UK comic artist Rachael Smith on her Prague residency and the benefits of keeping diary comics

From english.radio.cz

Author:Ruth Fraňková

Rachael Smith is a young, comic artist from the UK, who has just undertaken a three-week residency programme in Prague, organised by the Czech Literary Centre in cooperation with the International Lakes Comic Art Festival. During her stay she recorded her life in the Czech capital through short comic strips, which she immediately shared with her fans online.

                                 'Quarantine Comix'|Source: archive of Rachael Smith

I met with Racheal on the last day of her residency to discuss her work and her impressions from the Czech Republic, but I started by asking what brought her here in the first place:

“It was actually the Lakes festival that suggested me as a resident here to the Czech Literary Centre [a section of the Moravian Library], and luckily for me, they accepted me, so here I am.”

What did you work on during your stay in Prague?

“I am mainly known for my auto-bio comics, or my diary comics, so I thought while I was here, I would just make diary comics about my experiences here, about soaking up the culture and learning about how people live.

“So I have just been making comics every day about my experiences. And it was important for me that I could make the comics and upload them online so that my fans could come on the journey with me, in a sense. So that’s what I wanted to do!”

I believe this was your first visit to Prague. What was your impression of the city and what was it like working in a completely different environment? Did you find it inspiring?

“Yes, I have never been to the Czech Republic before. It is so beautiful and I have really loved it here. It’s been very different working here. There was a lot of restrictions and I don’t have all the materials I am used to having. But that was good, in a sense.

“I think having restrictions on how you can work sometimes force you to be more creative with what you are saying in your work. And, as I said, it is just breathtakingly beautiful here. So I hope I have done it justice in my drawings!”

                                 'Quarantine Comix'|Source: archive of Rachael Smith

What did you like about Prague? Did you have time to visit places?

“The apartment I am staying in is quite close to Vyšehrad, which is really beautiful and I have been there several times already. Otherwise, I just love walking around the centre. I love all the squares and I love how Prague has a lot of green spaces. I guess London has that a little bit, but it seems Prague really considers it important to have green spaces.”

I know that you also tried to learn some Czech….

“Yes, I can say hello, and thank you, and ask for a glass of red wine. But otherwise, I struggle.”

You recently published a comic collection called Quarantine Comix, written and drawn every day during the 2020 lockdown. What inspired you to start doing these comics? Was it a sort of therapy, a way to overcome your loneliness?

“During the lockdown I was trapped away from my partner and I couldn’t see him for a long time, so I went into a bit of a depression.

“My friend Heather suggested that if I am good at anything, it is making people feel less alone through my comics. So I started documenting what I did every day, which made me do things every day and it was actually very cathartic.

“I started putting the comics online and a lot of people told me that they were helping them, that they made them feel less alone. So I just carried on and they ended up being put in this lovely book.”

Do you record your life regularly, or does it only happen in unusual moments, such as the lockdown?

“I have done in the past. One of my most famous books is called Wired up Wrong, which is a black diary comics about my experiences with mental health and my issues with depression and anxiety, talking about my coping mechanism with that.

“I have another one called Stand in Your Power, which is a very similar book about going through a break-up and relationship issues. I made them sound very bleak, but they are actually very funny!

“So I am known for my diary comics and it felt very natural that that would be what I would do on my residency in Prague.”

What has drawn you to the genre of diary comics in the first place? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this genre?

“It was ten years ago, when my therapist suggested that I start drawing, because I told her it was something I loved to do. She suggested that I draw something every day that was good that happened to me, to try to be more positive about life.

                                 'Quarantine Comix'|Source: archive of Rachael Smith

“So I started doing that and I started putting them online and I called the project One Good Thing. And I just found that really helpful and cathartic to get it out there.  Also, the added benefit that I wasn’t expecting was that it actually helped other people. This has helped me think more positively about life.

“So at that point I thought: this is actually quite important, I should continue doing things like this. So then I wrote Wired up Wrong, and from there, it kind of snowballed.

“I don’t do diary comics every day, but when I do, it’s very rewarding. It’s a kind of instant gratification putting them online and having people immediately come back and say: Oh this is great.”

