Trapy wrote:But if they teach you something like chiaroscuro , use it sparingly... I always worry I'm going to learn a word like that in another language and use it socially awkwardly lol
Yeah, I hate the fact that we're starting to read a lot of elder (older?) texts in my English class, so I'm never going to actually use most of the new words I'm learning in a conversation. Currently we're reading
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire which was published in 1924, and I'm learning a lot of new vocabulary from it, but I'm not sure which words are still used today, and which ones are simply archaic. And I've heard that they read even older texts and poetry - such as Shakespeare - in A level English classes
Fun story: The other day, I was listening to the album
Pure Heroine. I always thought that the -e at the end of
heroine simply was some weird New Zealandish spelling of
heroin, but then I decided to look it up. Apparently,
heroine is a rarely-used word meaning
female hero. This type of false friends is so annoying
I completed the first two chapters of my
Sound English book- the first chapter's about stops, the second one's about fricatives. It's
really good, but it's hard to remember all of the rules! (for an example, it included a list of 12 rules for when to pronounce th as /θ/ and when to pronounce it as /ð/).
I've been reading a few pages in a German collection of short stories and doing a bit of my French tree on Duolingo every day. I've also been brushing up on my German grammar.
I've been thinking about dropping out of my "science college" and do the IB instead (IB=International Baccalaureate, a high school taught in English). Currently I'm only able to do A level English and take a single year of German, which is a bit sad since I really like languages. However in the IB, I'd be able to get full immersion in English and get 5 lessons of both French and German every week. I'm just not sure if I want to spend another year in school just to take those two languages, when I easily could learn them after finishing high school.
I had an interesting conversation with an old woman the other day. She speaks fluent English, German and French, and I asked her how she had mastered three languages. Apparently, when she was a teenager, everyone who weren't doing A levels in maths and physics had to study 5 foreign languages - German, French, English, Latin and Ancient Greek (and those who did A level maths still had to study the first four languages). After some years, school reformations slowly changed the amount and quality of language instruction, and 15 years ago, it was common to only study 3 languages at school. Now children only have to study English for 9 years and either German or French for 2 years. It's so sad to see that the world is becoming more and more internationally oriented, yet many Danes can't even understand why people would invest time in learning any other language than English. Even when I announced at home that I had decided to take German as an elective, the first reaction was that my sister got mad at me and kept telling me it's a waste of time. Is something similar taking place in other countries as well?