LET'S GET EBEE-FIED ! C'MON !

Sunday, April 23, 2006

hey everyone.. last day of my hols and i still haven blogged..shall blog now. my first post abt aust..

just talked to lt just now.. kept suaning me as usual. no i haven found a bf. there are only 4 pathetic guys in my whole cohort. how to find man. surprisingly quite a few international students..abt 10 plus? i mean asians.. got like european internationals as well..but i can't really differentiate them unless they tell me. haha.

ya the ppl in my course quite friendly..some la. then u just talk to them when u sit next to them in lects lor. made frens with a few. but after class i dun see them le. anw they have their own frens fr high sch to hang out with. oh a lot of them not fr brisbane too..like countryside or fr other states. cos UQ (uni of queensland..my fav acronym now..haha.) usually i am with e singaporean scholar. or another sg girl who came here earlier. she had a seriously interesting life man..lived in so many parts of e world like US, Italy, Aust, Sg. anw most of the international students u see here have been in aust for a few yrs..like fr high school. or are ABCs.. so i am one of the rare ones with non aussie accent which u will see makes things interesting..

i am taking linguistics, 2 speech modules-one learning abt types of disorders and another one a more practical module with tutorial participation, and psychology.

Let me tell u what i learn in linguistics:
A sentence is made up of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. In a noun phrase, there can be a prehead dependent, a head and a post head dependent. Nouns inflect for number(singular vs plural), verbs inflect for tense, adjectives inflect for grade(big, bigger, biggest). I had my test not too long ago.. and as usual, i just finish e paper when e examiner said "time's up". phew. i can
struggle with ling like take 3 hrs to complete a tutorial la! cos most of the time i juz stare at e qns..haha. that's how scientific and analytical it is.

my speech module is very nice..i realise this is really the course i want to do when i learnt all that stuff..how they help the patients and all. makes me more aware of like what my tongue does..all e tongue movements when u say a word. and in the interactive module i had clinical attachment..was assigned to a speech therapist who goes to schools..so i saw how she had assessment and therapy with the children..very cute one..4-5 years old! Wah all this is making me like children man..and learning how to work with kids! and we will know what is normal speech for a child at their age and what is not. so next time u all got kids can ask me man! i will be ur advisor..haha.

A conversation with a little boy i met in a school:
He approached me and asked:"Are u from Japan?"
I said: "i'm from Singapore, do you know where that is?"
He said: "Yes. I have an uncle who lives in malaysia."
"Is english your first language in Singapore?"
I said:" Yes, it is."
He countered: "But you speak with an accent."
I looked at him and said:"Well actually, we think that australians speak with an accent too."

goodness.. he's so young and he can tell me that i speak differently fr them!
anw some australians are surprised that we can speak eng so well, while others cannot catch us and we have to repeat ourselves. cos singaporeans tend to speak too fast and we don't pronounce our words properly..like 'th' in 'the'. I gave a presentation recently in tutorial..was the only one with a non aussie accent. the other taiwanese gal was aussified. haha. it went ok i think..according to one aussie fren of mine. but they were all looking intently at me. maybe they needed to see my mouth movement to help them catch my accent. haha. and the teacher wrote so many comments.. she didn't even write so much for the rest! ok will let u all know when i get e results. it was peer-cum-teacher-graded.

psyc is so interesting..i got a british and an american lecturer..both are so funny la! dirty jokes sths though.. psychologists quite psycho one..haha. but their accents are easier to catch and actually i like british accent the best! the aussie accent i can catch la..depends on who is speaking though. some of them just speak in a flat drawl. oh we learn abt things like sleep..deep sleep, rapid eye movement. so cool.. but i realise psychology is just a lot of research..

ok got to go call home now.. all the best for ur exams! anw i think i post now u all also have no time to read. next post will be australia proper.. this one is sch life i think. haha.

june

10:11 pm