Update on my Language Learning History

In my first blog-entree I already spoke about my Language learning history, 

especially how I learned English in school as well as on my travels and journeys

to other countries.

However, in this entree I would like to update my LLH, therefore I will focus

on my expectations for my future learning process as well as how I
changed my way of English learning during my university time so far.

Finally, I would like to give some advice to next year's first-year students providing

them with helpful information how to facilitate the Englsih learning process.

First of all, before I came to university I expected that my level of English would

be sufficient.

Anyhow, during my first weeks at university I realized that I had to cope

with several problems.

Especially I had to struggle writing academic English texts.

Searching for the reason, I evaluated the way I was used to write and

with the help of my English tutorials I found several ways how to improve
and develop my academic writing style.

The best ways gaining better writing skills are:

Firstly, force yourself writing texts that include many academic words by

 using words from the academic word list.

Furthermore, avoid words like: to make, to get or to give.

Use instead synonyms like to create, to receive or to provide.

Secondly, provide your readers with an well ordered structure that

 facilitates reading and creates the impression of professionalism.

This will all contribute to an academic writing style which is essential

 obtaining good grades at the university.

Furthermore, I changed my way of English learning in that way, that

I'm now more focused on Business related texts and therefore,
I read several online journals in my free time

about international business which is improving my steady
extension of vocabulary.

In the end, I would like to give some advice to next year's first-year students.

I can recommend, surmount difficulties by facing them.

Never hide yourself, face the fields of your problems!

First locate errors and after that work on them to prevent doing them

over and over again.

Moreover, do not be depressed or in low spirits.

Try always to motivate yourself and you will be able to improve your English skills.

I would like to end this with an quotation.

"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making

 mistakes and becoming superior."  ~Henry C. Link

Press release and evaluation

Hey,
today I would like to present you my first press release which I wrote about a fictional company called "Hazel".
Our task was creating in groups of five a new strategy in order to rise the profits and making "Hazel" more competitive in the global market.
Therefore, our group acted like real managers and developed a new product. Furthermore, we presented and explained in an PP-presentation how we would like to change the business in order to expand our market share of men's products through widening our product range.

Preparing this assignment, I used several frameworks from the internet making it as professional as possible.

Here the original Text with the Boilerplate giving factual information of Hazel.

HAZEL’S HAIR HOLDER –

INTRODUCTION OF AN INNOVATIVE BEAUTY PRODUCT FOR MEN

GRONINGEN,NL November 28, 2011 –  Hazel, one of the global largest direct sellers of cosmetics and beauty products, releases their newest product innovation especially for men, called “Hazel’s Hair Holder”. Their product slows the degree of hair loss down and is especially developed and created to target on the receding hairline.

More focus on the male anti-age beauty market

Lennard Weiss, Chief Executive Officer of Hazel, stated “Hazel’s Hair Holder, is our answer to an emerging market of anti-aging products specialized on the needs of men, this innovative product is a solution for many mid-aged men to “freeze” their loss of hair and with that their chance to keep their beauty for many years. This product is innovative and we will build up a broader range of beauty products on it, especially for men to raise our share for beauty men products on the global market ”

Natural ingredients

“Hazel’s Hair Holder” is completely based on natural ingredients and therefore free from chemicals that might harm the scalp. Furthermore, it also aids their consumers with a fostering effect on the scalp and also strengthens the hair structure. This contributes to an ever-present feeling of well-being.

New slogan and advertisement campaign

Supporting their product, Hazel also launched a new advertisement campaign with a catching slogan: “Freeze Your Loss of Hair!”

Additionally, Hazel also introduced a new logo showing hazelnuts to illustrate their relationship to natural ingredients.

All in all, “Hazel’s Hair Holder” is an innovative product for the emergent anti-aging market for men based on natural ingredients and supported by an eye-catching campaign.

END

Hazel was founded 1886 in New York City and operates global as the world’s largest direct seller of cosmetics and beauty products with more than 42000 employees.

