pondělí 18. května 2015

video description

Well, well, well.. :)

 This activity was the biggest fun I've had since I started all these recordings. I've been doing this kind of activity for a time so it was nothing I wouldn't know. It's been very helpful, but also really hard since scenes change quite often and mistakes occur freuqently.



Reflection: I decided to use Community since it's been my favourite show recently. I also wanted to use a video in which "something" happens and people are active. As I said, this wasn't the first time I was doing this kind of activity. Nonetheless, it was still hard and I made tons of mistakes. Very often I stopped talking in order to think about what I'd say next. I also used basic vocabulary, as I had no time to think about advanced words and without time to think I use those "Teddy bears" spontaneously, which is a pity because this made the recording sounds as if it had been recorded by a beginner. Sometimes I also forgot to use -s ending when I was speaking about someone else, for instance: "Britta feel" instead of feels. What happend to me few times was that I started with a sentence and suddenly changed it after few words and started with another one which made it sounds not understendable. Also last sentence: Let's see what's happen next.. really Jana, really? :D But practice makes the master, so let's go for it :)

As my individual task I decided to do a picture description in order to practice it for the ZJZP exam which is about to be taken very soon.


Since I've been attending speasking sessions every single week and practice at home I dare say there are no serious problems. Sometimes I do pauses in order to think up a story or find an appropriate word, but I hope it's becoming better and better :)


sobota 2. května 2015

Picture description




Well, to be honest, I don't mind describing pictures any more since I've been doing that every single week. I've learnt that if there is nothing happening in the picture, it's necessary to think out of the box and try to create a story behind the picture. But this means my fluency is sometimes worse than I wish it to be. The reason is that I have to think about the story and about all the stuff I want to share, as I don't want just describe what is obviously in the picture, since everybody can see that.

In the given picture I had several problems: as I have already mentioned, it was fluency - there were pauses in few sentences that didn't sound very well, e.g. "very often suffer from fear," or "who drank themselves to death". I also wasn't able to hear some articles while "profreading" the recording, even though I think I used them. So it means I either forget to use them, which is not good, or used them and didn't pronounc them properly, which is not acceptable either, so I definitely have to work on proper pronounciation of articles.

At the beginning I also used a phrase "in a pub" instead of "in the pub", but fortunately, I corrected myself.

Also gap filler used within the sentence including "horrible results" made it sound like as if I used an article before the word horrible.

The second task meant practicing some words that are stressed on the first syllable in order to try to exagerrate it a little, as I need to remember not to forgot to pronounce even stress on the first syllable properly.