English workshop/Meetings

Meetings

2013-02-12

• Discussion about words ending with -pathy (sympathy/empathy)
• List of 100 most used 3-word sentences.

Assignment for next meeting:

• Make some 3-word sentences and find such sentences in literature. If it contains a word Jay does not know, you get an extra bonus point ;-)
• Make sentences with the following words: vein, vane, vain, feint, faint

2013-02-05

Less formal meeting. Long discussion about several topics.

2013-01-29

General discussion of some English literature. Introduction of P.G. Wodehouse.

2013-01-22

Again we did some exercises regarding passive/active voice. The following text was used as an example:

Lisa: Hello, my name is Lisa, I am from America.. who are you?
Hans: I am Hans, I am from Germany
Lisa: Nice to meet you Hans, what do you do?
Hans: I am flying airplanes I FLY AIRPLANES
Lisa: Really? Right now, you are flying airplanes?
Hans: No, right now I am talking with you
Lisa: Ah, so what do you do for a living?
Hans: For a living, I am flying airplanes
Lisa: For a living, you fly airplanes - thus, you are .. a pilot!
Hans: Yes, I am flying every day
Lisa: Ah, you fly every day?
Hans: That is correct .. but today I fly not, because I am having pause
Lisa: You are not flying today, because you are having a break?
Hans: Yes, thank you for correcting my English .. I am not speaking good English
Lisa: You speak fine English!!
Hans: Usually, I am not speaking good English!
Lisa: Right now, you speak okay English. Tomorrow, you will speak better English!
Hans: Yes, I am wanting to speak better English.

We read an RD helicopter manual with a bad English translation and tried to correct the sentences. Then, we did some pronunciation exercises and made a list of difficult English words.

We read "Still I rise".

For the next meeting, we plan to read "Douglas Adams - The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy". The first chapter will be discussed on next Tuesday.

2013-01-16

We went through many examples of active and passive voice working our way through “The cat in the hat” book. We intend to continue and repeat this exercise in future meetings. To increase interaction we did this exercise in pairs. We played a round of Pepi's game that uses the words from this book where each player gets a random word from the book and has to explain this word to the group. This turned out to be both fun and surprisingly hard to formally explain words.

Homework

Prepare an example of correct and incorrect use of active and passive voice that you've encountered recently.

2013-01-08

Around ten people join the meeting. Jay introduces himself as a native English speaker who lives in Europe since ten years. He has some great ideas about what we can do within the workshops: He addresses some common mistakes German-speaking people make when they speak English and offers to help with that. For improving vocabulary, he suggests reading dictionaries.

We make a list of books we intend to read. See also Literature. Jay also suggests that watching films with subtitles can improve language skills.

Jasmin says that she has some material and knows exercises for better pronunciation.

Pepi suggests that playing some games could be helpful, and also there should be some kind of challenge. For example, naming things with their English names when you are out (like in the tram) will improve vocabulary.

We decide to meet again in one week and schedule the next meeting for 2013-01-15 19:00