“So I put my comics on my Twitter and my Facebook and my Instagram and people comment on them and talk about them.”

https://english.radio.cz/uk-comic-artist-rachael-smith-her-prague-residency-and-benefits-keeping-diary-8733854

What can you do to improve your foreign language?

From raillynews.com

Knowing a foreign language has become a very important plus value today. In fact, knowing not only English but two or three languages ​​is considered ideal. Because, with the development of technology and communication networks both in business life and social life, contact with people in different countries has increased. The company you work with may have a foreign partner or staff, or it may be necessary to know a foreign language in order to shop and establish social relations while traveling abroad.

In addition to all these obligations, people can only be interested in any culture. In order to get to know that culture, he may want to learn the language spoken by that geography. At this point, for whatever reason, those who want to improve their foreign language can start to explore various ways.

So, what can those who want to improve their foreign language do? Here are the essential tips when learning a foreign language:

What can you do to improve your foreign language?

1. Watching TV Series & Movies in the Language You Want to Learn

We think that the most fun way to learn a language is to watch foreign series and movies. As you follow foreign series and movies, an ear familiarity develops in the language you want to learn. In addition, you have the chance to learn new words since you follow the movie or series with subtitles in the beginning period. You can write the newly learned words on small papers and paste them where you can see them often.

2. Changing the Phone Language

One of the most practical exercises you can do to improve your foreign language is to change the language of your phone. In this way, we can use smartphones, which are one of the tools we use most frequently, in a more beneficial way. Using a different language on the first day may seem strange, but we're sure you'll get used to it over time.

3. Following the Lyrics While Listening to Foreign Language Songs

Do you like listening to music in a foreign language? If you like it, you are lucky. You can discover beautiful songs about the language you are interested in and try to understand them with the words you learn. For this, you can also benefit from mobile applications where you can follow the lyrics of the music.

4. Keeping a Journal in a Foreign Language

Everyone says that the best way to learn a foreign language is to think in a foreign language. They are not wrong about this either. Thinking of sentences directly in a different language instead of translating your mother tongue into a foreign language speeds up the learning process. Therefore, keeping a diary in the language you want to learn can help you think in a foreign language and express daily events more easily.​ ​

5. Utilizing Foreign Language Development Applications

Today, there are many mobile applications for those who want to learn a foreign language. With mobile applications that you can easily access from your smartphone, you can learn new words and sentences without delaying your learning request. Let's list a few of the mobile applications you can use to learn a foreign language:

• Memrise
• Duolingo
• Busuu
• HelloTalk
• HiNative

6. Attending Online Trainings

Of course, everyone's language learning capacity and ability is different. But if you spend a little time each day learning a language, we're sure you'll see the difference. With online trainings, it is much easier to spend time in a foreign language and attend courses wherever you are. In this regard, you can benefit from the programs of various foreign language courses or foreign language development applications such as Cambly or Skype Tutors, which have many foreign instructors.

7. Researching Language Schools in the Related Country

Of course, going to language school requires a sufficient budget. If you can allocate such a budget for language learning, you can quickly start researching a language school in a country where the language you want to learn is spoken. Because the easiest way to learn a foreign language is to be with people who speak that language as a mother tongue.

Getting Started with Level 8 Books

Reading a book is also a very important element that expands the vocabulary. And for those who want to read a foreign language book, there are various levels in this regard. In the periods when you are just trying to learn the language, you can start with the books with low difficulty level and gradually increase the level in the following periods. Thus, as you see that you understand what you read, you can be even more motivated.

9. Finding Online Dating

As we said before, the fastest way to learn a language is to talk to strangers on a daily basis and even make friends with them. For this reason, you can get language friends from different countries via the internet and mobile applications. In this regard, you can take a look at applications such as Tandem and italki.

10. Following Foreign Social Media Accounts

Have you ever wondered how many hours a day you spend on social media? Many people now spend a lot of time on social media. If you use social media very often, you can turn an area where you spend so much time into an educational platform. You can follow the social media accounts in the language you want to learn and try to understand the explanations under the posts. This method will also come in handy for learning new words and phrases.

https://raillynews.com/2021/06/yabanci-dilinizi-gelistirmek-icin-neler-yapabilirsiniz/

How keeping a diary can help adults learn a foreign language

From theconversation.com

Most of us assume that learning another language is very difficult. You need special skills to remember both vocabulary and grammar rules and, at the same time, must be able to converse fluently with a native speaker. So how do we actually learn a language? What is the best way? And how can teachers help learners to remember the sometimes complex elements and characteristics of another language?

