Family Guy

Hello all!

A few days ago I was surfing the net searching for something fun, and I thought...Giorgia, why don't you look for something entertaining and useful at the same time, that's to say, something amusing and linked to English?!?

So, I decided to put here a video from YouTube. The video is part of an episode from 'Family Guy', an American animated TV sitcom. In Italy the sitcom was broadcast on Italia1 changing the title into 'I Griffin'.

I love this show and I bought many DVDs with its episodes. After all, I bought them in English so they are useful for my personal learning environment! LOL :)

The show is known to have an adult content but I consider my readers grown up enough to handle it ;) and I know that you will enjoy it! I dare you to find somebody who doesn't like Family Guy at all!

Episode: Chicken Fight



N.B. No chickens were harmed during the making of this video ;)

See ya!
Giorgia

FeedBACK to get FORWARD

In parallel with the running of our blogs, me and my classmates are working a lot on mutual feedback, especially about grammar issues.
I think that getting feedback is an extremely useful way to get aware of our frequent mistakes; it is difficult for me to always recognize my errors, especially if I'm the only reader of my pieces of writing. :)
I sometimes notice my mistakes but you know...the more you go on reading and re-reading the same passage, the less you'll realize the errors inside.
BTW, if you've already read my post on 'personal learning environment', aka PLE, you know that in the last couple of weeks I've removed a few things from my vocabulary: present perfect (really hard, as you can see above!!!) and 'also'.

During the last lesson we continued our work on grammar improvement; we talked about 'building sentences', especially using subordinators and conjuncts. I learned that:
- subordinators (e.g. although, since, when) are never preceded by a comma;
- conjuncts (e.g. in addition, to sum up, therefore) are always independent words or expressions followed by a comma. They can be preceded only by a full stop or a semi-colon.
It is important to remember that subordinators and conjuncts are very formal expressions that tend to make the syntax heavy. So, if you manage to express yourself clearly and logically without those expressions, don't use them!

Then we talked about relative clauses (defining and non-defining), which are used to give additional information about something just mentioned without starting another sentence.
If you want some good tips about the above mentioned grammar issues, take a look to Grammar Girl, an helpful website about linguistic topics.

Ok guys...Hope this information will help you!
And I hope to get more and more aware of my mistakes and get rid of them!

Bye
Giorgia

Good Chances I

As I've told on a previous post, I committed myself to do as much as possible to improve my English in any possible way…so…guess? I’m attending a seminar of English Contemporary Literature in which we watch movies in original language – English obviously – without subtitles! It’s definitely a good chance to prove and improve my listening skills. What’s more, these movies were produced in some of the old European colonies (i.e. Australia, Africa, Jamaica, to name a few) and therefore they are full of slang terms, which are interesting to learn as part of everyday, informal language.

Ok…just a little step forward, but a step indeed!

Bye
Giorgia

Language Learning

I just want to say briefly for those who may not understand who I'm referring to when I write 'we' or 'us' (hoping that someone else - apart from my classmates - will read my blog! :) ) that this blog is part of an academic course of English language.
That said, as I told you on the previous post, this blog can be an extremely useful tool to improve English. Blogging and - primarly - reading others' blogs and get feedback or comments on yours are parts of what we called during class 'personal learning environment'.
As a matter of fact, reading others' words or get your pieces of writing corrected make you notice which are your weak points/frequent mistakes and how to get rid of them.
Thus these are the 'things' that I wanna get rid of (I'll get them back as soon as I learn how to use them properly!!!):

. present perfect
. 'also'

First of all, I have to remove the present perfect because the more I think about its use the more I mistake. I think that sometimes it's really difficult for an Italian native speaker to understand the subtle difference between present perfect and past simple, especially when the fact that you are describing happened not long ago.
Secondly, I have to get rid of the adverb 'also' because wherever I put it, it's always the wrong place :). I think that this mistake depends on the fact that I use 'also' as the italian equivalent 'anche', but syntactically they are very different.
I hope I'm not the only one dealing with these problems :(
Well...Let me know what do you think about this kind of issues, so we can discuss them together and help each other out!

Apart from these last (and new) notes, last week we fulfilled a personal ‘To Do List’ on the next language goals we would like to achieve. As far as I’m concerned, I never thought of designing my own language path before. However, to sit down, think and write my personal needs & projects made me feel more realistic on what I’ve learnt so far and what I still need to learn. As a matter of fact, I realized that I want to be more confident when I have both to communicate and interact in English. I want to organize my speeches and my pieces of writing better, more coherently. I want to enrich my vocabulary both formal and informal. And I want to get rid of my usual mistakes (see above). That said, I committed myself to spent at least 30/60 minutes a day practising my English in any possible way: reading books, newspapers or magazines, watching movies without subtitles, surfing the net, reading my classmates’ blogs and trying to interact during classes as much as possible.

Easier to say than do! :)

However, to point out this ‘To Do List’ was a good thing indeed!

Let’s start and see what happens as we go along!
Okay, that's all for now...

Bye
Giorgia

Me & Blogging

I never had a blog ‘till now, ‘cos I was always concerned about being boring as well as exposing myself too much. However, as I read on the net while doing a paper on the blogging phenomenon, almost EVERYBODY has either a blog or a page into a social network...so it’s high time for us to become active cybernauts :)
As I’ve just written, I found a lot of interesting info on ‘blogging’ during the wiki project on the 1st semester: blogosphere is HUGE and there are plenty of blogs, the ‘cyber-world’ is so big that have been invented websites working as search engines for searching blogs (e.g. Technorati or Icerocket).
Neverthless I’m sure that blogging and analysing others’ blogging – using the proper tools – will become more and more interesting, useful and easy as we go on.
Try to go in Google or Technorati and key in “how to blog...”, you’ll find a lot of tips and walkthroughs for managing properly a blog and its tools.
Beyond all these technical notions, I think (and I hope) that this new adventure will help me to improve my writing skills in English as well as my vocabulary both informal and formal. I think that this can be an effective experience through which achieve some of the above mentioned language goals I set at the beginning of this semester!

Read, write, observe, analyse, learn...It's up to me now!

Bye
Giorgia

Welcome

Hello all!

I’m Giorgia and this is my blog. This is my first time running a blog and I’m really excited! I hope we’ll enjoy sharing interests, improving our English and learning a lot of things together. Any comments, advices, suggestions are welcome!

We are all here to learn from each other :)

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)