you live somewhere far for sometime, that place becomes like your second home and then when you leave your second home you also start to worry about that home and all the people you know there. Most Portuguese are quite calm and even quiet compared to their Spanish neighbours but that attitude might be changing based on what I've seen in the news during this autumn. When reading news about the climate change and the economical crisis in Europe, I sometimes hope that mice would be the ones to rule the Earth...
If you want to know more about the current situation in Lisbon check out this link for example
Since almost everyone knows Douglas Adams' book already I won't write a long description about the storyline. In short, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978-1980) is a story about Arthur Dent, an unlucky Englishman who gets kidnapped to the space (by his best friend, Ford Prefect) on the day that his house and the Earth is destroyed by aliens. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction parody but also a lovestory: Arthur's crush from Earth, Tricia (or Trillian) has also escaped the destruction of their home planet and is now hunting for an answer to the existence of the Universe. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the title, refers to an electrical travel guide Arthur gets to guide him across the adventure. The book's guidelines are quite hilarious and the whole opus is known for it's witty language.
Like most film versions of great books, this film doesn't beat the original but it's still very entertaining. I loved the voice of the narrator and Martin Freeman is a great choice for playing Arthur's role. He succeeds in giving a face to his cowardly brave character. I liked the film even if it felt pretty short compared to the book, of course.
Another thing I haven't been reflecting on too much during the autumn is my news reading (and listening) hobby. When you live somewhere far for sometime, that place becomes like your second home and then when you leave your second home you also start to worry about that home and all the people you know there. Most Portuguese are quite calm and even quiet compared to their Spanish neighbours but that attitude might be changing based on what I've seen in the news during this autumn. When reading news about the climate change and the economical crisis in Europe, I sometimes hope that mice would be the ones to rule the Earth...
If you want to know more about the current situation in Lisbon check out this link for example
sunnuntai 25. marraskuuta 2012
Imaginaerum
What a great weekend! It's lovely to have some freetime once in a while. Since we didn't have our lesson on Friday (I hope the little guy is getting better by now) I spent the day doing my backlog and that was pretty much everything I did during the day. Because of the hard work on Friday I gave myself an opportunity to do something nice during the weekend... So we went to the cinema! The film was in English, of course, but the director is Finnish. I think you guessed already? Yes, it was Imaginaerum, a new film based on Nightwish's new album with the very same name.
My husband is a fan of the band and I had nothing against it when he said that he would be interested in seeing the film. It wasn't bad after all... But it was quite scary! Imaginaerum is a film about an old man, Tom, who stays in the hospital, unconscious. While he sleeps he travels back in time to his childhood as an orphan, then to his youth as an artist, and then finally to his late days when he realises all the mistakes he has made during the journey. This old man has somekind of dementia and in his dream world he keeps trying to put things back together, to remember his family members and pieces about his own history. The illness, has a figure of a snowman (a scary snowman) and Tom has to fight against him and try to escape as well as he can.
There's another level of the story where Tom's daughter tries to survive in her own life, tries to forget her father and forgive him for all the mistakes he has done during her childhood. We are let to know that Tom wasn't actually a good father but very much the opposite. He had a bad temper and he spent his days playing the piano and touring with his band. Now as an adult Tom's daughter is full of anger and disappointment towards her father. It's a last chance for Tom to beg for his daughter's forgiveness...
Imaginaerum is a strange film! It treats the same kind of topics that Finnish films so often do. For example, it tells about problematic father relationships (on two levels: Tom's father committed suicide which made him a bad father), generation gap, childhood traumas etc. Sounds pretty depressing, huh? But still Imaginaerum doesn't seem like an ordinary Finnish film. The story is told with music and actually this kind of dark and cranky themes match quite well with Nightwish's strange lyrics and dark melodies. Or can you imagine a super positive film made about Nightwish? That would be scary!
Besides the music there's another strange level in the film. It's a self-portrait of the band's figurehead. I wonder if it's an accident that Tuomas Holopainen himself plays the role of the young Tom, and it's interesting how similar his and Tom's lives as an artist seem in the film... We can only guess how much there is of Tuomas inside the character! Imaginaerum is a strange mix of dark music, gothic and carnivalistic elements and a split of North American film tradition (the film was produced by Finns and Canadians). Somehow it also reminds me about Japanese anime tradition... What an odd film indeed!
