This year

This past year has been quite an experience. We've done a lot of different things, and learn about various topics. Thought, I wish we had gone deeper into each topic, and spent more time on each. We could have been more effective perhaps. But I've enjoyed this year, with all the different learning technics, and watching movies.
Next year there should be more oral presentations, but in groups. This year, we have had the chance to perform some; but only single. I think that with more oral presentations we would have developed our language more. As well as it would be easier when we're not presenting alone.That way we would maybe have had the chance to get to know eachother better as well :)
Anyway, this have been a great year!

Standard written English

Translate these sentences from "new english" to standard written english.

1. You didn't see him, it is? 
You didn't see him, did you?

2. When you would like to go?
When would you like to go?

3. That man he is tall.
That man is tall.


4. Her jewelleries were stolen.
Her jewelry were stolen.


5. I am understanding it now.
I do understand it now.


6. They two very good friends.
The two of them are very good friends.
They are very good friends.


7. Sushila is extremely a lazy girl.
Sushila is an extremely lazy girl.


8. When you leaving?
When would you be leaving?
When are you leaving?


Pick four of the sentences and explain how it is different from standard written English.
They two very good friends - Here we can see that it is missing a verb, "are". As well as it sounds odd to say "they two".

When you leaving? - Again we can see that a verb is missing "are", or as I also have translated it "would + be".


Sushila is extremely a lazy girl. - Here the sentence structure is wrong: "a" should be in front of "extremely" so that it says: "is an extremely".


Her jewelleries were stolen. - In this sentence, the word "jewelry" is written in a plural tense, which does not exist.

Losotho visit

Today, we were so lucky to have a visitor from Lesotho in our class. Moliehi Sekese, who is a teacher in Lesotho told us about the circumstances in Lesotho and compared them to ours. Lesotho is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the children in her school are far from as lucky as we are; they only have two computers to use for 700 students, and one teacher to teach a group of 100 students. Their classrooms are only three quarters the size of the classrooms we got, and we're only about 25-30 students in one classroom at the time. Sekese told us that they're in a lack of tables, chairs and books. When she teaches a class she has to write down everything for her, as well as their assignments. There is no possibility for the students to do work by them selves; they're dependent of their teacher. 
Many of the children have to worry about things as if they got enough food, if they have anything to wear ect. There is few places with electricity and running water. They have to walk very far to get their water. I wrote a little poem about my associations to this.

Far far away

Too far to really understand

Just imagine 

A crying child

An empty stomach

A closed door

The sun is heating 

The throat is dry

The people walk far far


Far far in the heat
To the nearest waterhole
Carrying buckets on their heads


Small children 
Only hope for a better life
Is to get an education


Schools without electricity 
Without pencils and books
Depending on their teacher


Children going home
Don't knowing if there will be dinner

 Will mom survive today?


Diseases fighting the population
But there is a hope in medication
A hope in plants


So they plant
They make their own botanic gardens
Where hope will grow


Poem by me

Double entry: The Devil and Miss Prym

The Devil and Miss Prym is written by Paulo Coelho and is about Chantal, a village orphan in Viscos and a Stranger that visits with a task and a reward.

Conflict.

"What?"

Her question came out like a yell.

"Exactly what I said. I want them to commit a murder."

I chose just a few lines for the theme "conflict" because I think these three lines are all that's needed to illustrate the story's conflict. The Stranger is telling Chantal about his plan; if the people of Viscos commit a murder within seven days they will me rewarded with ten golden bars that would make the village a wealthy village. None of the inhabitants will need to work for the next thirteen years. And the Stranger will get the conclusion: we are all evil. But if a murder is now committed he will conclude that we are all good, and if Chantal's steals the one gold bar he has shown her where is buried, he will conclude there are both evil and good. Chantal is given the task to either tell the inhabitants of Viscos about the offer, or he will in the end of the week and then, if they decide to kill someone, he says; "it would probably be you". She could also run away with the one gold bar.

