Pronunciation diary part 1

Our task for this week was to try out some exercises from our Pronunciation Practice Page and write about our experiences with them. I, personally, enjoyed these exercises very much since I like listening to native speakers and I have always been fascinated by the different accents of British and American English. This is why I started with the pronunciation practice page “antimoon.com”. This site provides a subpage called "Choosing between American and British pronunciation" that is really helpful to decide if you want to speak British or American English. I, for my part, prefer American English and therefore I focused on the American English pronunciation exercises.

I started with the pronunciation website “Rachel’s English”. I have to say I really enjoyed her videos called “Real life” because the focus of these videos is everyday communication and they also give an insight in the American Culture. Her perfect AE pronunciation was the reason I got stuck on her page for quite some time. After that, I watched the videos from Amy Walker. I really liked her accent tutorial because she’s a likeable person and, in my opinion, she explains the way how AE pronunciation works really well. Particularly her first video about the vowel sounds was really useful for me. It’s a lot easier to pronounce a sound if know how to do it concerning mouth, teeth and tongue. I think practicing pronunciation in front of a mirror is a really good idea! Another video that appealed to me was the one about consonants and letter combination. Since a lot of German native speakers have a problem with the “th” and “f/v” sounds I had a closer look at these exercises.

To sum up, I think that the exercises from our Pronunciation Practice Page are really helpful and I am planning on improving my pronunciation, in particular my “th” and “v/f” sound, by doing a lot more of these exercises.

Comment on anonymous summary

Summary: "Europe already has one foot in 'Japanese' deflation grave"

The article “Europe already is one foot in Japanese’ deflation grave” by ‛
Ambrose-Evans-Pritchard, that was published on October 23, 2013 is about the European
Debt crisis.
At the moment the percentage of debts in the European Union is increasing. With the
exceeding debt rates, deflation is also rising. Over the past few months prices within the
EU have been falling, increasing the risk of deflation. France, Spain, Greece, Portugal
Cyprus, Slovenia, Latvia and in particular Italy for example have especially faced this
problem.
One of the reasons for the problem the EU is currently facing has its origin in politics.
Evans-Pritchard argues that because of poor policy, like imposing high taxes on the wrong
countries and giving too much money to countries, as Germany, the specter of deflation
rises.
The author states that one possible solution for this problem would be, if European
countries like Spain, France and Italy started to work together, putting through a reflation
policy that would stop the inflation fall.

My feedback:
First of all I have to say that it really impressed me that the author managed to compose a summary of 165 words mentioning the main ideas of the original text. In my opinion the summary is well written and clearly describes the complicated topic.
However, although it was impressing that the author did not need more words he did not fulfill the task because we were asked to write a summary of 200 +/- 5 words.
I like the topic sentence but unfortunately the author got the title wrong: "Europe already HAS one foot in 'Japanese' deflation grave"
One thing that I personally don't really like is that the author mentions a lot of countries in the first paragraph. I think one or two would have been enough as examples.
Apart from that I really liked the summary because it manages to give an insight in the difficult topic of the original text and expresses it in a way that is easier to understand.

EU group paragraph

The European Council

The European Council plays an important role in setting a general political direction for the European Union. This institution, which meets at least four times a year, is composed of the Heads of State or Government of the Member States, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council. The President of the European Council, currently Herman Van Rompuy, is elected for two and a half years and can be re-elected once. He is responsible for coordinating the work of the European Council and ensures that decisions are put into practice. The decisions are made by consensus: a concept or an idea has to be accepted by every voter or by the qualified majority depending on the nature of the treaty. In some cases decisions are reached by unanimity, which means that every Head of State or Government needs to agree.  If someone does not approve, the change cannot come into force. Although the European Council is not a legislative body, thus not allowed to pass laws, it is still very important since it sets priorities and debates sensitive issues.