Firstly, I have slightly tried to learn the differences between British and American English vocabulary and I must say that I have no idea of those. I spell words British way if there’s a same way pronounced word but of actual vocabulary I have no idea. Reason for why I think that I’ve no idea of the different vocabularies is the quiz I’ve been trying to do and the fact that I can even guess correctly is like one out of ten. With some words I may know that there exists also another word for the same thing but I usually can’t say which one is British or American. So there is absolutely one point on which I have to concentrate when writing academical texts in English, knowing the fact that I’ll have to check most of the words if there happens to be other word that I should use.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/aug/12/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-books-podcast
Secondly, I have now listened a podcast first time, or at least an entire podcast. I found that really hard because there were no helping hands or any kind of gestures or images which would have helped me to make sure I understand things correctly. Second hardening thing was that the sound came out only from the other earpiece there was some bug or fault in the sound file.
Whatsoever I listened Guardians podcast from Edinborough book happening where G. R. R. Martin told about his book series The song of Ice and Fire. He told bits of his background as reader and writer, how he came up doing this kind of characters and whom he had used as models. There were information how long Martin have done his saga and what he has done before and why (to irritate some people who say some genres can’t get blended), how much he have done background work, if it can be called that. He have been interested of history and about created the whole saga because he thought the wall in Scotland being so amazing (and then made it hundreds of times bigger in The sing of Ice and Fire).
He also told about plotting how some people think certain details over and over and find out who did certain things years before the exact book comes out. This made me think how I don’t usually want to do that thinking myself or either watch it from the internet. If I want to know what will happen, it won’t be a happening so far as three books from now but to make sure the current character will live through this book, meaning that I hope there will be happy ending. So, I’m also quite bad because I usually peek to ending of the book… Which isn’t certainly bad with Martin’s books because the straight ending tells only one character’s happiness in the end of the book.
I’m one of those who call the saga Game of Thrones because I watched the TV series first and after that started reading. I haven’t been an active on either but have been trying to read first what will happen in TV after a BIG BAD thing came out from TV and I didn’t have a moment to get prepared to mass-slauther. I can some way handle bad things in books but because the TV series is so raw, violent and stuff I’ve decided to be a bit informed early.
Thirdly I’ve tried to be a good girl and have done preposition quizzes to improve my understanding with prepositions and phrasal verbs. And well, I have done hours of them and I think I’ve also learned something. With time prepositions I just wondered why nobody had told me those ruling things before! Now I usually have some idea of the preposition in time situations.