Why do they sweep and gather the autumn leaves? I saw them this morning and they were everywhere, making piles of fallen, dry leaves in the trunks (?) of small open trucks. The funniest thing was the wind that scattered the leaves into the air and the men were continuing their job stubbornly, though in vain.
October 31, 2006
October 30, 2006
afternoon
A Chinese girl is sitting beside me in the library. She has an electronic dictionary like almost every Chinese students and she is sitting up straight and that reminds me not to slouch over the table whenever I look at her . I am sitting near the window which I love. This is one of the in-the-afternoon-be-happy windows and it means you could enjoy the sunlight in the afternoon when you sit near them. The wind is blowing gently outside and I am happy that I have a warm place to study. Without feeling cold, I can enjoy the beautiful blue sky over those autumnal trees. The leaves are all golden and they seduce me to gaze at them instead of concentrating on Carter’s novel.
October 29, 2006
nothing ventured, nothing gained
Today I progressed a bit. Now I am in page 40 and it seems that I have passed the impenetrability of the starting point. The words are more familiar now and I have learned the frequent ones but I am still behind my schedule.
Today's word is not actually a word but a saying :
" nothing ventured, nothing gained"
it means one can not obtain anything except by risking something or making an effort to obtain it.
I learned this saying in Nights at the Circus when Fevvers(the heroine) is talking about her first attempt to fly which was a do-or-die attempt and then she explains that she accepted the risk of trying it. ( from the height of thirty foot)
October 28, 2006
word of the day
From now on,I am going to write new words here. Don't panic ! I promise to keep it less than three words a day.So here is the first one:
Cataclysm : (n.) fml
a violent and sudden event or change, especially a serious flood or earthquke
I started Nights at the Circus but I must confess that this is really a difficult English novel to read. There are lots of strange and new words in it and I must look them up in my dictionary almost in each line ( Is it a grammatically correct sentence ?) .The solution that suggests continuing without a dictionary doesn't help here because I can't guess the word's meaning by knowing the context. As it is a magic realistic novel you don't know what are you going to expect as a reader. I wish it were a bit easier . I am going to read 125 pages by tomorrow night which seems impossible .( now I am in page 6 !).
By the way, thanks a lot for your nice comments on learning new words :)
October 27, 2006
logophile
As you see I am very excited with this new blog ! To be honest ,I can't wait to write down my new ideas that came to my mind about learning new words . For I am a real logophile I always try new ways to learn words, most of them are visual because I think I am a visual person. For example , I write down the words on small colorful piece of papers and paste them on toilet walls or kitchen cupboards . Today I put a notebook near the place where I sit to watch TV along with a pen and my German dictionary. It was ages ago that I learned a new German word and today I felt that I could enlarge my "Deutcshe Woertschatz " while watching German TV channels by looking up the words that I don’t know and make a list of them in my notebook.
Do you also have any ideas to learn new words?
I gave my presentation today on ecocriticism. Now I have the rest of the semester to concentrate on my paper.I'll begin with reading the book, which is Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus" .Then I am going to find some myths that she has alluded to the novel and also I should realize how these myths are incorporated.
Mythology is one of my passions in literature ,but apply it on a text is not easy at all because you have to know all the stories of at least famous myths, from ancient Greek gods to Christian and Bible stories.
fly
This is so cool that nobody knows I am writing here. It gives me a sense of freedom like these three crows that flew over our roof a few minutes ago .
October 26, 2006
to start
Writing in English is not an easy task for me ,though I study English-American studies in Vienna university. I hope writing in this blog helps me to improve my knowledge of English. I still don't know in which style could I write.We are encountered in the university more with academic style which seems a bit boring here.
Punctuation, grammar, and above all new words are what I should learn more and more . So if you know English well , please try and find my errors. I'll be happy to learn and maybe you could also find interesting things here.