Summary: The Crisis of Credit

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The video „Crisis of Credit Visualized“by Jonathan Jarvis explains the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Credit Crisis is defined as a lack of availability of credit to consumers and businesses from financial institutions, such as banks. Previously Investors bought treasury bills from the US Federal Reserve. However, on 9/11, the interest rates were reduced to only 1%. The leverage of banks, or borrowing money to amplify the outcome of a deal, escalated. Wall Street connected investors with homeowners through mortgages. The starting point is when homeowners purchase a house. Subsequently, investment banker buys the mortgages. A CDO, or collateralized debt obligation is created. Divided in three parts: safe, okay and risky. The safe part is additionally insured with CDS, or credit default swap. When a homeowners default on their mortgage, the lender gets the house. Now the houses are offered to sub-prime mortgages, individuals with poor credit histories. These mortgages cannot be repaid so they turn into houses. The homeowners start selling their houses, as their mortgage has not changed in spite of the rapid decrease of other houses prices. This leads to System Freezing, which leads to bankrupt, and millions of worthless investments.

That is how the Crisis of Credit happens.

Summary: The Crisis of Credit

The video Crisis of Credit explains how the credit system works as well as causes for credit crisis.

Firstly presented are definition of credit crisis and the involvement of the key economy terms. The fact that we are all affected by this situation makes us wonder, how?! Basically the concept is two groups of people homeowners and investors, the only mutual thing between these groups are the mortgages-houses, the money- insurance companies and a lot of banks and brokers. This is how this system works. The homeowners want a house; mortgage broker connects them with the lender, who gives them a mortgage. Next thing, investment banker buys the mortgage, and thousands more, so he gets income every month. CDO box, or collateralized debt obligation is key part, as the safe part, is bought by investors, who are then directly connected to the mortgages.

The problem arises when financially unstable families can't repay the credit.
Monthly payments turn into houses, and the demand for them is low. Furthermore, even the homeowners start selling their houses. This leads to so called System Frizzing, which leads to bankrupt, and millions of worthless investments.

That is how the Crisis of Credit is created.

Pronunciation /prəˌnənsēˈāSH(ə)n/

Pronunciation and techniques to improve it.

As part of my subject English: Language and Culture, on one of the classes with Professor Frank Newman we had exercise devoted to pronunciation.

The assignment composed of a text and a dialog that we were supposed to read, and a picture that needed to described in duration of one minute. All of this was recorded, so our professor could notice and later point out the flaws and mistakes that were done during this task.

When we, in this particular case referring to the students, are learning a new language, most of us have tendency to pronounce the words with the accent from our native tongue. The process of learning a new word, aside from the meaning, the collocations, and in which situations the native speakers use it, also includes the way we say it. No vocabulary, regardless of how rich it is, is complete without the pronunciation. Certainly, we as non-native speakers might have some difficulties at the beginning, but as for everything else, there is solution for this as well.

That said here are few of the tips and tricks on how to I pronunciation.

1.    Use Dictionaries.
Online or old-fashioned hardcover dictionary, it doesn't matter. Always right next to the word there is the phonetic transcription of it. Most of the letters are same as the alphabet, but there are a few that differ. After learning them, I have noticed the ease that I have when pronouncing a new word.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

2.    Watching TV, listening to music, radio..etc.
Any opportunity that I have to listen to a song, watch a TV show or movie in the language that I am learning is more than beneficial. There is great number of YouTube channels devoted to pronunciation techniques. Books, newspapers also are very helpful.

3.    Recode yourself.

I am pretty sure that listening to our own voice recorded, makes us wonder „Do I really sound like that?!“ . Strange as it might be, by recording myself , I could notice my  grammar, sentence structure and pronunciation mistakes better than ever.  With continuous recording , describing a painting or reading an article (few suggestions), I am  able to keep track with your improvement and progress.

4.    Pronunciation Tests
The Perception of Spoken English (POSE) Test is one of many. This test is a tool designed to help non-native English speakers diagnose problems in speech perception. There are few categories, including  vowels,  consonants , word stress,  intonation (sentence-final) and  sentence stress, depending on which segment of the pronunciation do we want to focus.
http://eslactivities.com/pt/

5.    Speaking, speaking, speaking

All of these advices would be completely pointless, if we do not practice speaking. The bus driver, the waitress, or the man working in the post. I use every of this opportunities to practice my pronunciation. And I warmly recommend it, as there is a tremendous difference between how we think we sound  while speaking ,in our heads, and the actual speaking.

These are some of my techniques that I use.  Hope you are going to find it helpful as well.
 Till the next post.

Alex /ælɪks/

Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Dear readers, first and foremost I must apologize to you as I haven't published any new blog posts for the past two weeks. However, as most of you know I am now part of the Erasmus+ student exchange program, and I've been in Graz Austria for two weeks already . I will write more about the city, its beauties, and impressions in some other post, but in this one I will focus on my vocabulary learning techniques.

Throughout my  three years bachelor studies at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in Macedonia and here at the ITAT I have come across  various strategies and techniques  that are used in studying new words, and the language itself.  I would like to briefly present the methods that I personally use and find very helpful.

Books, newspapers, internet articles etc.

Let's begin with books, newspapers, internet articles. I find all of these very useful for learning new words and improving my vocabulary. My advice is to use every free moment  to pick up a book or newspaper or whatever you prefer and read. The chances that you are going to come across some of the words  in  your vocabulary are very high, as the chances that you are going to remember  them  as well.

One vocabulary book I can recommend  is  Academic English by David Porter. It has various exercises created to help you learn and revise vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, and spelling.

Translate all the time

At the  University here in Graz, I have a subject called Text Competence in which I was introduced to the concept of Parallel Texts, which are basically texts or books where the native language and the target language are presented side by side. This is a very helpful way to study languages regardless of your level.

Another key point, regarding  translating techniques, is to write down all the unfamiliar words that you hear or read most frequently. For example einfach(simply),Unterschiede(differences), eigentlich(actually) or ziemlich(quite) are few of the  words that I was hearing  here all the time, so I sat down and translated them. Furthermore when you make a sentence with the newly learned word then you can be sure that it will be easier to memorize it.

Internet

We live in a time when technology and more precisely The internet  is involved more and more in every aspect of our daily lives. So, of course it is more than recommended to use it when we want to improve our vocabulary.
There are a few  internet sites that I have found to be beneficial in terms of improving my vocabulary, one of them is www.vocabulary.com. The site itself  claims to be „the quickest, most intelligent way to improve your vocabulary“. Our teacher has also shared lists he made from words in The Porter book and I am planning to experiment soon with creating my own.

It is inevitable to mention the smart phones and the applications. We can find tons of applications on google or apple store. Some of the ones that I use and can recommend are: Duolingo, Learning Languages: Rosetta Stone and Babbel, as well as Elevate, which is actually a brain training app, but it also contains words exercises, that are very helpful and useful in my opinion.

Corpora

Last but not least, I have to mention  Corpora. Corpora by definition is:’ A large collection of texts  that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria.’ (Bowker and Pearson 2002:9). This is the first time I am using them, but from what I have seen  so far, I can say that  they look tremendously useful for translators as well as for interpreters. I'm still exploring this concept, so expect a new post devoted only to this topic soon.

 I genuinely hope that I have helped you  in some way by sharing my vocabulary learning techniques and warmly recommend you  read books, watch movies, listen to music all in the language that you want to learn, write down all unknown words in your notebook , put sticky notes on things so you can see them all the time, find some similarities between some already known words and the new ones. What you do depends on you, but with continuous use of the above mentioned strategies, you will begin to see progress in no time at all.