English Language and Literature Exam date - at last

Our Professors and Assistant Professors finally announced the date of English Literature up to 1500 exam. At  last. They actually announced two dates – 29^th June and 13^th July. That was one exam that I carried over to the second year, and according to the new rules and regulations, students cannot take the exams in the current year until they pass all exams they from the previous year.  For me, that was a major obstacle to take many other exams. I do hope that I will take the exam and we’ll see what the outcome is. Finally, some good news.

Learning English – sometimes fun

I’ve noticed that some of my colleagues blogged about learning English through music. I think that is absolutely one of the easiest way to pick up and expend English vocabulary.  I really learnt lots of things through music, especially when I was a high school student. Since there was no internet back then, we had some trouble trying to figure out lyrics of the songs we listened to. Nowadays, fortunately, all of them are accessible. The other relatively easy way of picking up English vocabulary and phrases is watching movies. The great advantage of this is that you can also learn the correct pronunciation of words. Therefore, learning does not always have to be boring and tiring. Sometimes it’s really fun.

Crossword puzzles

What I really want to do is to be able to solve a crossword puzzle in English. On occasions, crossword puzzles are difficult to do in your mother tongue, let alone in the foreign language. There are numerous sites offering crossword puzzles, but they really seem too difficult to deal with. On the other hand, they are very useful to expend the vocabulary, learn different synonyms, antonyms, idioms etc. One of those sites is:  http://www.boatloadpuzzles.com/playcrossword.

Problems with electives and some other courses

This year we have been encountering several problems and we are approaching the end of the semester.

First we had a problem with elective courses. We are obliged to choose two electives. However, we have certain limitations and obstacles in terms of not being offered enough electives to choose from. For example, this year we were offered the German language II (which one cannot take if did not have the German language I in the first semester), History of BiH II (which presumably could not be taken as an elective if one did not previously take  History of BiH I, Arabic Language II (naturally not available if Arabic Language I was not taken previously) and Inter-Cultural Understanding and Human Rights (course available for six students only). So some of us were really “between a rock and a hard place” in that regard.

Secondly, we really have a problem with this English Literature up to 1500 course. Exam dates for other courses have already been designated and this is the only course we still don’t have the exam date for. I do hope it will be designated soon.

English learning web-pages

The page that I use quite often is http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/. It really offers a variety of fields that will help one improve his/her English command. It contains grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and even quizzes to check your knowledge. The pronunciation I found very useful for our last year’s Phonetics and Phonology courses because it contains some pronunciation tips as well as a reference to the so-called “connected speech”.

The online dictionary that I use most often is  http://dictionary.cambridge.org. I like it because it has use examples of every word contained in the dictionary as well as idioms, phrasal verbs etc. It was rather helpful to me on many occasions.