These lines illustrate the paragraph because it tells us about the main conflict of the story: "will the inhabitants kill someone?" And that's why these lines were chosen.

Self-realization and Relationship.

She smiled to herself, glanced to her left and blew a discreet kiss. She was not a useless woman; she had something important to do: to save the place where she has been born, even though she had no idea as yet what steps she should take.

The "she" person in this paragraph is Berta, the old widow living in Viscons. She can "see" people, and she can se the evil by the Stranger's side, and the good and evil fighting in Chantal after she have met the Stranger. This paragraph goes under both relationship and self-realization. Relationship because it illustrates Berta's love for the village and that she is very bonded to Viscos. Also, in this chapter we get to know more about Berta's husband.

But it goes under self-realization because of two reasons. One: In this chapter, we also get to learn about why Berta can see people and how she realized her purpose in life after her husband died and why she is the woman she is today.

Reason two is that Berta helps Chantal realize something important: who her enemy really is and who she is "hunting". This realization sets the story off in new direction.

Picture link

The Devil and Miss Prym

So, after a lot of back and forth I had to chose another book to read in English class. Of course, I am going to read Emma, but not now. Emma is a book that deserves more attention than I got time to use on reading right now. Besides my "job" as a book critic/reviewer (I am not sure which word would be right to use..) I don't get much time for other reading. After all, I have other school work besides my job and social life ;-) So I had to find a shorter book this time, and ended up with "The Devil and Miss Prym" by Paulo Coelho. I wanted to read "The Alchemist", also by Coelho, but it was sold out everywhere.

I started reading the book today and it caught my attention after just a few pages. Which is a good sign! Soon there will be a post with "double entry journal" about this book. ;) Stay tuned!

The Varieties of English

There are many varies of English in the world today which might sound odd, but considering English is a global language this is not that weird at all. With all these countries all over the world; in Asia, Australia, America and Europe and in Africa, and all with their different languages, dialects and accents there's no wonder how their ways of speaking English turned out differently.

The most known English varieties that we know well are, perhaps, American English, British English and Australian English. But in this entry, I am going to write about three more kinds of english; Singapore English, Caribbean English and Hinglish.

Where Singapore English and Caribbean English descend from are quite obvious, but Hinglish might be a little bit trickier for some to figure out? Hinglish is a blending of the two words "Hindi" and "English". Hindi is the official language in India, besides English. Hinglish is most common in the Urban and semi-urban centers of the states in India where Hindi is spoken, and the Hinglish speakers are assumed by some to soon outnumber the native English speakers.

The columnist Devyani Chaubal was the first author to use Hinglish, and after her Shobhaa De who used Hinglish elements in her books and columns in the Indian magazine Stardust.  And through the years, Hindlish has been used in advertising, for example in slogans. An example is the Pepsi commercials; "Yehi hai right choice, Baby" which means "this is the right choice, Baby".  There is also written a book called "The Queen's Hinglish: How to speak Pukka".

Hinglish is also affecting the English spoken in England because people adapts words and expressions used by the Indian immigrants. Kind of like the "Kebab Norwegian" language in Norway which is Norwegian influenced with words and expressions from other languages.

But back to the Singapore English. This is a dialect of the English language used in Singapore, influenced by both Chinese and Malay (Malaysia). The Singapore English is emerging and the the difference between the English of the various ethnic groups in Singapore is mainly the intonation.

David Deterding claims that it is fully possible to sound Singaporean and still be easily understood in the rest of the world. Considering this I would guess that the Singaporean language havn't influenced the Singapore English much.

The Caribbean English is a broad term for the various dialects of the English language spoken in the Caribbean. The daily use of English in the Caribbean includes a different set of pronouns, for example; me/meh/mi, you/yuh, we/wi/alawe and dem/den/deh for "them". They often skip the "th" in words

The Caribbean English is also influenced by other languages, as Irish and Scottish. For example the Jamaican English: "Whierr iz dath bwoy?"  Also from Bahamas their tongue is similar to the accents of south western England and Wales: "Wey iz dat boy?".

