Hello! I hope you're having a pleasant week. I've been busy as always. I've finally gotten started working with the material for my thesis and it means hours and hours of work, of course. I spent almost my whole weekend transcribing the clips but on Saturday night we had a pause with my two friends and some friends-of-a-friend Erasmus exchange students. We went out for a beer and then dancing some latin rhytms and I had a chance to practise my English for a change. (One of the guys was Brazilian and with him I spoke Portuguese, of course.) I also happened to dance salsa with many Spanish speaking men but we always spoke Spanglish instead of Spanish. Does it count?;)
I've been looking for those links we talked about in class and I've been thankful for these tips they give for learning. Speaking about phonetics, I'm a lucky person since I had to learn phonetic alphabet during my Portuguese studies. (There are still some phones in English that don't exist in Portuguese. Those I should learn, of course.) Electronic Journals could actually help with thesis, as well. And.... oh my God, I just noticed that there's a podcast of James Joyce's Ulysses! It was just translated in Finnish for a second time. (That's one of the books I will read when my thesis will be ready. I call that kind of books my "trophy" books.) I don't know if I would have the courage to read Ulysses in English. Maybe I could try after finishing the translated version. I loved "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" so I should try, shouldn't I? The rice game was fun of course but maybe the most useful link thinking about the future was the Cambridge Dictionary. I've been looking for a good online dictionary because of my thesis and now I can finish my search.
One thing that is concerning me a bit now is the fact that I must use British English and American English mixed together all the time. I'm in a hard situation since we were taught to speak and write the British way when I was in high school but ever since I got to the University I've been reading almost exclusively American articles. (Literature courses made an exception on this matter.) It doesn't help that many of the films we are watching come from the States. Nor the fact that I actually never thought so much about the difference between British and American English before this course. I don't think I'll manage to change my whole speaking or writing during this semester but at least I can try to be more conscious about it. What else about this week? We watched "How I met your mother" again and then some films. That's about it. See you on Friday!
P.S. Actually I did forget something! I've been thinking about different reading techniques a lot and I got in to one conclusion: those fast reading techniques just don't work for me. I mean, of course it's a good idea to skim through all the headlines of an article and only after that decide if you want to read it or not but if I decide to read the text I have to read it properly. Otherwise I get the feeling that I'm missing something very important and I don't get the big picture. They actually did one critical survey about fast reading techniques in the University of Turku so I might have a point here. What do you think?
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