Culture Days

This week we had our Culture Days, which means I went to see many, many presentations covering a variety of topics related to Irish and American culture, history and society. These are all the topics I heard about when I spent 80% of my waking time at university:

American Topics
Since I am not going to take Frank as my teacher for the KGP, I cannot choose American topics. However, I had a presentation on an American topic myself, so I simply watched the ones that were before and after my presentation. They were:

• The Kennedys: Jack and his brothers
  by Alissa Zwatz
• Livability in America
  by Beatrice Hofer
• Vietnam: Soldiers as Victims and Villains
  by Eva Egger
• Accusations of the Innocent: Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism
  by Tanja Erlacher
• The never-ending War on Terror
  by Helene Kortschak

Irish Topics
Whenever I didn't have another class or exam at university, I watched presentations on Irish topics so that I would have a wide range of presentations to choose from for the KGP ('Kommissionelle Gesamtprüfung', our oral final exam this year). 

• Irish influences on C.S. Lewis' work
  
  by Marlene Fischer
• Comparison of the Irish and Austrian educational system
  by Simone Wohlkinger
• Irish as an official EU language
  by Dolores Miskovic
• The Conspiracies about the Murder of Jean McConville
  by Alexandra Pasca
• Irish women: From Household to Gender Equality
  by Margarita Misihaev
• What did the Fenian Brotherhood achieve with their raids on Canada?
  by Theresa Steinwender
• Belfast - a city still split by the Troubles
  by Stefanie Schauer
• Gerry Adams and the IRA
  by Josepha Biebl
• Health problems of the Irish Travellers
  by Nina Nöst
• The Race around Ireland
  by Roman Sommersacher
• Is Irish a dying language?
  by Nina Mikusch
• David Norris & LGBT rights in the Republic of Ireland
  by Katharina Luttenberger
• The Vikings in Ireland
  by Verena Roßmann
• Oliver Cromwell in GB and Ireland
  by Verena Eisenköck
• Irish Intelligence at its peak
  by Julia Kölbl
• The popularised Leprechaun
  by Linda Zaufel

As you can see, I saw a large number of presentations, so I do not have the time or nerve to comment on each one separately. Some of them were excellent, some of them were not...
The three major criticisms I wrote on my feedback sheets - all of them criteria that make the difference between an okay and an overwhelming presentation -  were:

• that the presenter did not speak loudly enough - believe me, I am scared to death as well when I have to speak in front of others, but by speaking loudly you at least give people the impression of being confident. "Fake it 'til you make it" :-)
• that I had a hard time following your presentation AND filling out the handout, because there were a lot of open questions or because the questions were not in order
• that the presenter seemed rather bored - we all have been working on our topics for weeks and I see how you could be fed up with it by now, but this was your time to shine...

Now I am waiting for my feedback sheets to see how I can improve my presentation skills!

In the meantime, I have to decide which five topics I choose to be tested on at the KGP. I am someone who can be interested in almost anything if it is presented with enough enthusiasm, which made the choice tough. Here are the five topics I chose and why I chose them:

• The Vikings in IrelandI am generally interested in the Scandiavian culture. Also, I study Norwegian and the Vikings came from Norway - how could I not choose this topic, then? :-)
• Is Irish a dying language?I chose this topic because I think it is important to know about this minority language if you choose Irish culture for the final exam. The gradual dying out of Irish Gaelic can also be linked to many historical events, which makes studying easier for me.
• David Norris' contribution to LGBT rights in the Republic of IrelandA very unusual topic, but same-sex marriage and questions on its legislation always seem to be on the agenda nowadays. I had not heard about David Norris before, but after the presentation I was inspired to read more about him and to also investigate what the situation for same-sex couples is in Northern Ireland.
• The Role of Oliver Cromwell in Great Britian and Ireland
  This is another topic I chose because it can easily be linked to to other events in Irish history. I also liked this presentation because we can see two very different perspectives on the life and work of one man here.
• Irish Intelligence at its peak
  It was one of the most impressive presentations I saw, and even though there will be a large number of facts to learn I had the impression that this presentation is extraordinarily well-structured and well-researched. Since I had to watch the last part of a movie on Irish culture last sememster, The War of Independence was in my part and I had already heard about most of the people and organisations before.