I think it's curious that there are so many languages, so many varieties of English with influences and accents, and still, most of them are understandable. Don't you? Letting the English language getting influenced by other languages makes us richer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean_English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish

http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/SingaporeEnglishterm.htm

Gran Torino

 Today we saw Gran Torino in our english class. Gran Torino is a movie directed by Clint Eastwood from 2008. The movie is about Walt Kowalski who fought in the Korean war and is played by the director, Clint Eastwood. Walt is a grumpy old man who dislikes(as it seems) everyone, especially Asians, and is not exactly happy when a Hmong family moves in next door. The Hmong people are from Laos, China and Thailand. Two of the family members that moves in are a tough girl called Sue and her brother Thao. While Sue is tough, Thao is quite the coward. He is quiet and insecure.
Because of various incidents, Walt and Thao and Walt and Sue gets to know one and each other and relationships are built.

The movie consists a lot of racism between ethnic groups, especially between "white" and Asians. From my opinion Hollywood often portray people of different races as enemies and there is often a lot of violence, guns and swearing. Kind of mafia like with threatening of families ect. I think Hollywood often overdo it when making movies.. At least so I hope.

It can be really hard to be an immigrant, because you need to be able to become a part of the new society and you're also dependent to be accepted by the new society. It is also very important that you do an effort yourself; to learn the new language for example. Also you have to accept the new society and their traditions and morals.

A Jane Austin novel

For our English class, I am reading Emma by Jane Austin. In this blog entry, I will write about what I think about this book(as far as I've read).
My expectations for the book were few, but I had heard it wasn't actually easy reading. At the time it was written, people had another way of writing than we have today. The book contains a lot of descriptions and "unimportant" information about various characters. The first three chapters rarely contains any dialogs, which makes the book taught to read because of it's lack of, well, action. The sentences are very long, some 7 lines with letter size 9-8. The language is very formal and deep. the first chapters have still not managed to engage me much, and I'm waiting for the story to really begin.

I am not sure about the time the story takes place, but the place is somewhere in a two hours diameter from London. Or so I have understood.

In the book, we meets Emma, who lives alone with her father. The books starts with describing the character gallery in the book, we get to know about a whole lot of people that Emma knows. Quite boring information, but if you've read Anna Karenina, this is no worse. 

Trusting information on the internet

When searching the internet for information it is important to be sure your information is trustworthy. For example if you search for a keyword and you end up on http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com you are goofed. This link can look like Wikipedia, but it is not.
Also there is a discussion about whether Wikipedia is to be trusted or not. It is. Wikipedia's reputation is too important for this encyclopedia to be ruined. Yes, everyone can write an article there, but if your article is full of bullshit or even just one mistake, it will be deleted within a few minutes. Therefore wiki is a page you can trust.

But how do you know if you can trust a page? First of all, how is the text written? Informal, formal, passive or partial? Second, have you heard of this page before? Does it have a reputation? Who is the webmaster and what contact information does the page have? Is it a typical homemade webpage with bad graphics or an advanced webpage? Think and be critical!
It is very important to know who have written the article and on which basis? Because facts and conclusions in a partial article can rarely be used for own writing.

My best tips is to stick with the pages you know, like Wikipedia or as I often use the Norwegian online encyclopedia. And if I can't find what I need on any of these I usually use the local library because there you can always find something and there's always books you can trust.

Megacities

Today's theme in English class is megacities. First of all, what is a megacity? To become a megacity, there has to be more than 10 million inhabitants. In our English book, that we use in class, there is a text about megacities including a quote by Kofi Annan who where the UN secretary-general. Kofi Annan speaks about the problem about people moving from the country and into the cities. The rural population is decreasing while the urban population is increasing. Cities are having challenges accommodating new inhabitants.

