Monday, October 29, 2007

Listening tasks

Listening has never been my favourite activity, because I have always preferred reading or looking to the pictures. I think, that the memory type that I have is the visual one and I’m happy for that. Having an ability to remember faces, places that I’m visiting, paintings that I love and the beauty that surrounds me in everyday life do not distact me from the things that I must do. Of course, it becomes a difficulty to remember thing, which are told just once for me, or the facts that I’m hearing for the first time. The best way which I’m using to remember the information, is to listen, to see that person, who is telling it, and to take notes. The only thing that I can do to make my listening tasks more effective is writing down main ideas each time. After listening the podcast once, I read my notes and then I try to listen the speech once again. This technique helps me to remember the main point of speech, to notice the words, that are unfamiliar to me and to concentrate more.
The podcast, that I was listening to, were quite simple and easy understandable. I was choosing them by looking to the title, and downloaded just the most interesting ones.
The first, which I have chosen was just one minute long, so I had to search better. The ones, that were specified for students, who are learning English as a second language, were too easy for me. The speaker was talking too slow, he did not have any accent and the words were quite simple. The second speech was quite good, because after the talk, speaker explained the most difficult words, their meaning and how to use them appropriately.
I think that those texts, of what I was hearing about, are useful when some words are new and you do not know how to spell it. By looking to the text, I can find their meaning in the dictionary.
To my mind, the most useful podcast are those, which are specified for native speakers, and are more difficult than we are used to. I concentrate more to difficult things, than to the tasks, that I consider to be easy.
I’m not saying that I have learned everything and now I need just difficult tasks, I think that the best way of getting better is learning form your mistakes. There is a long way to make my English good enough for serious conversation, and these tasks really helps. Talking with the foreigners who are visiting me in Lithuania is also a good practice, but we are use just casual everyday English, so I think it is not as good as listening news on BBC and using the webpage that our lecture suggested.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Analyzing handwriting

To analyze the person handwriting correctly, we have to look and notice a lot of things, because people have different writing characteristic, called indicators or writing traits.
Most important things are size, slant and base lines, but of course, there are much more of them. For example: if person is writing fast or slow, if he is using a lot of necessary words, different sentence construction.
Size- it shows how much we want to be seen. Making our letters bold it is the same as wearing a red sweather.
Slant of the writing- strong right means impulsive person, needs to relate with others, strong left means that person is a good listener, reserved.
Base lies- person characteristics (optimistic, pessimistic)
There are more questions, like where do we write, how we decide what kind of paper we will be using. Everything depends on our psychology and personality. Everyday we sit right next to our friends and we see, how do they write. Some of them finishes the sentence faster than the others, so they not just write fast, they are also do not write every dictated word. They formulate the main idea and do not waist time by doing unnecessary thing. I think they have a lot of strict plans in their life and these people will reach their goals.
Also there are some people, who are always asking to repeat the sentence, because they missed it. These people have a lot of mess in their life, because distraction made an influence. Of course, it is seen also in their notes- they are crossing a lot, they make more mistakes than the others, so notebooks are messed up.
Psychologist have always paid much less attention to writing than reading, in spite of the fact that writing is as least as important, because if no one wrote anything there would be nothing to read. There were made researches, who showed that writing about stressful experience reduce physical symptoms in patients with chronic illnesses. Also they have found that we can feel 20 different emotions while writing. So every time it is not the same.