M'athchomaroon!

If you are a Game of Thrones fan, you might already know what I'm talking about...if not, let me clarify this: M'athchomaroon is the equivalent for "hello" in the fictional language of Dothraki. Dothraki was created specifically for Game of Thrones by this guy:

David J. Peterson

David J. Peterson is a linguist who really likes to invent new languages - but not the kind of "oh, let's substitute each letter in the alphabet with a strange sign" kind of language most of us invented at some point when we were children. No, David puts a lot more effort into his work as you can best see on his homepage.

For each language, he explains all the rules from pronunciation to morphology to orthography for whoever has the will and nerve to read through it. Each language is more or less based on the grammar rules of a real language. For example, there is 'Kamakawi' (which means 'rainbow'), a language based on Hawai'ian. It is one of the more "evolved" languages on his homepage, and by evolved I mean that David provides more specific grammar rules and a larger vocabulary for Kamakawi than for some of the other languages. For example, he uploaded a list of Kamakawian names and their meaning!

Some other examples of languages David created are 'Gwedyr', a language based on the Finno-Ugric vowel harmony and noun cases, and KNSL, a sign language.

I think his work is pretty impressive, but it must also be quite sad to be the inventor of a language and therefore probably its only speaker. The meaning of language is to make communication easier, but if you cannot speak that language with anyone because nobody knows it, this is very frustrating. Also, if you are the creator of a language you know all its rules because you are the one who makes them. There is no one who knows the language better than you - so there is no one you can look up to and learn from.

Health Report Correction

Dentist's

This report provides a summary of the findings of a survey which was carried out during the week of 12th to 18th May. The survey consisted of 100 evaluation forms as well as 25 face-to-face interviews with patients after their dental visit. While the surgery was praised for its modern equipment, there were serious issues raised regarding the cleanliness of some of the facilities and the behaviour of the staff.

First impression

In general, the majority of the people interviewed expressed satisfaction with the overall impression of the surgery. They approved of the light-flooded premises and the quiet waiting room. There were similar results with regard to the extended opening hours, which make a dental visit possible even after a regular workday has ended.

Cleanliness

One issue which emerged from customer responses was the flouting of health regulations. While many mentioned the surgery’s clean overall impression, it was pointed out that the dentist often did not disinfect his hands before turning to a new patient. Five percent of the patients surveyed voiced concerns that this posed a health risk. They also disliked the fact that patients are encouraged to use toothpaste from a common tube in the bathroom as this may accelerate the spread of infections.

Staff

In terms of friendliness and politeness, staff scored highly. However, it also emerged from the survey that communication among the staff is something that needs addressing. One patient expressed his dissatisfaction: ‘One dentist told me that my wisdom tooth needs to be extracted. The next time I came here, they didn’t mention the wisdom tooth but concluded I need brackets.’

Recommendations

It is clear that certain points, hygiene in particular, need to be addressed. I would strongly recommend organising training for the staff in order to make them familiar with the current health regulations. It is also essential to keep better records of all the procedures in order to improve customer satisfaction.

In this report, I made some silly and unnecessary mistakes concerning subject-verb agreement and articles. I suppose this is because I had realized too late that we had to print the report and did it in a hurry. In the end, I handed it in without having proofread the printed version. I hope these kind of mistakes will not happen on the next progress check, where we have to write by hand.

Honey, honey, honey...

...life is funny? Not for the bees anymore! It is not completely clear why so many of them die each year, but among the main reasons are definitely the pesticides used in today's agriculture and the Varroa mite, an insect that is a deadly hazard for the bees. Another cause could be monocultural farming, where farmers only plant one crop on a large area. It drastically reduces the variety of food available to the bees. Bees are essential for a healthy ecosystem though, because they pollinate plants and help them to reproduce. Without bees, plants wouldn't survive and we would have nothing to eat!