Their CEO Lennard Weiss is running the company since 2000.

Hazel’s priority is to deliver premium cosmetic and beauty products at obtainable prices to men and women of all ages.

Hazel Incorporation, New York City, New York.

Website:  www.hazel.com

#

Following our presentation slides providing the audience with our new marketing strategy as well as information about our new product.

Hazel

View more presentations from Lennard666.

Following, an illustration showing my evaluated press release.
The use of different kind of word is highlighted by different colors.

"The average 'near-native' (C2.2) ratio is: 70:10:10:10"

Evaluated text written by myself:        71:7:7:15

My Explanation for the use of 15% of "Off-List Words" is that the program from the webpage  http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/

determined the company name as an "Off-List Word" and through the frequently use this is also expressed in the evaluated statistic.

University Exam and Memo Report

Hello everybody,
The last weeks were really exhausting, I had to study a lot for my exams.
I wrote exams in all my subjects especially my first one in English.
Later on, I will explain you have I prepared myself for this Exam.
Anyhow, it was a very exciting day today.
We got the grades of our English exam as well as the second Memo Report.
To shortcut, I passed both and I am especially satisfied about the Memo Report.
As I told you I tried to make it as professional as possible.
Thereby, I also tried to minimize mistakes in Grammar and other fields of Errors.
With the "Self-check Error List" provided by our teacher, I now can look for all my mistakes and the frequency I used to do those mistakes.
Following, our "Self-check Error List":

Evaluating both Memo Reports I recognized that I will have to focus in future more on the use of gerunds.
Furthermore, I think I could have easily avoid the spelling mistakes by giving my reports to others to check them on mistakes.
I will work with and on this list furthermore to gain more academic writing skills.

Concerning my English exam I would like telling you how and why I prepared for my Exam.
Firstly,  I tried to refresh and to refill my knowledge of academic business vocabulary.
Therefore, I learned the Academic Word Lists by heart.
I used a special vocabulary learning program for that. This was facilitating looking for words that I already knew and that I still had to learn.
For MAC-user I can recommend a freeware called "Provoc" published on following webpage:
http://www.arizona-software.ch/provoc/

Furthermore, I made use of an example exam that we discussed a weeks  before the actual real exam.
This was contributing, because with that I was able to focus more on my actual problem parts of the exam that were for instance linking words as well as special words from the AWL.

I would like to end this entry with a funny exam situation ;)

Evaluation of my memo report II

Hello everybody,

I have to say, I am really excited about the grade of my second memo report we had to hand in.
I really learned from my mistakes and I tried to make the report as professional as possible.
Furthermore, I used the program of: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ to evaluate my used words again.
My results are as follows:

Compared to my last report, I must say that I really improved the use of wordlist two vocabulary.
To make things clear, you can find a comparison below between a native speaker and myself:
Native speaker:
70% list one
10% list two
10% AWL
10% Off-List
Myself:
72.01% list one
09.13% list two
09.53% AWL
09.33% Off-List

I think, this is a fine step into the right direction but, of course, I still have to improve further on.

All in all, this showed me that it is possible to make improvements! Moreover, it is really helpful to make use of the possibilities the world wide web is offering to us. Online-applications can contribute to our knowledge and help us heading forward to our aims.
In my case: writing and speaking academic business English.

With this in mind,
have a nice day,

Lennard

Combine fun and learning!

G'day,
to start with an Australian salutation.
Today I would like to inform you about something really helpful, if you are not a native English speaker.
During our last meeting of "SPAA" (a meeting with our student-coach), we took a test, that differentiated us into different learning styles
Those are:
-Auditory Learners
-Visual Learners
and
-Tactile/Kinesthetic Learner

My outcome: Auditory Learner

After the tutorial I thought about it and I concluded that it always was really helpful for me to watch English spoken TV. I learned pronunciation and spelling of many words knowingly, that most of the "MTV English" is not appropriate to learn academic English. In total it was still contributing to my proper English. Futhermore, I remembered that during my travels, all people coming from countries, where English TV-shows were not synchronized spoke English more fluently than other countries.
Just to list some: Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway.

