Report: Gaining experiences abroad Introduction The aim of this report is to take a closer look at the language and cultural aspects of gaining experiences abroad. Going to another country brings a lot of benefits but it can be also challenging at the same time. At the end a few recommendations are given. Language For many people learning a foreign language is the most important point of going abroad for a longer period of time. As a new language learner it is recommended to go for at least three months. Though most people get the best language immersion when living for a year in a foreign country. Then the host language is established well enough to enable you to travel in the country independently. Cultural understanding The second most important aspect of living abroad for some time is to learn about the different culture. For a lot of people this can be also an intense time, where they review and understand their own culture better. You might discover that something that is deemed very important in your country, is not considered at all in the guest country, and life is perfectly possible without it. The same observation can be done the way around. Recommendations A lot of people reported language learning difficulties because they stayed to close to their native language when being abroad. It is definitely recommended to learn about the host culture before you travel. With this preparation will not be too surprised if people react in an totally unexpected way to your own intuition.

The limits of technology - 1.1 - Expanding my horizon Inspired by a text I read here about computing and technology advances, I want to have a go myself. I am very interested in this field and I will write a few entries about it. This first entry will be about some anecdotes of my personal experience. In the past 15 years I went on a journey from a complete computer analphabet to writing software almost every day. When I grew up I loved books. In my later youth the realization set in, that it is impossible to know everything and it is difficult to access accurate facts on the fly. This is not a great situation to be in, but everybody I knew had the same limitation. When I had a gameboy I dreamed that it could do more with it than just playing stupid games. I imagined I would use it as a library and it also could do calculations. In school I was slightly annoyed that a calculator could not provide more useful functionalities. But this was the way it was and I learned to not to dwell too much on those illogical technological limitations. I noticed that a few kids around me got those giant slow boxes with a screen, on which they played quite ugly games. It was nothing for me. In school the computer classes were boring. This was partly due to the long booting times and it took a while before the last was on the same page when we stepped through exercises. I think the biggest achievement was a box and circle drawn train going from right to left on the screen. The rest of school focused on the use of powerpoint. It was during my university time, when I noticed some of the technological potential. All my extra income that time came from work with technology. Running business training simulators across the country and developing digital learning systems. My thesis was about elearning. Technology was innocent and funny anecdotes appeared like that one of the universities servers was hijacked to host inappropriate content. The sky was the limit and I dwelt many hours a day on the pre-facebook social media sites. I heard of some fellow students making thousand of Euros per month playing online poker. My friends was playing too but he never won anything, so I put it down as a myth. My first 64 mb usb stick had a great impact on me. It had a voice reorder, mp3 player and cost EUR 50 (£33, $60). The old super game boy dream started to stir in the background.

#5 An extra day What would you do if you have an extra day of time? Yesterday morning I found myself exactly in this situation. I did not mind not going to a far away city, and sitting over five hours in the train. The weather played in the favour for a trip, but it was also just ok to enjoy the sun in the back garden. I am chronically over planned so ,it was easy to pick some tasks from the top of the list, and get cracking. Well get cracking after continuing the shield lice battle on three pot plants, watching lots of braincraft youtube videos and calling friends. The biggest viable option for the day was to see a friends, that happened to stop over in the city, while he transferred from one airport to another. Though despite waiting for his messages, he did not contact me. Nevermind there were some other social interactions throughout the day with the neighbours, the postman and a political campaigner. As I was alone in the house, I could install the dishwasher without disruptions. Also there was enough time to seal off all gaps around the kitchen sink and window sill. Before the dishwasher could be moved back, I wanted to dry the wet spot from underneath the machines place. I took a fan for it. Most of the water was already removed with the salt and rice, that were there for two weeks. I think within three hours was all back and working. The new piece of flooring fitted nicely in underneath. After the siliconing there was even time to read a newspaper article, about the end of Casini satellite, and to take a proper nap. In the evening we managed the weekend shopping, having a nice light dinner, and watching a movie about a slightly food obsessed boy. The movie was supposed to show a man’s life, but important parts, like his four siblings, were cut out. It probably will be a long time when a sudden extra free day comes along. That is why I enjoyed it especially.

Rich insights from the fringes Often I wonder, how to get to the bottom of a topic, without spending too much time. A good example is when I hear about a book and want to get a good summary. Frequently I will not find the time to read the whole book but surely I can spend 15 minutes up to one hour to research it. For fictional topics wikipedia is a good starting point. If the book was already a classic around the year 2000, then is probably summed up with a good two page review in one of the summery books that I happen to have. The title of the summary book is slightly irritating but the content never disappointing. The summary books are called “Passing time in the Loo”. In the recent years I started to make more use of the reviews on Amazon. Reading the reviews from all different rating levels gives a good insight. After a few reviews a good summary emerges. Once and a while a review is a full treasure. Those reviews enrich the books content and put it into the wider context. Often this is context the original work did not consider or ignore. Good reviews, especially the academic ones, can be quite long but that is ok. It is possible, to get the reception of a book from different geographical locations by adapting the domain and language settings. English alone has five regions. This week I made full use of it when trying to find out more about the light hearted book from JP Sears. I was almost considering to obtain the book about his slightly harsh, sarcastic and satirical comments on current culture and spiritual matters. The top reviews were all the same, but there were some deep discussions on some of the not so positive reviews. A guy who prepared for an interview with JP, read the book, but then the interview was cancelled. So he posted the interview questions with his thoughts on Amazon. Then a few people, from different age groups, responded to the review. This gave a way more complex consideration of the topic and put it into a perspective up to the middle ages. Suddenly the discussion was more serious where the original aspects of enlightenment were considered. Also it was nice to see the difference how younger and older people reacted to the book. If I made you interested, just have a look for “awakenwithjp millennial” on youtube.

