The Beginning of the English Month

S.A.P.#12

February 2011 is known for dozens of different occasions, at least where Filipinos are concerned. There's the People Power Revolution to celebrate (Feb. 25), President Noynoy's birthday (Feb. 8), the Chinese New Year (Feb. 3). This is also the Month for Pro-Life members of the world. And, of course, who could forget that this is also the Month of Hearts, or in other words, Valentine's Day (Feb. 14).

But just this recent morning, I now count a new event for this month, which is (drum roll please), The English Month (Tah-dah!).

As a second year student majoring in English, my fellow classmates and I have to do the facilitating for the upcoming events of the English Month and I had felt that this task proves to be challenging, but at the same time truly a good way to exercise my ability to help, improve, assist, etc. for these events. It's too bad, though, it would mean I can't join an event at all since we'll have our hands full in hosting, assisting, etc. for these events.

Just today, I had had the pleasure in hosting one of the first events of the English Month: the Research Forum. I felt like every fiber of me is responsible in rolling the event as 'smoothly' as possible. I was a bit tad nervous if everything will turn out alright, but I guess all in all me and my fellow hosts and the presenters of the program had done a deal of a great effort to put on a very intellectual show in sharing the research they had done.

I look forward to more events concerning English Month and Linggo ng Wika, as both had become the capable Tongue of the Scholasticans.
XD

Scott McNeil - A Talented Example of a Voice Actor!

S.A.P. #11

In watching cartoon and anime shows and even movies and video games, I have always admired those people who were behind it all in bringing the characters in these shows and games to dynamic life. One of them is Scott McNeil.
Canadian-born, 48+ years old, long-haired and totally bursting with 'Otaku'-like enthusiasm, Scott McNeil has voiced dozens and dozens of characters over the course of his whole career as a voice actor, voicing punks who are ace pilots of Gundam robots, popular mutant heroes to anthropomorphic characters who happen to be archnemesis to an evil iguana.
Totally talented, funny and kid-friendly (depends on the show he's lending his voice to), here is Scott McNeil.

What we did with nouns--Act them!

S.A.P. #10

Just this recent Thursday we began our new lesson non-verbal communication and it was here our teacher assigned us to do an activity: guessing the word the 'actress' is conveying.
So the mechanics went like this:
The group has to guess as many nouns as possible, with one of the members doing the acting while the rest guesses and all of this has to be done in three minutes. The group that has many guesses wins.
The words like 'horror', 'confusion', 'bitterness', 'bravery', 'hope', 'tension' and more were, to me, not act-able, as I found it hard to do 'horror' without screaming at the top of my lungs and crawling around like Sadako in 'The Ring' and 'hope' turned out to be a joke as I tried 'look hopeful' while having slightly wistful but silly eyes, my hands clasped together in my chest like a hopeless nutcase.

I know this was in all due fun, as I was laughing my head off, both because of my clumsy acting and from the other group's really aggressive take on trying to guess what she was acting about.

I remember a similar thing that my cousin, my brother and I did this last Christmas. We have named the game 'Daring Consequence', because we mixed the 'Dare' in Truth or Dare and Consequence because we have to act what was said in the slip of paper which we will pick at a random pile.
It was just the three of us, but it was a hell lot of fun. I remembered trying to act like the ugly duckling, quacking and trying to look ugly to them and one of them guessed I was trying to be a cow(seriously? a cow quacking?). We laughed our heads off when we saw our brother dancing almost like Micheal Jackson while singing Kesha's song 'We r who we r!' and my cousin clapping his hands in a weird manner and we couldn't guess what he was trying to portray. 'I was a scissor!' he told us, then we hollered at this maniacally.

Life is good.

XD

Poetry Night - Aria 955(...555) XD

S.A.P. #9

The day of judgement has come. I was perspiring a bit as I heard the news from my classmate, that our teacher is going to play the finished product of our project in poetry reading. I calmly drew out a breath as I know that logically, this isn't going the world, no!
Then, the inevitable arrived: we were going to hear ourselves read our poems out loud while she(our teacher) played it in her laptop. My hands went clammy. I remembered that I stammered when I was reciting my poem during recording. This is a bad omen. This is it!
I buried my head in resignation inside my arms as we(my classmates) laughed it off, trying to shake the horrible feeling of embarrassment. Well actually, it was funny, hearing ourselves recite the poem with all our hearts while we are now in a classroom, completely not in our 'poem phase'. It was as if the voices we were hearing aren't really ours and it's hard to believe that we had made it this far as to recite these poems with total grandiose.

Anyway, I did feel finally great to have heard my own voice speaking my poem like any poet would voice out theirs. I just did what I have to do just to put my shoes in the narrator in the poem (by the way, my poem is 'If' by Rudyard Kipling).
I did feel for my poem and I felt very happy for the presentation we had all achieved to do.

Maybe in the future, I could find a job as a radio DJ or something and I'll name the station to Aria 955 LOL! XD

The International Phoneme Alphabet.

S.A.P. #8

Since the end of Midterms, all that we have been learning from (S.A.P.)class is pronunciation, enunciation, assimilation, phonemes, etc. In other words, how we pronounce the English words clearly and correctly.
Recently, we've been learning in our S.A.P. class of the symbols that correspond to what kind of pronunciation we should produce when we see this, most especially in dictionaries.

