Post 10 (04-12): English Language Challenges

The End of the Beginning

During my five years in college I discovered that English is very important to develop interpersonal relationships between people, because thanks to the conversations about series and films that I had with my friends, I begun to understand many jokes and memes that are in social media all the time and, I don’t know how, I started to understand more in the English classes (yes!). I’m saying that memes, series and youtube’s videos save my life during the process of learning English at college. 

Obviously, I want to say thanks to the teachers for support me in this complex road, because their teaching methods was very didactic in comparison with the poor and boring methods that I had at high school.

I think that is great the “write-in-a-blog method”. This was useful for me and it makes so much easier building sentences to write my texts  in this language. I learned how to express complex ideas (for my level).

Furthermore, I think that my weakest skills are listening and the vocabulary. When I hear people talking each other in English, I’m not capable to understand the full mean of the sentences. I think is because the speed of how people talk. And I don’t know a lot of words. To improve this, I think I should watch even more series and films in English, maybe without the help of the subtitles to force myself to think in English. It would be helpful, reading a lot too. Or, I could go to a language club in some library and have conversations with real people in English.

In my daily life, I use the English in my profession. I mean, there are tons of technical words related to filmmaking, for examples shutter speed, frame, transfer, travelling...and the list goes on and also I use in my leisure time.

Post 9 (04-12) Changing the Study Programme

A Month of Leaving Forever?

I study cinema in a public university and I would like to start by saying the only thing that I wouldn't change of my career. I wouldn’t change the teaching methods because it is very inclusive, democratic and open to the dialog in the classes on both the theoric and practic subject, the teachers value the opinion of the students and this is very important at the time of creating a community in the university.

The university have two study programmes for the same career, the first is the bad one and the second is the good one, well, I have the first.

In my studies programme we have many theoric subjects about communication and mass media, this is good but we have less time for the subjects specific of cinema and also this makes the workload is very high, because it combines the delivery of academic work with the delivery of cinematographic proyects. For all this I would propose as a solution to remove a few theoric subjects and to add more subject about cinema (production designer, more screenplay) and extending the deadlines.

Long ago the university campus was very beautiful, full of trees, fresh air and lots of grass, but now it is full of buildings in construction and many construction machinery, all the landscape is grey, there is nowhere to sit in the shade, I would like the campus  to be like before, green, quiet and with party in the "Cenicero" the fridays.

The technology in the campus is very is good, but bad in the careers because in my case, in cinema career, the equipment that we need for recording the short films is not good, I think that the directive needs to invest more money in  last generation filmmaking equipment.