First book review - "Perks of being a wallflower" !

Hey guys!

For always having things to tell you I thought it might be a good idea to write something about the books I read. The last one I finished was "Perks of being a wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky - but before I tell you more, I want you to click on this link and listen to the song while reading the rest of my post.

"Could it be another change"

This is a link to a beautiful song by "The Samples" and it's called "Could it be another change". The perks of being a wallflower was turned into a movie and the song is part of the soundtrack.

The Story

Charlie is a 15 year old boy who is afraid of highschool. He is shy, very sensitive and the reader instantly gets the impression that he might have psychological problems. He also tells the reader about his aunt who died in a car accident and whom he loved very much. When he meets Patrick & Sam his life takes a sudden turn. He wants to participate in life and tries to live an "applepie-normal-life" of a teenager. He smokes pot, attends parties and drinks alcohol. Of course he also falls in love for the first time.  

I don't want to tell you too much of the story because I don't like spoilers myself ;)

You have to know that the book is absolutely beautifully written and the way in which is written is absolutely not normal. It's written in letters Charlie writes to a person of his choice but he/she doesn't know who Charlie is. 

The movie

The movie to the book was brought to cinemas in 2012. The leadingroles were played by Emma Watson (Sam); Logan Lerman (Charlie) and Ezra Miller (Patrick). Everybody did an absolute great job! The movie is really touching and has an incredible soundtrack! I really recommend that movie.

What I also love about the movie is that the actors were picked perfectly. I think there is no other actor who could have played Charlie in such a good, sensitive and also cute way. It's the same with Emma Watson as Sam and Ezra Miller as Patrick. I saw the movie before I read the book and can say that the persons absolutely fit the image a reader makes him/herself while having the story running in his/her head.

This is the official movie trailer:

The Soundtrack of the movie is adorable. If you click on the word "soundtrack" you will be linked to YouTube and be able to listen to the songs of the official soundtrack. It starts with "could it be another change" - the song mentioned at the beginning of my post :)

I hope you are now interested in both book and movie of "Perks of being a wallflower" and want to end my post with a quote of the book:

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."

Keep reading (:

Pub Quiz!

Hey guys!

On tuesday some friends of mine and myself decided to attend the "Pub Quiz" at "The Office Pub" here in Graz. We had already wanted to attend the quiz three weeks ago but when we got there no table was free anymore. That's why we decided that two of us should go there earlier. You may ask yourself now how we decided whose turn it was? We simply used toothpicks. Two of them were shorter than the others and everybody had to choose one. The two people who had chosen the shorter ones had to be at the pub at 4:30 pm. It was me and Helene.

When the two of us arrived at the Office Pub we first looked for a table big enough to have space for around ten people. Beer was ordered afterwords and card games were played. It was really fun sitting there in the pub eating pizza and playing some card games. 

The menu of the pub offered absolutely delicious food! We decided to share one pizza because we knew: we wouldn't be able to eat one alone. The pizza we ordered was a "Pizza Milano" with onions on it. The prices were high but we wanted somehting to eat though. 

At around 7 pm our other friends arrived and the quiz started at around 8 pm I think. There was one step to take first: a name for our team. We came up with things like " Aix and the TKK's" (I loved that one!). Aix is a guy living with me and my boyfriend in our apartment. As we all study TKK except for him some of us thought that this name would be awesome. Other team names were "Happy Hoagascht", "Trunk Table" (we called our weekly meetings a Stammtisch. So we looked up the English word for "Stamm" and "Table" and simply put them together. It's funny because if you replace the "T" with a "D" it's "Drunk Table". It simply sounded funny :) ) The name for our team we finally chose was "Team O'Tuna". I still think we should've called our team "Aix and the TKK's". :D

These are the sections we had to fill out:

Here we had to recognize stars wearing a hat. It sounds easy but the guy with number eight was absolutley difficult to recognize. His face was covered with his hat. 




Here you  <-- can see 2 more sections which are "Blockbusters" and "General Knowledge". Both sections were really (!!) hard to fill out. The thing is, if you are able to fill out the whole "Blockbusters" section and if you're really absolutely sure that everything is correct you can hand it to the quizmaster. If everything is correct you win 500€! Awesome, right?? :) BUT: If there's just one wrong answer you and your team lose all the points you have already gained. So you have to be absolutely sure that everything is correct!

As we had really much fun attending the pub quiz we decided to attend again next week. I'm already looking forward to it!! 

Team O'Tuna

Keep reading (:

Improving homework can be challenging.

Hey guys!

Last time we had to hand in a piece of homework it had to be about analysing a dictionary. The following text is what I handed in:

Today we had to have a look at various monolingual dictionaries in English Class and I for myself liked the Macmillan English Dictionary best. Why? Because it has a vocab section! One of my goals for this semester is to expand my vocabulary and I think, with a vocab section in the dictionary this could be easier. We also discovered a so-called “writing skills section” which could also be very practical. Another advantage for me personally is that there are many pictures in it. I tend to remember what I see and I think this could make learning new vocab easier for me. There is also a CD included but actually we couldn’t find out what’s on it because we didn’t have the required administrative privileges to install the software on the computer. Another thing we discovered was a section called “language awareness” and I for myself found that very interesting! The Macmillan English Dictionary covers so many of my personal language requirements and this is why I chose this as my favourite!