For example, the long 'ee' sound in words like 'equal', 'seat', 'meat', 'easy', etc. has the phonetic symbol /i:/; so if you encounter this on a dictionary, thesaurus, or any kind of pronunciation book that can help you pronounce words that has this pronunciation.
The short 'ee' sound, in words like 'hit', 'kit', 'ship', 'furniture', has the phonetic symbol /I/.
The 'Eh' sound, in words like 'edge', 'set', 'merry', 'egg', 'head', have the phonetic symbol /E/ or an inverted number three that is actually like an epsilon in Greek language.
/a:/ is the phonetic symbol for a long 'Ah' sound, like 'part', 'calm', 'lock' and more.

Diphthongs are a pair of vowel sounds combined together:
/eI/-for 'age', 'drape', 'cape', 'bake', 'lake'.
/aI/-for 'bite', 'pirate', 'deny', 'ice', 'eye'.
/(I/-for 'oil', 'joint', 'joy', 'boy', 'coin'.
/au/-for 'plow', 'out', 'loud', 'cow', 'owl'.

In Consonants, most of it is easy, since what we have basically learned about how we pronounce it in elementary is still unchanged.
But words like 'thin', 'ether', 'path', 'think', 'breath' has the symbol /θ/, which is a voiceless 'th' sound, compared to its other voiced 'th' sound that has the symbol /ð/, for words like 'that', 'the', 'either', 'this', 'then'.
The 'sh', 'zsh', 'ch', 'juh' sounds have the respective symbols /sh/, /3/, /tS/ and /d3/.

If you want to look up for more of what the symbols look like, we have the internet and the libraries for research. All in all, the lesson was a great topic, something I knew I would need when I see a very difficult word that I cannot pronounce and I have to see the dictionary for it.

See you and have a good day! XD

January 1st of 2011 in my neighborhood had been the safest first day.

S.A.P. #7

Note: This entry will also serve as a journal to remind me that fireworks don't need to be the only equipment to celebrate the start of a New Year.

"Imbis na bumili ng paputok, bumili na lang sila ng pagkain, para salu-salo lahat sa bagong taon," says an old lady from Tondo as me and my family, while driving back home on the evening of the last day of December, listened to the AM news radio as both my parents agreed to what she had said.

She was right. Not only do we have to celebrate the coming of the New Year with our closest people and with our brothers and sisters, but we have to celebrate it wisely and safely.

Take this example on the night when 2011 came:
Jan. 1st, 2011, 12 midnight. My cousins and I decided to head to our grandfather's office despite the fact that the whole neighborhood was going gaga over the fireworks display they were doing just so we can greet him a Happy New Year. Luckily he was already on his way out of his office and we saved the time of going in.
after the pleasantries of greeting other people, we resumed to one of our usual reflexes: Watching the fireworks display.

So okay everything was dazzling, but suddenly one of our neighbors was going to light his firework when--BAM!--his firework fell off his gate and came exploding its sparks on the ground, almost burning a kid's foot when his parent got him to safety!

But besides that incident, nothing mortifying has endangered us and the whole neighborhood. But a few days later, I kept hearing and watching news that people are getting hospitalized because of accidents regarding fireworks.
What's the point of a great banging New Year if you're going to put yourselves in danger? Why is also that people are still firing up fireworks when the New Year has already passed?

People have to learn that safety is a priority and I just hope that when New Year 2012 comes people should come to their senses about their safety.

Listening to the powers of...twisted tongue twisters!!!

S.A.P. #6

Just before me and my fellow SAP classmates were dismissed, our miss gave us one more task before we go on our very merry (christmas) way: Tongue Twisters!
She made us read tongue twisters with themes concerning Christmas.

Such as:

'Bobby brings bright bells.'

And...I would love to share the other two but because of my poor and slowly degrading memory because the notion of Christmas-fever and 2011 nearing my head I could not remember the other two more twisters that twisted my delicate tongue whose ability is better off tasting Christmas Ham than being challenged about speaking random nonsense about bright bells in its impossible speed rate.

Anyway, since the start of the Holidays, I've been checking sites that specialized on tongue twisters and their significance:

In the bygone times, people pronounce spells and hexes in the form of tongue twisters, mainly because it sounds strange and is said to 'manipulate the mind'. Pretty paranormal, huh?

According to the Guiness World Records, the hardest tongue twister in the English language is this: 'The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.'

Tongue twisters uses alliteration and rhyme, unfamiliar constructs of loanwords or other ways of using language features to make the words more difficult to articulate once the speaker says it fast.

The following tongue twister had someone won a grand prize in Games Magazine during the year of 1979. It goes like this:
'Shep Schwab shopped at Scott's Schnapps shop;
One shot of Scott's Schnapps stooped Schwab's watch.'

Of course, our native tongue twisters are, hands down, still the best twisty twisters that can get our spittle flying just to pronounce the words clearly!

Palakang kabkab, kumakalabukab, kaka-kalabukab pa lamang, kumakalabukab na naman!

Pugong bukid, pugong gubat

Pitumput-pitong puting pating

Notebook at aklat, notebook at aklat, notebook at aklat...

Ang relo ni Leroy ay Rolex


Then, my ever-first Tongue Twister that I had happily succeeded in twisting in my tongue!

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper
Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled pepper?
A peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper,
where's the peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked?

I was at least seven or eight when I accomplished in saying the tongue twister perfectly.

Anyway, a tongue twister's primary goal is to amuse everyone whenever we see someone struggle in pronouncing these words in their fastest possible.

I hope tongue twisters still survive even in the future, because it deserves a rightful place amongst golden shelves of entertainment and art, right there next to stand-up comedy, Glee and Limericks.

Now, since this blog is over, I'll just practice a new Twister here:

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were stuck so what could they do?
Said the Flea, 'let us fly!'
Said the Fly, 'Let us flee!'
So the Flea and the Fly flew from the flue...