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How I Managed to Write My MA Thesis During COVID-19
As university students, most of us have to submit academic papers at some point and all of us experience some form of struggle in the writing process. During the ongoing pandemic with its necessary restrictions you might have felt less intrinsically motivated to write- I certainly did. Therefore, I actively tried to find new strategies…
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How to improve your English skills with drilling techniques
Drilling in language learning simply means listening to a language model and repeating what is heard. The language model (or structure or pattern) can be provided by a teacher, a friend, another student or a recording. Even though modern language learning tends to be rather student-led than teacher-led, drilling can be a good way to support…
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Order of adjectives
A few years ago, a tweet addressing word order went viral. It is rare to see Grammar resonate with so many people, so let us have a look at what was going on:
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Vowels 3 – r-colored vowels – definition and examples and explications
Another area of pronunciation in which varieties of English can be distinguished is in the phoneme /r/. This is not only true between nations like Great Britain and the U.S., but also within them. Within the United Kingdom the pronunciation of /r/, or rather, how it affects the preceding vowel sounds, differs from shire to…
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Vowels 3 – Diphthongs – definition and examples and explications
Before you tackle this lesson, take some time to do a bit of research. See what you can find out about varieties of English spoken in North America. This needn’t be a vast amount of in-depth research, just spend about 20-30 minutes learning about what kinds of ’non-standard‘ English you might come across in: the South, the…
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Weekly Poem: Haikus
In the same way that we know different types of sonnets, haikus we know today have seen changes through time as well. Originally, the 5-7-5 triplet we know today (then called hokku) was only the beginning to longer poems called renga. The triplet was followed by two lines of 7 syllables. What makes the renga…
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Neologisms: Formation Processes
Do you know what a neologism is? Stemming from the Greek neo-, ’new‘ and logos, ‚word‘, the term describes just what is sounds like: a newly minted word or expression. Such new words are quite frequent in cutting-edge industries and new technology. They can also be found in more popular subcultures, where people are either…
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Poetry: Rhyme and Meter
When you read a poem, the differences between written prose and poetic language often stand out immediately. The most apparent differences are two of the most basic qualities of poetry: rhyme and meter. We hope to give you an overview of both concepts which are helpful to know when reading a poem.
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Connected Speech: Elision
Of all the features of English pronunciation, connected speech, or the flow between words, is the most subtle and one of the least well described. Elision is a specific part of connected speech, the one which is responsible for all the sounds dropped and most of the letters that seem to serve no purpose in…
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Writing an Abstract: when and How?
Whether you have written your paper in English, German, or any other language, you may be obliged to submit an abstract in English as well. Regulations for PhD dissertations in the Humanities at German universities (including Hamburg) often require them, and a number of journals may publish German-language articles but nonetheless insist on abstracts in…