A few weeks ago I saw a documentary about bees and what happens now that so many of them die. If you are interested, you can follow this link and watch it yourselves. I had heard about the bee discussion before - an Austrian politician had brought it up, but he was often made fun of. I didn't know how grave the problem was until I saw the documentary. 

The most shocking scene was one where they show an apple tree plantation in China. The Chinese farmers had used so many pesticides that all the animals in the area basically became extinct, which means that there are no more bees that can pollinate the apple trees. A plantation doesn't work if the plants don't reproduce themselves, so the owners now hire humans to pollinate the apple trees! They collect pollen from healthy apple trees on a plantation far away, bring it to the chemical-infested plantation and climb every tree in order to put the pollen on the apple trees. It may be a funny sight, but in reality it is one of the most tragic things I have ever seen.

A few days later, I read a newspaper article about a 23-year-old Austrian girl who had a great business idea. The name of their company, 'Rent a bee', says it all. On their homepage, you can rent a beehive for two months. You don't need to know anything about bees or beekeeping, all you have to do is open the beehive door in the morning and close it at night, and you have to provide water for the bees. After two months, you return the beehive and you receive all the honey your bees produced in the last two months, which can be as much as five kilos! If you became interested in beekeeping, they also offer a tutorial and all the equipment needed for harvesting the honey yourself.

Unfortunately, the beehives are all delivered in April. If I could get you excited about having your own beehive, you'll have to wait until next year to get one, sorry. In the meantime, why not get an insect hotel like the one in the picture that provides shelter for different kinds of insects?

Science meets Comedy

You think science only involves boring equations, difficult formulas, numbers, data... - anything but fun? Read this post and think again!

Maybe some of you know poetry slams. After all, they have become quite popular recently. In a normal poetry slam, an artist has five minutes to present a text he or she has written themselves. Whispering, shouting, screaming - everything is allowed, but they must not sing (at least not during their whole performance) or use instruments. Also, artists are not allowed to use any requisites. In a poetry slam, the audience decides who wins by rating the performances with numbers or applause.

While in a normal poetry slam you should entertain your audience or make them re-evaluate their view of a topic, in a science slam the main goal is to inform the audience about your field of research. If you can entertain them at the same time, or change their views on your subject - even better! Performers of a science slam are apparently allowed to use requisites, and they have six minutes instead of five for their presentation.

In a science slam, it is less important to pay attention to the language you are using. Performers don't need to think of clever rhymes or puns, it is more important to explain their work in a simple way and show why they are fascinated by it. Most importantly, maybe, they are trying to convince the audience that research is not just something that happens far away from our daily lives in laboratories, but something that concerns us all and can make our lives easier and better.

In Austria, science slams take place approximately every three months, but the location changes, so it might take a while until there is one in a city near you. In the meantime, you can watch this video of Martin Moder, who was elected best Austrian science slammer and will take part in the European science slam finals later this year. Unfortunately, the video is in German. Generally, science slams don't seem to be popular in the English-speaking world yet. You can try your luck on youtube, where some of the videos have at least English subtitles.

Fans of the "real" poetry slam might denounce science slams because they differ too much from the original concept of a poetry slam, especially because they don't pay attention to linguistic aspects. However, I think they are a great way to bring various fields of scientific research closer to a large audience. Maybe they will encourage someone to study something scientific, or maybe it will change someone's mind about genetic modification and the like.

whatever makes you "glow"

It's been a while since I published my last post. This is because I had a lot of work to do for university, but also because I decided to put some serious quality time into my language learning. 

During the Easter holidays, I spent a week in Sweden with two of my friends. We don't speak Swedish but a friend of mine and I have recently started to learn Norwegian. When we heard people talking in Swedish - which is phonetically not so distant from Norwegian - we suddenly had a vivid connection to the Norwegian language and were totally motivated to put more effort into studying it back home.

