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Today we had our phonetics practical exam, which was a lot of fun. The listening part in the morning wasn't too bad - we had to transcribe a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh (Eeyore being morose, as usual), and then some two-syllable words using all sorts of funky sounds that aren't part of English and thus take a fair amount of effort to decipher.
The oral part this afternoon, which I thought was going to be the easy bit, turned out to be hard. We had another passage from Winnie-the-Pooh to read out, with intonation (and a few clever bits where there was, say, a 'b' rather than a 'd' in 'said' because the word following it was 'Piglet'), and that was very nice. Then we had to make various vowels and consonants (not nice, especially in front of three examiners, one of whom I'd never seen before), and the worst of all was the nonsense two-syllable words. With tones. Agh.
Apparently I did fairly well on the oral exam, but it was still rather scary. Sweet tea afterwards helped me calm down, at least.
Anyway, to make up for that, I've been playing two games, both RPG/dungeon crawls with a slight twist. The first is Kingdom of Loathing, a free online game with various slightly odd character classes and locations. (To give you a hint of this, two of the early dungeons are the Haunted Pantry, where you will come across cans of asparagus that try to asparagustab you in the leg, and the Haiku Dungeon where all the adventure descriptions are in haiku form.) To even out the playing field, so that people who can spend all day online don't have an unfair advantage over those who can't, your character is limited to 40 adventures (turns spent in dungeons) a day, with 80 for your first day. Buying things in shops and using items don't take up adventures, though, so you can do a lot of buying, selling and combining items. You can also buy food and drink to give you extra adventures for that day, though eating or drinking too much does make your character either full up or drunk.
The other game is the even simpler Progress Quest, which is just like any other RPG or adventuring game, except it dispenses with the need to tediously move your character, click anything to arrange your stats, decide what weapons to buy, and so on. Just choose your character, roll their stats, then sit back and watch them level up! Or, alternatively, set them off on their adventure, leave the program running and forget about them for the next few days.
The oral part this afternoon, which I thought was going to be the easy bit, turned out to be hard. We had another passage from Winnie-the-Pooh to read out, with intonation (and a few clever bits where there was, say, a 'b' rather than a 'd' in 'said' because the word following it was 'Piglet'), and that was very nice. Then we had to make various vowels and consonants (not nice, especially in front of three examiners, one of whom I'd never seen before), and the worst of all was the nonsense two-syllable words. With tones. Agh.
Apparently I did fairly well on the oral exam, but it was still rather scary. Sweet tea afterwards helped me calm down, at least.
Anyway, to make up for that, I've been playing two games, both RPG/dungeon crawls with a slight twist. The first is Kingdom of Loathing, a free online game with various slightly odd character classes and locations. (To give you a hint of this, two of the early dungeons are the Haunted Pantry, where you will come across cans of asparagus that try to asparagustab you in the leg, and the Haiku Dungeon where all the adventure descriptions are in haiku form.) To even out the playing field, so that people who can spend all day online don't have an unfair advantage over those who can't, your character is limited to 40 adventures (turns spent in dungeons) a day, with 80 for your first day. Buying things in shops and using items don't take up adventures, though, so you can do a lot of buying, selling and combining items. You can also buy food and drink to give you extra adventures for that day, though eating or drinking too much does make your character either full up or drunk.
The other game is the even simpler Progress Quest, which is just like any other RPG or adventuring game, except it dispenses with the need to tediously move your character, click anything to arrange your stats, decide what weapons to buy, and so on. Just choose your character, roll their stats, then sit back and watch them level up! Or, alternatively, set them off on their adventure, leave the program running and forget about them for the next few days.
