Finally finding my way around!

I survived my first week of classes and I actually enjoyed my learning experience this week. I eventually figured out the days, times and places of all my class and made it to all of them! I had my first golden week. The week began with Spanish class which to say the least was awful. The level of the class is intermediate and I couldn´t understand a thing as I don´t even have basic Spanish. But I decided that i would give it a chance and try and learn from it so I went to my second Spanish class on thursday. After this I realised that I would not be able for this class as I spent the class with my head down praying the lecturer wouldnt ask me a question. I dont think I would have even known if she was talking to me beause I couldn´t understand a thing. The class is thought through Spanish and from my own learning experiences in the past I know that I can only learn a language if it is thought through english. So today i decided to drop the spanish class and learn the language through a tandem partner where I soeak english to them and they speak spanish to me. I also have been spending a lot of time on google translate :)

Tuesday was a better day. We had film comedy class which I really enjoyed and its the class I look forward to all week. (Our lecturer is really nice and he is going to help us work on a project in our spare time because we have limited options for classes we can attend in english.) He began the class by splitting us up into groups of people from different countries. He wanted us to understand jokes and what makes them funny. So we had to tell jokes to our group and then explain why they are funny as people from different countries have a different sense of humour. This was a really fun exercise. Once this was done he showed us cartoon clips of Tom and Gerry, Bugs Bunny and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? After each clip we dissused the factors that made it funny. These were things I never would have noticed before. Factors such as sound effects, explosions, cruelty, surprise and exaggeration. I tried posting a video here of one of the clips we watched but for some reason it won´t upload! (frustrating) So I´ll just have to post the link..
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvy_s-GfDxA

Wednesday was the first of our history of design class. I didn´t really enjoy this class. The lecturer was teaching about Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and Egypt and telling us about how the pyramids were built. She was also teaching about the evolution of humans from monkeys. Maybe it´s just me but I don´t see the relevance of this. Because myself, Emma and Sinead are the only ones in her class from Audio Visual Communications she expected us to know everything because we have studied design before. It was very embarrising when she kept asking us questions that we didn´t know the answer to. I had to eventually just tell her that we don´t know this stuff as we have never studied it before. We would´nt be doing a class if we had studied all the stuff before. I hope that this class will improve and that she is just getting the boring stuff out of the way first.

The other class i really enjoyed was effective presentations. I think that I can really benefit. We have this class on a wednesday and friday. I think this will be helpful beacuse I am missing out on so many presentaions at home this semester so hopefully this will help me keep on top of my presenting skills and also help build my confidence for presenting the group project in third year. The lecturer has really good english so he is easy to understand and we are the only native english speakers in the class so I feel like we have an advantage. We were given notes on overcoming stage fright which were really helpful. At the end of the semester we have to do a presentation by ourselves on any topic we like so until then we´re going to work on the best way to approach it and outline it and how to keep your audience interested. He is also preparing us by getting us to read out things in class so we won´t be shy when presenting which i feel like is an effective approach!

I am really looking forward to see what this semester abroad will bring in terms of learning. I have to spend this week making up a project proposal for my film comedy lecturer so he can allocate credits to it and also work a bit more on my spanish by hopefully getting a tandem partner. I´m excited about getting stuck into the work! My film comedy class in the morning should be fun! :)