In Sweden, we also met a German guy who studies in Brazil and can speak seven languages more or less fluently. If you need proof, watch this video! Unfortunately, he left Stockholm only one day after we had arrived, but on that one evening we spent together in our hostel's kitchen, he gave us many valuable tips and showed us some useful websites that might help us improve our language skills.

One of these websites (okay, it's a blog, not a website) is The Polyglot Dream. This is a blog owned by an Italian man who can speak ten languages. He blogs about his language learning skills, but also about the culture of different countries and about his trips to different places. Every post comes with at least one audio file - sometimes you can read and listen to the same text in as many as five different languages! I love blog posts with accompanying audio files because I feel that good quality acoustic input is often too little, but the most important phase in a conversation is the active listening - you have to understand what the other person is trying to tell you before you get to try to formulate your answer! I recommend you to listen to this interview about the role of talent in language acquisition. It lasts for half an hour but it is definitely worth listening to. Their views on the topic are interesting and it is highly motivational as well.

Some weeks ago I also borrowed an Italian audio book from the library. The book is called "Novecento" and it talks about a boy who is born on a cruise ship that goes back and forth between Europe and America. The boy becomes a piano virtuoso who plays for the guests on board. However, he refuses to leave the ship and people start wondering why...

I loved the story because it was written like a play and even contained poems. It was quite easy to understand, too. I have already decided that I will borrow some more Italian audio books from the library next week.

As far as Norwegian is concerned, I'm still searching for a good resource to use. I listened to a Norwegian radio station but there is mostly music and only little talk. It is a bit frustrating that my level is not high enough to follow a normal conversation yet because that limits the range of videos and audio files I can listen to. I listened to some children's stories but I was soon fed up with them because they were too ridiculous...to sum up, I'm still investigating Norwegian resources.

If you are still reading at this point, you might have wondered what the title has to do with all of this. Well, whatever makes you "glow", whatever makes you happy, excited, whatever you find intriguing will help you boost your level in a language :-)

The ultimate Styrian food experience

Today, we were finally given the corrected texts from our first progress check. We had to recommend a location where you can get the ultimate Styrian food experience. I chose the 'Stubenberghaus', a restaurant on top of a mountain where I had been working as a waitress for one whole summer.

If you want to try typical Austrian dishes in an extraordinary location, the ‘Stubenberghaus’ is the place to go. It is located on top of the ‘Schöckl’, a mountain north of Graz. The best time to visit the ‘Stubenberghaus’ is in summer. Even if it is unbearably hot in the city, it is relatively cool on top of the mountain. I recommend booking a table if you want to enjoy the breath-taking view from their terrace. This is because there are usually a great number of tourists and hikers.

Since all the ingredients have to be brought to the restaurant by cable car, the choice of dishes is somewhat limited. However, they also have home-made specials consisting of seasonal ingredients that are quite tasty.

If you like meat, try the ‘Kürbiskernschnitzel’, a piece of pork that is covered in flour, egg and pumpkin seeds and then deep-fried. Even though I do not usually like the taste of meat, it was absolutely delicious. Unfortunately, the ‘Stubenberghaus’ does not cater specifically for vegetarians or vegans. Non-meat-eaters are best asking the staff, who all speak English, for a vegetarian option. Anyone with a sweet tooth is advised to order the ‘Kaiserschmarren’, a typical Austrian dessert that resembled shredded pancakes. It will be freshly prepared for you and served with sugary plum jam. I strongly advise you not to order one for you alone however unless it is your main course – it is simply too filling.

Dining at the ‘Stubenberghaus’ may be a bit pricey for a student, but having lunch while enjoying a stunning view of Graz and its surroundings is a memorable experience that should definitely not be missed.

I am honestly surprised that I got such a good mark on my test because I was not completely content with it. After the exam, I felt like I should have used more new vocabulary. Sometimes I had a somewhat unelegant way to express myself, but our teachers provided great suggestions that helped me rewrite the text in a (hopefully) better way.