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