It was a shock to realise we have to write a review of our independent work before next Thursday. It's hard to realise we are in the end of November already! Time goes so fast... Soon it's Christmas! I shall write a review of my independent work next week and also place my idiosyncratic dictionary here. I even feel sad that this blog is coming to it's end in a couple of weeks. During this autumn I got used to it already. From now on it's going to be just thesis everyday... What else can I say? Thanks for the advice in the beginning of the course! Maybe I'll start a new literary blog in 2013!
My husband is a fan of the band and I had nothing against it when he said that he would be interested in seeing the film. It wasn't bad after all... But it was quite scary! Imaginaerum is a film about an old man, Tom, who stays in the hospital, unconscious. While he sleeps he travels back in time to his childhood as an orphan, then to his youth as an artist, and then finally to his late days when he realises all the mistakes he has made during the journey. This old man has somekind of dementia and in his dream world he keeps trying to put things back together, to remember his family members and pieces about his own history. The illness, has a figure of a snowman (a scary snowman) and Tom has to fight against him and try to escape as well as he can.
There's another level of the story where Tom's daughter tries to survive in her own life, tries to forget her father and forgive him for all the mistakes he has done during her childhood. We are let to know that Tom wasn't actually a good father but very much the opposite. He had a bad temper and he spent his days playing the piano and touring with his band. Now as an adult Tom's daughter is full of anger and disappointment towards her father. It's a last chance for Tom to beg for his daughter's forgiveness...
Imaginaerum is a strange film! It treats the same kind of topics that Finnish films so often do. For example, it tells about problematic father relationships (on two levels: Tom's father committed suicide which made him a bad father), generation gap, childhood traumas etc. Sounds pretty depressing, huh? But still Imaginaerum doesn't seem like an ordinary Finnish film. The story is told with music and actually this kind of dark and cranky themes match quite well with Nightwish's strange lyrics and dark melodies. Or can you imagine a super positive film made about Nightwish? That would be scary!
Besides the music there's another strange level in the film. It's a self-portrait of the band's figurehead. I wonder if it's an accident that Tuomas Holopainen himself plays the role of the young Tom, and it's interesting how similar his and Tom's lives as an artist seem in the film... We can only guess how much there is of Tuomas inside the character! Imaginaerum is a strange mix of dark music, gothic and carnivalistic elements and a split of North American film tradition (the film was produced by Finns and Canadians). Somehow it also reminds me about Japanese anime tradition... What an odd film indeed!
It was a shock to realise we have to write a review of our independent work before next Thursday. It's hard to realise we are in the end of November already! Time goes so fast... Soon it's Christmas! I shall write a review of my independent work next week and also place my idiosyncratic dictionary here. I even feel sad that this blog is coming to it's end in a couple of weeks. During this autumn I got used to it already. From now on it's going to be just thesis everyday... What else can I say? Thanks for the advice in the beginning of the course! Maybe I'll start a new literary blog in 2013!
torstai 22. marraskuuta 2012
The Silence
Good evening! Sorry for making you wait so long. I've been keeping myself busy again. Yesterday I wrote 13 pages for the thesis (I'm so proud of that) and today I went to class and studied Estonian for five hours... Exams are coming! I promised to write about cultural stuff and I like to keep my promises, so here it comes:
I've been having a serious culture shock for one week! It all started a week ago when we discussed about Lehtonen and Sajavaara's article, "The Silent Finn Revisited" (1997) in our English class. That was the moment when I realised that I'm no true Finn! The article says that: "The statement by Bertolt Brecht that Finns are silent in two languages can be considered just a cliché today". Well, that's a good start for an article, but after that opening statement so many strange things about Finns followed that I absolutely have to resign myself from being a Finn if those facts hold true.
For the sake of a good story line I guess I'll have to tell you a little bit about my own cultural background. Maybe it will also help innunderstanding why I find some arguments in the article so absurd. So, I grew up in the Eastern part of Finland, in a small town of less than 5000 people. As far as I remember (my family moved South when I was ten) lives in the North weren't silent at all. Very much the opposite: I remember having great, noisy parties in our big house (we were living in an old vicarage) with singing and dancing. Some times we even made a Finnish Swedes-style crayfish party in our garden since my mom comes from a Swedish-speaking family.
