Learning vocabulary ist the most important way to improve your English Recently I signed up for an English course called 'Professional Online Competence' at my local university. The teacher told us something that got me to think about some important topics when learning a language. He gave us a quote from See Hulstijin: 'Learning vocabulary is one of the most important ways of improving your English' (note: I just tried to make the title a little more catchy.. studying something with media ;). He also told us that over the past 10-20 years English teachers used to believe that as long as you can describe something well and speak fluently, it is actually not important to know the right word for it. But now experiments have proven that students who know more vocabulary simply score better grades. With this idea in the backhand our teacher told us about the 'Academic Word List' (AWL) which includes the most used 570 words in academic English. I guess he also told us we should learn all the words, but I'm actually not 100 percent sure about that. This really got me thinking because I was taught English the oldfashion way meaning that I spend most of my time learning English with reading, watching films and speaking with other people. But I did definitly NOT learn any vocabulary. Not at all. Maybe I was wrong. Now I'm kind of certain that if I had spend more time with learing vocabulary my English would be much better now. What is your opinion on this? I'm really curious because I'm still debating if I should learn all the words from the list, which is hard work. Will it be worth it?

Homework and pressure I am writing this because I'm somehow angry with myself and I thought maybe I can learn something from this day by reflecting it. I have to do a presentation and a film review till next monday and also some research about social media and politics with saturday as deadline. So I said to myself I will finish the research today and also start with the presentation and the review. Today was a holiday and I had really nothing else to do. Now the problem is: it is 11pm and I havent even started to work. I dont know how this happend but I somehow found everything very interesting but work. I am a person who needs high pressure to do work without motivation. This pressure was not here today and I hate it because I really wanted to finish this work today. I spend the whole day with reading, watching youtube videos, eating, searching for stuff which is I found interesting to know at this moment, visiting 9gag, facebook, getting distracted, sleeping, watching tv... To sum it up: I didnt really achieved anything today. I did this because my brain didnt want to work and always was like: 'Yeah, we will start soon.. just let me do one more thing. Trust me, It will be fun, afterwards we will start to work... We have still enough time to do the serious stuff later so.. come on. ' I was convinced, because it made perfectly sense to me. Dammit brain! What is wrong with you? I think the only way to help myself with this problem (so that something like today will not happen again) is to put myself under self constructed pressure, because the real pressure is too low and too far away. But this is also hard to do because of obvious reasons. Has someone another solution which could help me? Or some creative ways to put yourself under pressure?

The Hobbit This is not a review of the Hobbit film but just some own thoughts about the movie and it may contain some spoilers. Please correct my language if you have the time to do so. So because I am a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy I recently watched the Hobbit. It's a film about Bilbo Baggins the oncle of Frodo Baggins and it tells a story which took place many years before Frodo got the ring. I have to admit, since I watched the first Lord of the Ring film I had some bad feelings about Bilbo, the fat,grey and old hobbit. There is a scene where Bilbo steals the ring from gollum and his fingers are just so huge and ugly. Bah. But all those negative feelings about him died very intense with this new film. First I try to give a quick overview over the plot. The young Bilbo lives a peaceful but not very interesting live in the Shire, home of the hobbits. Until the day Gandalf the grey appears and asks him to go on an adventure. Bilbo objects. But the very same day thirtteen drawes arrive at Hobbiton and explain their situation. They want to take back their home at the lonley mountain, which had been taken by Smaug many years ago. Gandalf wants Bilbo to be the burgler, the guy who sneaks behind the enemy lines to open the gate of the lonley mountain. After some discussion and the group leaving Hobbiton Bilbo finally decides to help them. They travel through Middle Earth and past some incidents with orcs and elfs they have to cross the Misty Mountains. The whole group, expect Gandalf, gets caught by the golbin king deep in the mountain. Bilbo manages to escape him but falls even deeper to a place which is known as gollums cave... My favorite scene is the one in the cave, where Bilbo and Gollum try to make an agreement. Also I love every scene with distance shots over the beautiful landscape of New Zealand. The thing I will proably never understand about the universe of Middle Earth are the eagles from Gandalf. It would be so much easier if they would help outside of desperate situations. But I guess it would also be more boring. So overall Peter Jackson did an awesome job translating this children book into not one but three movies. At least he did a good job on the first one but I'm pretty sure the other two will be awesome as well. Can't wait for the next movie! I'm really sad the Hobbit got no oscar but that doesn't mean anything to the quality and awesomness of the movie. Thanks for reading my stuff. :)