Adults learn explicitly. That means they want clear explanations, and they also need to clarify things they are uncertain about. Adult learners analyse elements of a new language and make links using their own existing language knowledge. Everyone has, and uses, these highly developed explicit learning processes which have often taken a lot of time and effort to develop.

But students need techniques to overcome learning challenges, including those presented by COVID, which ended face-to-face teaching, and Brexit which has made trips abroad and training placements much more difficult.

Through our research, we found that keeping a diary turns good teaching and learning practice into something more concrete and immediate by allowing students to replay their learning steps in their written entries.

A teaching toolkit

Our study examined a group of language learners studying Spanish as a foreign language in evening classes at a Scottish university. We wanted to find out how they explained and clarified the new language they were learning using their existing language (English). What did they focus on as they were learning Spanish? What language characteristics drew their attention? How did they explain what they were learning to themselves and others, and what links did they make with their mother tongue?

Working with three classes made up of 38 learners, we introduced learning diaries to the classroom as a task for the end of each language lesson. Students had to answer two questions: what they had learned in the lesson, and what differences and similarities had they noticed between their mother tongue and Spanish.

The questions remained the same for all their entries. Students were free to comment, analyse and reflect on the substance of the lessons. It was up to them to choose what to discuss in their diary – there was no effort on the part of the teacher to draw attention to specific linguistic or cultural elements of the language.

After using the learning diaries for a set period, a focus group interview was arranged to quiz students about the impact of these diaries. Chiefly we were interested in whether they felt using the diary had altered their performance and improved their confidence in speaking the new language.

Using a diary after each lesson helped students consolidate what they had learned in class and reflect on the new language connections they had made

rawpixel.coml/Shutterstock

How was it for you?

Students’ learning diaries revealed how they used their analytic language ability. They identified common language errors that (mainly) English speakers make in Spanish. They described how the language worked in Spanish, as well as in English. They also noted and translated grammatical rules that apply in both languages, and also how things differed between the two:

In Spanish ‘me gusta/n’ means ‘it is pleasing to me/they are pleasing to me’. Or literally, ‘to me it is pleasing’, the it/them being the object of the sentence. This is quite a difficult concept to understand.

Students seemed keen on writing a diary about their learning and understanding; they enjoyed learning by making connections with their mother tongue. According to their accounts, these connections helped them memorise what they were learning. The content of their diary entries was good for sparking discussions in the classroom and talking about how they learned things:

The diary … helped me memorise colours in Spanish and improved my chances of getting a Spanish reply when I [repeatedly] asked myself, ‘what colour is that?’

But we were surprised to find that students did not reflect on cultural matters in their diaries. Lessons had purposefully contained cultural elements from all over the Spanish speaking world, from the Mexican Day of the Dead to Easter celebrations in Madrid.

The students’ reflections seemed to cover only the linguistic spectrum, focusing on distinctions between languages, such as the existence of genders in Spanish, and how you could guess the correct gender of a word. It appeared that the diaries were used specifically as a simple tool for tightening the nuts and bolts of language learning.

Their answers to the first question (about what they had learned in that day’s lesson) revealed very few similar answers across the three groups, which we were not expecting because each lesson had specific learning objectives. These were shared at the beginning of each session as a matter of good teaching practice. This result alone made us think about how personalised language learning becomes as students progress. Learners, it seems, take away a range of different elements from each lesson, which are simply not predictable.

Using these findings about how students analysed and reflected on language could help shape teaching and learning in future. Specifically, we can see that learning diaries allowed students to explore their own analytic skills, become aware of what particularly drew their interest, and illuminate how they reflected on their own knowledge to advance their comprehension and learning.

By the end, the students were keen to continue keeping a diary. They found it a really helpful way to make sense of language connections and memorise new Spanish words as they progressed. For the teachers involved, the diaries provided an excellent starting point for class discussions, and offered a practical toolkit for language teaching.

https://theconversation.com/how-keeping-a-diary-can-help-adults-learn-a-foreign-language-154597