While writing the text I didn't have the feeling that I was making many mistakes but getting my work back a week later showed me that I had made many mistakes. First of all I didn't use one of the topic sentences our teacher told us to use. I actually don't know why I didn't use one she gave us. I have absolutely no idea! My text also sounds like a list - I tried to improve my writing when I corrected the text. The following written piece is the correction of the text above:

Having looked at a number of monolingual print dictionaries in class this week, I have decided to buy the Macmillan English Dictionary. There were especially two sections which caught my attention: „improve your writing skills” and „vocabulary“. One of my goals for this semester is to expand my vocabulary and I think that with a vocab section for knowing common words which are used more often by native speakers this could be easier. For people who tend to remember what they see - for example myself - there is a great feature: words related to the topics “house, kitchen, body, clothes and patterns, motorway and types of vehicle, transport und car” are described using pictures. Giving the user numerous collocations the Macmillan English Dictionary is very practical because knowing the most common collocations is a must and covering so many of my personal language requirements I chose this as my favourite!

The first sentence is one of the topic sentences we had to use. For not making my text sound like a list I tried to use verbs in progressive form at the start of some sentences. Asking a friend of mine who is great at writing English texts about how I could write this or that was also a thing I did and I think the correction is much better than the piece I handed in!


My next post will be about the Pub Quiz at "The Office Pub". Be prepared and:

keep reading (:

Me and the English language

Hey guys!

I know it's my second post today but I want to tell you about my experiences with the English language.

I had my first experiences with the English language at the age of six. Back then I learned easy words and phrases like “I have got a doll” and things like that. Even then it was noticeable that learning a language is not very difficult for me. I’m good at dealing with languages. This is why I chose to study English! I like it and I think I’m good at it.

During the last five years I didn’t like our English lessons because our teacher wasn’t the kind of teacher that can motivate pupils so the lessons always were very dry and quite boring. I liked the English language though and so I decided to start reading novels written in English and I still do that. I also started to watch series with the original soundtrack.

Back in schooldays people always used to ask me for advice when it came to languages. Actually I have to admit that I sometimes just have a feeling for the language. I can’t explain why I do something. This is a point that bothers me very much! I especially want to improve my vocab because I want to be able to communicate more fluently!

As I am a visual learner it’s easier for me to remember things when I see or hear them. That’s why I started to write vocabulary on post-it’s and put them on furniture in our apartment – so I can see the words and maybe it will be easier for me to remember! 

What do you think about the English language? Do you like it?
Btw - did anyone try the cookies yet? Tell me if you did! 

Keep reading (:

Dictionary review transcription

Hey guys!

Knowing the features of a dictionary is something important. That’s why we split into groups of three or four last week in English class and filmed a review of a dictionary we chose. My group chose the "MacMillan Online Dictionary". Filming the review was a challenge for me because speaking free is not easy for me.

My part started with “So, the Macmillan dictionary does also have language games. There are several games like “Red Words” or the “Irregular Verb Wheel” – we can try that. So, uhm, there’s just coming one word and, uhm, we’ll see - …play… - so what is the past participle of wear? So, uhm, you have to know and if it’s wrong, there’s coming “incorrect” and you get the right answer – so the past participle is worn. What is the simple past and stuff like that.”
I don’t like that I always start a sentence with “uhm” or “so”. I don’t really know why I did it because normally I don’t do that. I noticed a mistake while I listened to myself speaking. I said “there’s just coming a word” and that’s something one can’t say. I should have used the word “appear”, like “there’s appearing a word”. I also think that I should get rid of my common phrase “stuff like that”. I tend to use it always and everywhere. I know that it’s rather informal so I want to get rid of it. 

The next things I said were these:  “So uhm what’s also nice to know about the MacMillan dictionary is that they have actually apps, uhm for example a practice app but I guess that’s not free because here it’s saying “IT’S FREE”. – That’s an idea app I guess, I don’t really know…”
As I already mentioned I was using “so” and “uhm” very often. 

Next part: "uhm and here it is also possible to…to …to…where is it?.uhm..play a language puzzles or other language games and now I have to search where this stuff is….where we found that…the have a lot of social media so you can uhm…"
The mistake I noticed here was “play a language puzzles”. I normally know that it has to be “a language puzzles” or “language puzzles”. I think I got confused with the title “Language Puzzles” because I wanted to just add an “a” and didn’t notice that it would be wrong. 

Then Sarah, my colleague, said something that brought me up to another topic: Sarah: “They have a blog by the way too”
My next – and last - part: ".. oh yes genau, they have a blog. That’s also nice to read..”Word roots and routes: way, road, street” was published on October 21^st, you can also email this post or set comments, that’s a nice feature I guess …and yes that was it with the Macmillan dictionary!"
Using the “genau” was a big mistake because my listeners might not understand German. Something I also don’t like is the “and yes…”. I also speak like that in German when I don’t know what to say. I am also not sure if "that was it with the MacMillan dictionary" is a nice ending for a review.
All in all, I think that I had a nice pronunciation. Sure, I made a few mistakes but I think those can happen to all of us. My To-Do-List: avoid “uhms” and “so” because I really didn’t like that about my part of our review!

Keep reading! (: