YOUPOST 2

              General information about stereotypes


Where do stereotypes come from?

·         Some are created by direct experiences with people from the “other” group

·         Some stem from the experience with only one or two people from this group

·          Others are based on second-hand information and opinions

·         Others are formed without any direct experience with individuals – they learn their                        information from mass media or internet..

·         They are created automatically and unconsciously

 Are they true?

·        
 Actually they are not true – you generalize people to find differences and to categorize

·         You put yourself and everyone who shares your beliefs, traditions, language into   category of “we” and “us”

·         When you meet a person who is different from you (language, accent, color of skin) you identify this person as “other” and put him/her into your outgroup category (“they”)

·         You start analyzing the “other”. Which differences exist between the “us” and the “other”

·         Some stereotypes are positive (“Women are multitasking”), some are negative (“Women are not as intelligent as men”)

Stereotypes in the U.S.A

"All Americans are fat"!

“That´s not true”! This sentence you will hear from few Americans. But in fact each day, 1 in 4 Americans visits a fast food restaurant. Though Americans eat Fast Food regularly, they have a thinner population than the Mexicans. In Mexico 70 percent of the population is too fat, in America there are only 35%. Of course, all this fast-food has led to a problem -obesity. In 2004, the National Center for Health published a study on obesity in the United States. Between 1962 and 2000, the percentage of obese Americans swelled from 13 percent to 31 percent.

French fries are the most eaten vegetable in America .You would have to walk for seven hours straight to burn off a Super Sized Coke, fry and Big Mac . In the U.S., they eat more than 1,000,000 animals an hour. The main problem why people in the U.S. eat so much Fast Food, is that many people realize that they can get a value meal at numerous fast-food restaurants for far less money than it takes to purchase foods to make a healthy meal for their family. As a result, this stereotype is not true. There are Americans who are obese, but not all of them!!!

SUPER SIZE ME - an experiment from an American!

While examining the influence of the fast food industry, Morgan Spurlock personally explores the consequences on his health of a diet of solely McDonald's food for one month.

COCKNEY ENGLISH

As we were talking about linguistic diversity in class, this will be of some interest for you!

Cockney English is a special language style which is used in specific regions and is only spoken from some people in London. “Cockney” refers both to the accent as well as to those people who speak it.

The term comes from a Middle English word (coken-ay) from the 14^th century which means a weak townsman in comparison to the tough countryman. Through some joking language it came to describe a “Londoner”. In the 17^th century, Cockney was the language of all Londoners, in the 18^th century Cockney became associated with the working class and in the 20^th century it meant that a Cockney speaking person is from a lower background. Nowadays Cockney is the most widely spoken dialect in Britain. There are a few different features of the Cockney accent, for example the Monophthongization or the Glottal stops where the last letter is not pronounced. There is also one case where the ´h´ is dropped out at the beginning of certain words like house= ´ouse. The last is the TH fronting: the dental fricatives are replaced, for example thin is pronounced as fin. In the Cockney Rhyming Slang, a word is replaced with a phrase, usually containing a word which rhymes with the original word, for example “dog and bone” for “telephone”.

This is a great video that shows you how to do a cockney accent.

It is worth watching it!

 

                              ALPHABET - One of the best film documentation I have ever seen!


Trailer

Last Friday I watched the movie “Alphabet” in the Volkskino in Klagenfurt. I can really recommend this cinema sensation, as many things really surprised me. It´s said that 98% of children are born highly gifted, but after leaving school there is only 2% left. Wagenhofer, the producer of the film says that he hopes that in the schools of future there should be enough room to develop and adapt skills. Teacher’s shouldn´t instruct somebody, they should just be there to show things. They can´t educate a human being. They can just educate themselves.

YOUPOST 1

                                             

                                           Most spooky time of the year --> HALLOWEEN!

Nowadays most people celebrate Halloween, but they do not know where it actually comes from or what the actual meaning is. The festival originates from a Celtic festival called "Samhain", which means „summers end“.  People believe that in the night before Samhain, 31st of October, the dead are returning as ghosts.. To keep roaming spirits away people leave food and wine on their doorsteps. The Christian church changed Samhain to All Hallowe´s Eve. Later it was shortened to Halloween, as it´s name remains until today. Personally I didn´t know much about the spooky festival of the year and there is a lot of new information that really surprised me. I knew Halloween is a very famous festivity, especially in the United States. A sister of mine lives in Ohio, and she told me that Halloween today is more about costumes and traditions like trick or treating than the literal meaning. I know that costumes have a huge impact and an important role in times of modern Halloween. More than 120 Americans dress up in costumes, for example as witches, pirates and vampires. All in all it means that Halloween is a huge business for companies. People spend 2.5 Billion Dollars for costumes every year and 6 Billion Dollars for candy, which is quite much. One thing I found out is how the traditions changed from the past to the present. In the mid 19th century the Irish came across the Atlantic and through that a lot of changes happened. Bonfires shrank to lanterns and disguising became to costumes. One important part about Halloween is the healthy pumpkin, where one of them contains more than 500 seeds and which peers out from doorsteps in many parts of the world in October. Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America and it should reflect the story of “jack-o´-lanterns”, which I also just figured out and found it very helpful and interesting for the historical meaning and traditions of Halloween. Another surprising information is, that a big part of the English society stopped celebrating Halloween when Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation began to spread. Although Halloween sounds very interesting I never celebrated it before, but now I understand more about the famous day of death and maybe I will also dress up at October 31st or just join the Halloween party, which is organized by the ITAT.

Crazy woman in Hollywood

                                         SOMETHING FUNNY FOR THE WEEKEND

This video was shot in June this year. On the world trip, which I did with my twin sister and a friend, we stopped in Hollywood. There we saw this crazy woman, who tried to earn money with her special dance moves.
ENJOY WATCHING! :D