Beneath the quote  there are three statics. The first one is illustrating the percentage of the growth of the urban population . As we can read from these diagrams, in 1800 there was a growth of 2% which have increased to 47% percent in 2000. The diagram is also foreseeing the percent in 2015 and 2030. In 2015 it's foreseen that the percent of urban population growth in the world has increased to 52% while it's 60 percent in 2030. That's a huge increase.

In the next diagram we're shown the statics of the rural and urban population percent in different regions in the world. We can see the population statics in 1995 and 2015, a twenty year difference. As we can read from this diagram, the region with the widest rural population is Asia with 2249 million people in 1995 and it's foreseen that this will increase to 2380 in 2015. In 1995 they had an urban population corresponding 1180 million people and 1970 by 2015. As we can see, both the urban and rural population is foreseen to increase. After Asia with the largest rural population there is Africa, and then Europe. In Europe the urban population were 518 million people in 1995 and foreseen to increase to 532 million in 2015, while the rural population which were 209 million will decrease to 188 million people. After Europe there is South America and on top, with the lowest rural population, and urban population matching Africa's there is North America. In 1995 the rural population were only containing of 67 million people and the urban had 231 million people(Africa: 247mill.) In 2015 it's foreseen for the rural population to have decreased to 59 million and the urban to have increased to 301 million people.

What we can see from this diagram is that the rural population in the developing countries is increasing as well as the urban is, while in Europe and America the urban population is increasing and the rural decreases.
This is of course a global challenge because the developing countries has the biggest population increase and then will get, as Kofi Annan said, problems hosting their new habitants, both immigrants and natives.

The third static is showing a rank of the world's biggest megacities. The three biggest cities is Tokyo with 33.4 million people, New York with 24.1 million and Mexico City with 21.7 million people.

Multicultural USA and Great Britain

I have decided to discuss and compare the US and the UK.

The United States and United Kingdom are both influenced with a multicultural population and have become pretty much multicultural societies. They're societies are influenced with a variety of cultures, religions, races and political views and values. Oblivious this would cause a great deal of both misunderstandings and disagreement.

In United Kingdom, or Britain you may say, the religious hate crimes have rose as much as 600% since the bomb attacks in 2005. And these crimes are mostly against Muslims.

Britain's policy of multiculturalism is as following: people of different cultures are allowed to settle without expecting them to integrate into society.

Could this be a problem? If people continuously immigration but do not integrate , what would happen to the society? In a society I think it is extremely important to have some mostly the same values and be able to understand and accept and speak the same language to make the society work and for people to be able to cooperate.

Historically the immigrants in Britain have come from Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, but today the immigrants more often are younger and with more various backgrounds. Today immigration today is more often motivated by economic factors, while family was a bigger factor before. This makes people from more far off places and different places immigrate. When family was the factor, people immigrated because of solidarity with family.  

Today Britain is one of the most culturally diverse societies in the world, sharing the statics with the US, a country mainly consisting of immigrants. There is immigrants from all over the world searching for a way to achieve the American dream. USA do not think of multiculturalism as a conflict maker, but as a source of strength and renewal. In America the immigrants who wants citizenship needs to study American history ect.

This is a difference between England and the US after my impression after reading about these two countries; In England making people integrate to the society is a problem while in the USA, if you want citizenship you're "forced" to integrate. Thought, in the US there is a problem with immigrants not assimilating, notably the Mexican-American. In many schools the "Pledge of Allegiance" is in control and some doesn't even fly the American flag. Also in America there are own societies  containing of multicultural people, for example China Town and the Muslims that had their own little society like we read about in the book Kite Runner.

Also Hispanics can do business in Spanish, cote in Spanish and take driver license exam in Spanish.  Also there are own schools for different multicultural groups.

The most common interracial categories in the US are white and black, white and Asian, white and American Indian or Alaska native and white and mainly Latinos. I think the racism is the US and Britain is very much at the same level.