Day 4 - Passion

One of the hardest tongue twisters that I have found is the following: 

"The sixth shack's sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep 's sick" 

We tried it a bit with Dana; he believes it might be the hardest tongue twister in English. Tongue twisters are helpful for improving the intonation; hence I am putting some time on them.

Yesterday,  I was reading a poem which I used to love when I was younger and can still relate to. To fin it, you can google 'you start dying slowly'. Since I am very passionate about it, I thought it helps if I practice body movements with it. When I read this poem, I can move my hands better and even walk in more harmony. I talked about it with Dana, and he suggested that I memorise the poem and sometime read it in a micro night. Also, I red it again for Dana and could apply his techniques (pauses, hand moves, thinking when talking, etc.) and the outcome was good.

Today's class was partly about passion and its effect on speech. Conveying your passion when reading a technical script is much harder than a poem. To see that, besides the poem, I red a technical paragraph from a paper about 'semi-online' algorithms. Dana also red the same poem and paragraph. It was much easier for me to convey my passion in the poem compared to the paragraph (although the paragraph was about a research topic that I am very interested in). In contrast, Dana could show the passion for the paragraph (although he called it 'a very boring text'). As the first step to fix this, I am going to read some technical paragraphs and in doing so 'pretend' that I am reading a poem. As I said, I found it hard in the first attempt. Besides the passion, I had little issues like pausing between an adjective and its noun (as in 'robust algorithms), partly because I put too much stress on the word 'robust'.

For the body movements, Dana asked my to give two talks: one seating and one standing. Although the topic of the first talk (favourite food) was easier than the second one (traditions in Fall), the second talk went much better (both talks were improvised). Seating makes me feel restricted, I cannot approach audience or (pretend to) look at them. Apparently, this is a good sign that I am improving my body language -hence I need to stand and walk-. 

For the next week, I am going to find a dialogue from a novel that I just finished and talked with Dana (named 'The winner stands alone' by Paulo Coelho) and we will try to act it. Apparently, there is only a fine line between acting and giving a public speech. 

The video of my talks are here and here.