Like I said, we moved South when I was ten and it took some time to lose my funny Eastern accent. Our family grew bigger and louder (I got two noisy little brothers) and no, I don't remember any silent moment from that period of my life. Dad was travelling a lot for his work and we also hosted foreigners in our house. I never found them noisier than my family but I did pity their ears! Years went by quite fast like they usually do and suddenly I was a teenager who wanted to try her own wings for the first time. I was still underage but after some time of persistent persuation my parents let me move to Brazil for one year. Going to Brazil was the best decision of my life by the way!
In the article Gudykunst (1989, p. 336) claims that: "Finns may be seriously handicapped by their silence-bound behaviour, which makes it rather difficult for them to open up and start communicating in such situations". Oh, shut up Gudykunst! I have to admit that I had some problems with communication in Brazil at first: I didn't know a single word in Portuguese! But it was in two weeks time that I was so tired of silence that I started to imitate every single word that I could recognize as a word and soon I was able to talk again. (And like my Brazilian "mom" said after that: "Nunca mais parou de falar" which means that when I started talking there was no end to it!)
"When we observe a Finn's communicative behaviour in these terms, we are mostly concerned with a Finn as a user of a foreign language, which adds one more discrepancy: the comparison is always with the native speakers of the target language using their mother tongue, and not with them as users of a foreign language." Yes, yes! That's what I'm talking about! I'm pissed of when Finns are always compared to Northern Americans in this kind of communicative investigations. And now I'll have to tell you a fact I've learned when I've been travelling and meeting people from different countries. Finns are told to be quiet in two languages while most people I've met are communicative in one language and silent in the rest of the 6000 languages of the world. For some reason, students from Scandinavia and from Finland succeeded in learning Portuguese pretty fast in Brazil whereas most of the Americans remained silent. So I would like to know where was this Gudykunst's typical Northern "silence-bound behaviour" then?
"While Americans make use of talk to gather information about the other party and to reduce uncertainty, Finns try to reach the same goal by making silent observations of the interlocutor. Representatives of Southern and Central European cultures become irritated, because they tend to assess their interlocutors by their skill in verbal argumentation and reasoning, and this is something that may be totally absent in situtation with Finns. Germans may regard Finnish quietness and silence as retirence, reserve, and even aimlessness (Tiittula, 1993)." I've never felt myself perfectly relaxed if there's an other person in the same room and we are just sitting there saying nothing. And this reminds me about my German roommate in Lisbon. She was so sweet and the best cook I've ever met. There was just one thing about her that was making me feel uncomfortable sometimes: she was too quiet! It was okay with her to spend hours together without a word and that was making me crazy. Does this prove I'm not a Finn anymore?
I was almost loosing my hope already and thinking that I've probably lost my Finnish identity while travelling around when I remembered something. I noticed that I still have something deeply Finnish inside of me: I'm the worst public speaker in Finland! You see, its not actually true what they say in the article: "A good speaker for a Finn is one who can give expression to what he or she wants to say briefly and efficiently without talking too much and too profusely." Even in Finland, a boring speaker is a boring speaker. A bigger problem is that most people don't like to give public speeches and are quite bad performers.
So, as the article says: "Finns may be less liable to intervene in public meetings and in classroom but participate with vigor in discussion in pubs, at marketplaces or in the sauna". It's easy to agree with this argument. Since I'm talkative I have many talkative (also Finnish) friends and my family is very talkative too (talkativeness may be something you inherit from your parents, I assume). Maybe because I love words so much, I've never actually thought about silence before but I have to say this new idea of "The Silent Finn" is interesting. At least it got me writing a lengthy post! :D
Talking about silence, check out this link about body language. It was quite fun!
I've been having a serious culture shock for one week! It all started a week ago when we discussed about Lehtonen and Sajavaara's article, "The Silent Finn Revisited" (1997) in our English class. That was the moment when I realised that I'm no true Finn! The article says that: "The statement by Bertolt Brecht that Finns are silent in two languages can be considered just a cliché today". Well, that's a good start for an article, but after that opening statement so many strange things about Finns followed that I absolutely have to resign myself from being a Finn if those facts hold true.
