advanced langauge skills

I will just start writing and for the moment forget about introductions and layout of this journal. Via google it’s also possible to start a blog, and I was in a quandary as to where I would be writing this diary. After careful consideration I’ve decided to do it here. The blog in google looks very nice and all, but it feels cold and lonely. This site gives more a kind a feeling of togetherness. It really seems you can get to know others with the same interest as yourself. The reason I’m starting a journal here is that I want to know "what people are doing these days". I don’t want to be left behind. This does mean that I have some catching up to do. I have never even chatted before, and I don’t know how ‘hives’ looks. The internet, however, is something which I do use regularly.

Another reason I’m starting this blog is that I’m writing my BA thesis on linguistic features used in blogs. From the literature I’ve been reading it becomes clear that most people use the terms blog, online journal, and online diary interchangeably. This is something I will do as well. The only difference between these terms seems to be that some blogs carry political content. What I am going to write will definitely not focus on politics. For the most part it seems pretty useless what all these politicians do, and what they do is not something I am interested in.

Today I was supposed to meet Fransy and Jelena at 11 on the ground floor of the VU (= a university). If you know them then it would not surprise you that they were both late. Fransy texted me, and Jel called me at about 11.15. it turned out that Fransy was stuck in public transport and that Jel overslept. At 11.30 I found Fransy on the 8th, 15 minutes later Jel showed up. Now we could start working on our assignment. The assignment was to write a proposition paper. This paper should be written on behalf of a charity and send to a company with shared values. This company should be persuaded to give the charity money. (all this was an assignment, we didn’t really have to post it) As charity we chose Kika, an organisation supporting research to prevent cancer. The company giving money was intertoys. I think we did a good job on it, and I’m glad we’re done. This assignment was not really useful for a student of English. It was more suited for the communication students.

This assignment was something we had to do for the course ‘advanced language skills’. The next topic in this course has to do with legal interpreting, which the students of English would like more. Our teacher for this course, Bert, is not very well liked. Especially the communication students are getting low marks, which does not surprise me, since they are being compared to the students of English (and their English is much better since they have more classes in this language). Today it erupted into an argument which could really escalate further. This disagreement started when one of the translation assignments was turned into a group discussion, and we therefore did not get a mark for this one. Now, we got 5 marks instead of 6. Originally we could drop the two lowest marks, but this is a new situation. Bert is thinking about how to solve this, and I think we should just wait what he comes up with.

After this I went to the computer to check on the Dutch championship Draughts. Thijssen and van den akker were tied in the lead, two points clear from the rest of the field. Today van den akker lost from G. Jansen, which means that thijssen has taken the lead. We will see who wins; let’s just hope that many games end in a victory, resulting in a low percentage of tied games.