The last weeks have gone by too fast as I have been in a whirlwind of different courses, job applications and interviews. I do have to admit that waiting for results for all of the above mentioned have taken my focus away, so my coursework for the ALMS has been a little less I planned for. However I have been keeping an eye on anything, that is in English and put a different sort of a focus on it than before.

I have started to collect a list of words, which I have had to put through a translator to understand it. Sometimes they’re just words I didn’t realize are very familiar to me (i.e. quantitative = kvantitatiivinen), but even then I find it useful to have collected the word as it might be the spelling of it that puzzled me. As well I have taken off the subtitles I used to have on in Netflix which forces me to actually listen to what is going on, and I’m certain it does activate my English a bit.

As I have started this course I have simultaneously started to focus on any English I read, write, think or hear. My word list keeps on growing by the day and this week I’m going to get it to use – I have an academic paper due this Thursday. It will be the first actual paper I’ve written in English, but it is for the support group of this course – unsurprisingly the group’s name is Academic writing. The text should be about 600-700 words and it should be argumentative, which would give me a chance to train my academic English and the use of sources. I’m quite excited for it, since the teacher will be reviewing my work and giving feedback on it. I think I will write about protecting geodiversity and the importance of it, after all it is the basis all life on Earth needs. I found this project, called HardRock-project, which takes place in Finland and it is a part of the Metso-program in which i familiarised myself in during last semester.

Last week there was a night I went to meet the exchange students of Geography who are currently in Helsinki. We played board games in ‘Klusteri’, which is a hang-out space for all Kumpula campus’ student organisations. It was really nice and I had a blast, plus it was great social English learning even though it didn’t really give me any new English words to use. That’s the thing about social learning, it very much depends on who are you meeting and in what context whether it will bring some new perspectives to the language or not. With this I mean that while it is always beneficial to have social learning situations when learning a language, the conversations are not only learning tools that can be pushed to be just what one needs, especially not in a group setting. So in that sense you mostly just need to go with it and accept it might not be something to bring you on a completely new level of learning, but to keep you on the level you are in now. And learning about other cultures and habits should never be overlooked either, as it is something that has the power of giving one a great perspective on life in the modern, nearly global world we live in.

Funny to see how I started this post as this shameful “oh well, I haven’t done much..”-style but now I see it has been quite a lot. I do have to point out how much of a difference it makes to just be oriented to look at the language as a learning possibility every time I come across it!