So why not combining  fun and learning, by watching more English spoken TV!?
Find a nice example hereunder:

Evaluation of my memo report

Hello everybody,

today I want to tell you something about an interesting website, which our teacher provided us with.
The link: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/
It is useful to evaluate any kind of English texts.
The program is searching for the frequency of words, that have been used.
It is separrating:
1.) K1 (most frequent 1000 words of English)
2.)K2 (second most frequent 1000 words of English)
3.)AWL (the 570 most frequently used words in academic texts across subjects)
4.) Off-list (the remainder which are not found on the other lists)

During our tutorial we had to perform like real managers negotiating about a topic, which was the expansion of a polish airport. Afterwards, we wrote a memo report about our negotiations.

I used the program of the website to look at my personal statistic of used words.
Following my findings:

The typical educated native speaker result is 70% from first 1000, 10% from second thousands, 10% academic and 10% less frequent words.
In conclusion, I realized that I used to many words from the first list (77.04%) and less words from second one (5.19%).This showed me, that I have to focus more on using those words to improve my writing in English, to come closer to the result of  a typical native speaker.

Make the best out of your English and have a nice day,

Lennard

How to keep in time during presentations

We all know the problem, our teacher provides us issues with heaps of information and it is often difficult to accommodate these into a predetermined time.

So I took the chance to provide my audience, my English class, with helpful options and solutions to keep in time during presentations.

The information of the following presentation-slides is based on an article of the University of Leicester.

Presentation english 1 time

View more presentations from Lennard666.

After presenting, I got the chance to receive feedback.

There were several helpful aspects, that could be improved and implemented into my upcoming presentations.

One important aspect was, that I should use the “International” Logo of our University, instead of the Dutch one showing that this course is international and not just local.

Moreover, I had a spelling mistake, which I could easily avoid by looking over my presentation several times.

All in all I took a lot of useful information from this tutorial, about my performance, as well as the ones from the others and I am looking forward to implement the improvements made on them in my following performances at the University to be more professional.

Welcome, here I am! My language learning history.

Well, how should I start my first Blog entry? I think first of all I should tell you something about my English knowledge level.

I started learning English in the 4th grade of primary school, our teacher taught us words describing colors, numbers and how to introduce ourselves. Ongoing, I have been learning now for more than ten years. During my school-time I took part in several exchange programs where I noticed how important English was. Looking back, I can remember just one funny situation when I was in Severna Park, Maryland, USA. I tried to explain my exchange mum that I needed a towel. Trying to find this simple expression I stumbled  something like “May I have a serviette, please?” My host started laughing and asked: “What?”

This is to show how a multi-lingual boy from Europe mixed up a French word with a double meaning simply trying to find an English expression for a piece of cloth to dry his skin.

So far I realized that my school English wasn’t always sufficient to manage simple everyday-life situations.

After having finished school with my A-levels, I started travelling through southeast-Asia, Australia and New Zealand, to explore the world and also improving my English skills.

The result was heaps of new vocabulary, but mostly colloquial and slang. Just to show you one example: in the Bushes of Australia “rednecks” usually welcome you by asking ”How ya, mate?” instead of saying formally “How are you doing, sir?” Even if I had a good basic school education and lots of exchanges as well as a one-year-trip, I had to realize that for my professional future it is indispensable to enter a new field of English, namely, Business English, to enhance my ability to express myself properly at the university as well as on my future job.

So my aims for this study course are to improve and to get used to “Business English” itself and to be able to transfer this knowledge to other study-subjects.

In addition to that, I want to gain better presentation skills and a reliable basis of business vocabulary.

In the end, I would like to read, write and speak Academic English, to participate in discussions at the university and to be successful in my future business job.

I am looking forward to tell you something about my first presentation in English in my next Blog entry.