How to learn best for advanced English?

Hi all,

Which good resources have you already found for learning advanced English?
I found some things on YouTube but it is a bit hit and miss.

I wonder if there is a community teacher here that has good experience in it.

Which good learning experiences did you make when learning for advanced English?

I am mainly learning to get a better level of English. Especially I want to speak more clearly and to be able to write better.

Many thanks.

Quick texts - how to choose a topic The challenge is to write a short text in about 15 min. When thinking about what to write about I noticed the abundance of topics available. I imagine that this text will be quite random as I just want to jot down some thoughts on that topic. I was just pondering about 10 different things when suddenly started to rain outside. A related weather topic is the newly changed language in some parts of the world from climate change to extreme weather. This year here in London the summer was a bit special as it wasn't raining much for one to two months. I was wondering the whole time when the councils will introduce the garden hose ban again. But it did not come after all. In the last month it was raining more and three days ago it rained 38 mm. Recently when I went to a mindfulness session there was an exercise to count your thoughts during a 5-10 min period. I think I had only about 10 different thoughts whilst others had 50 different thoughts at the same time. Each thought is a good idea for a notebook entry. One thing I like about this platform is how original the content is. It is extra interesting because lots of brainy people are here that go the extra mile to learn a new language. So far I only came across one case where I wan't sure if I was correcting somebodies homework. One topic to write about are weekend plans. Petty much every weekend there are 20 different things to do. The list is already so long as I pushed off many things for a long time. Another reason is that I cannot let go easily. I think I have a slight oversensitive attention span to almost everything that comes along my way. So I keep many things for later when there is less to do but so far I never got bored. So I am slowly running out of characters again and I only touched on a few topics. At the moment I want to spend a lot of time learning English. This means I should do an English test tomorrow to see for which level I should learn. I also want to record some spoken English to share it on the internet. Especially I like learning new vocabulary. It is quite easy to see the progress and new words are learned quickly. With grammar it is a different story. As always many thanks for your feedback.

All is gone - Reality or fiction For us it is still quite difficult to imagine that all can vanish within a very short time. Our great grand and grandparents survived two big wars in the past century, lots of countries gained independence from the colonial powers and the past 250 years brought a boost in economic, health and technological advances and things look as stable as never before. When I was in Rome as a student our guide explained the marvels of the Pantheon that even nowadays we cannot fully puzzle together how it was built. Also seeing the over 4m thick walls of the bathhouses that were built in a very short time only fills one with awe. It is only 1.5 thousand years ago when all this Roman glory disappeared. For many of us this is the oldest history we every come in contact with or hear about. The Roman empire was there for something over half a millennia. A few people kind of suspect that the stone age was not as far away from before the Romans and old Greeks. But there were in fact thriving and well connected connected societies before them for over two thousand years. Those societies were based on a well connected trading network but there were also wars. Though long stability was the norm. This time was the bronze age where the first city states appeared, writing, math and administration were invented. Medicine was in some areas as advanced as today. Then suddenly 3200 years ago this whole high culture collapsed abruptly within 50 years. It vanished so badly that for almost 1000 years there are not many records and human development did not reach the level from before the collapse. Only Egypt is an exception where a recovery from the collapse was possible. Because of its rapid decline almost no records could be left behind of what brought the sudden demise. The main factor of the catastrophe were parasite like behaving people that plundered and destroyed the cities. Afterwards nobody was left to rebuild the cities and international trade was non-existent. Those hordes that brought the demise are called the Sea People. It is a shame that we do not know much from the time before the Bronze age. We know of human activity but not what were some exceptional people called or which thoughts filled their day to day lives. For me this teaches two things. Never take anything for granted because once the damage is done it might be irreversible for a very long time. Second dare to look into the times where conventional thinking says that it is not worth exploring them.

#1 - Short version of the Life in the UK Test text On the weekend I was one of the many that passed the Life in the UK test. I took the test at 4pm so that there was ample time during the day to prepare some more. I went though the done practice tests and read some more of the book. In total I probably only read a quarter of the book. Before the test there was a thorough check of the personal details, behind the ears and of my glasses. The virtual desktop machines were from HP and had flat screens with flat angle view protection. The test supervisor logged on to a site on IntenetExplorer. When going from test to test the test site displayed 'Communicating ...'. When revising the answers one of the pop-up windows blocked the actual question and two clicks on 20 cm apart points of the screen were needed to remove the pop-up. Most people finish the test within five minutes. I took almost half an hour. Making full use of the whiteboard. Pondering about several questions and calculating if I still would pass if I have a certain percentage on answering them correctly. I analysed the user interface a bit and practised the home office twirl which was shown at every screen. Pretty much all questions were straight forward. Two were about the 17th century, some about the laws and the government. A sport question about the Ashes. After answering all questions I went through all of them again. I only had four flagged questions. I think I did not change any answer but it was reassuring that there was enough time to look at everything again. It was also possible to listen to all the questions. I made full use of it. It was properly pronounced like on the BBC. There were five speakers. One has a small lisp. Unfortunately I also witnessed two cases where people were dismissed. One forgot to a number in his post code. The other was just escorted out with the confirmation that from now on he only can reach the complain line and that there is nothing more that can be done for his case in the test center. After the test I looked a bit around when walking back to the station in Ilford. Only the elderly people were white. Most people were Asians, Middle Eastern and Africans. Their age range was in the 20-40ties. Similar to Lewisham there were several high rise building constructions in progress. Cross Rail will have a stop there. The rest of the day was passed in the with a small celebratory pint. It also started to rain quite heavily. At home the rain measure showed 22mm.