For the sake of a good story line I guess I'll have to tell you a little bit about my own cultural background. Maybe it will also help innunderstanding why I find some arguments in the article so absurd. So, I grew up in the Eastern part of Finland, in a small town of less than 5000 people. As far as I remember (my family moved South when I was ten) lives in the North weren't silent at all. Very much the opposite: I remember having great, noisy parties in our big house (we were living in an old vicarage) with singing and dancing. Some times we even made a Finnish Swedes-style crayfish party in our garden since my mom comes from a Swedish-speaking family.
Like I said, we moved South when I was ten and it took some time to lose my funny Eastern accent. Our family grew bigger and louder (I got two noisy little brothers) and no, I don't remember any silent moment from that period of my life. Dad was travelling a lot for his work and we also hosted foreigners in our house. I never found them noisier than my family but I did pity their ears! Years went by quite fast like they usually do and suddenly I was a teenager who wanted to try her own wings for the first time. I was still underage but after some time of persistent persuation my parents let me move to Brazil for one year. Going to Brazil was the best decision of my life by the way!
In the article Gudykunst (1989, p. 336) claims that: "Finns may be seriously handicapped by their silence-bound behaviour, which makes it rather difficult for them to open up and start communicating in such situations". Oh, shut up Gudykunst! I have to admit that I had some problems with communication in Brazil at first: I didn't know a single word in Portuguese! But it was in two weeks time that I was so tired of silence that I started to imitate every single word that I could recognize as a word and soon I was able to talk again. (And like my Brazilian "mom" said after that: "Nunca mais parou de falar" which means that when I started talking there was no end to it!)
"When we observe a Finn's communicative behaviour in these terms, we are mostly concerned with a Finn as a user of a foreign language, which adds one more discrepancy: the comparison is always with the native speakers of the target language using their mother tongue, and not with them as users of a foreign language." Yes, yes! That's what I'm talking about! I'm pissed of when Finns are always compared to Northern Americans in this kind of communicative investigations. And now I'll have to tell you a fact I've learned when I've been travelling and meeting people from different countries. Finns are told to be quiet in two languages while most people I've met are communicative in one language and silent in the rest of the 6000 languages of the world. For some reason, students from Scandinavia and from Finland succeeded in learning Portuguese pretty fast in Brazil whereas most of the Americans remained silent. So I would like to know where was this Gudykunst's typical Northern "silence-bound behaviour" then?
"While Americans make use of talk to gather information about the other party and to reduce uncertainty, Finns try to reach the same goal by making silent observations of the interlocutor. Representatives of Southern and Central European cultures become irritated, because they tend to assess their interlocutors by their skill in verbal argumentation and reasoning, and this is something that may be totally absent in situtation with Finns. Germans may regard Finnish quietness and silence as retirence, reserve, and even aimlessness (Tiittula, 1993)." I've never felt myself perfectly relaxed if there's an other person in the same room and we are just sitting there saying nothing. And this reminds me about my German roommate in Lisbon. She was so sweet and the best cook I've ever met. There was just one thing about her that was making me feel uncomfortable sometimes: she was too quiet! It was okay with her to spend hours together without a word and that was making me crazy. Does this prove I'm not a Finn anymore?
I was almost loosing my hope already and thinking that I've probably lost my Finnish identity while travelling around when I remembered something. I noticed that I still have something deeply Finnish inside of me: I'm the worst public speaker in Finland! You see, its not actually true what they say in the article: "A good speaker for a Finn is one who can give expression to what he or she wants to say briefly and efficiently without talking too much and too profusely." Even in Finland, a boring speaker is a boring speaker. A bigger problem is that most people don't like to give public speeches and are quite bad performers.
So, as the article says: "Finns may be less liable to intervene in public meetings and in classroom but participate with vigor in discussion in pubs, at marketplaces or in the sauna". It's easy to agree with this argument. Since I'm talkative I have many talkative (also Finnish) friends and my family is very talkative too (talkativeness may be something you inherit from your parents, I assume). Maybe because I love words so much, I've never actually thought about silence before but I have to say this new idea of "The Silent Finn" is interesting. At least it got me writing a lengthy post! :D
Talking about silence, check out this link about body language. It was quite fun!
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