...An article..
..A story..
..A poem..
..A review..(restaurant, book, film you have seen recently)
..An important announcement..
Just make sure it's in English!
Look how diverse English has become in countries where it is spoken.
Most English courses teach Standard English but occasionally we see examples of generally Standard American or British English
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHere's an article that was recently published in Australia..
ReplyDeleteA bit about my life in Swtzerland..
I uploaded the document to Google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6GjdZCrnJswbHJsTlBCUzNLV00/edit?usp=sharing
Well, I'm on Vacation (only one week unfortunately), and I decided to use part of my free time to contribute to this blog, and to practice my poor English. Outside it's snowing, therefore it's the right time to do my homeworks :-).
ReplyDeleteIn this contribute I would like to explain how I normally write in Englsh when I need to. As I already said during our first lesson, I have never really studied English, so my current knowledge is based, for the most part, on a "self-made" learning.
More or less ten years ago I have adopted for my personal computer life the free and open source operating system Ubuntu, based on the Linux kernel. Perhaps you know that in the open source world, to obtain help and support for free, you have to count on the community of other users. That means you will use forums and "Question and Answer" (Q&A) sites like StackExchange. The most comprehensive and up to date sites are always the ones in English.
So, how can a guy like me participate to these forums and sites with so little experience in writing in English? Since the first of my comments on a forum, I have applied the following steps:
1) write a draft of my text in English (this is a good exercise in any case)
2) use short phrases (it's difficult and dangerous to use long and complicated sentences as you do with your mother tongue. You will be lost soon :-) )
3) copy and paste my text into a translator (google translator) and check if the Italian version of my text "sounds good and correct"
4) apply the corrections needed to make my text at least decent :-)
5) not mandatory but useful, listen to the google translator voice that read my english text and, again, check if it "sounds good"
5) post my text on the forum or the "Q&A" site
I have to admit that my first time I was a bit nervous. What if my text is so bad that other users will only laugh and not respond me? What if I made too many errors? This could be a very embarrassing situation with a text posted into the wild! :-)
But what a beautiful surprise when the first answer is arrived. The other person responded me exactly for what I have asked! This means that, after all, I have wrote a text that was pretty good, or at least sufficiently good.
Since then, I have asked and answered many times on forums and "Q&A" sites, and my "method of work" is still good.
A final note: obviously for the present contribution I have not adopted my "method". This is an exercise to improve our English, and using google translator is not fair. I wrote this text alone, without any help.
You can use a language in four manner:
ReplyDelete1) listening
I like very much the TV series, and since a couple of years I have committed myself to watch some of them with the original audio track. The most part of the TV series that I follow are american or british. Moreover, I follow every now and then the news on the BBC channel, and a couple of interesting broadcasts (Countryfile and The One Show), that allow me to listen about different arguments, and different kind of pronunciations (from England, Scotland, Wales).
It's impossible to understand all the words, but it's a good exercise to "make the ear" (I don't know if this is a valid expression :-) ) on the language.
2) reading
I have not yet read a book in English. This is a lack form my part, but thanks to the suggestion from Mark, I can download some good classic books. This is not a problem because I like to read.
3) writing
My job implies that sometimes I have to write to a company's support, but this is always a technical argument. No poems, no articles, no novels :-)
I don't know, perhaps one day I could write something different, as I'm doing right now on this blog. This could be a good exercise to improve my skills on the phrase construction.
4) speaking
This is the more difficult point. In my daily life I have no occasion to speak. I can say that I have spoken a couple of times with an employee of a company, but these are really limited dialogues and very technical. So, what to do?
Perhaps can I speak sometimes with my fellows of the csi-english course?
Or can I participate to one of the many hangouts on the net?
Or I have to meet a girlfriend from GB, USA, Australia? :-)
Work in progress here...
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteWow! What fantastic posts Nicola! Your writing shows that motivation and discovering the techniques that work for you personally can get results.
DeleteYour English writing is of a very high standard for someone who hasn't had any formal training. Well done!
For a corrrected version of the posts (which includes some rephrasing and minor changes in vocabulary where appropriate)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6GjdZCrnJswTU5xa3kwWGVCVFE/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you Mark! Your needed corrections will be very helpful for my future performances :-)
DeleteHere is my presentation about Alexander for your interest.
ReplyDeletehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6GjdZCrnJswX2JxNnpjMmo0akE/view?usp=sharing