This was fun and slightly vexing to do, as most good projects are. For this week, I returned to an old presentation and added a new twist.
Short Review: the program I used is called Loom, which allows you to mark up and add text to a screen recording. I could’ve also done a Facetime recording (so, my face either with or without the screen), but I didn’t feel like it was necessary. Loom was pretty okay; it had high resolution (1080p as default but it went way higher), and the variety of options for sharing were nice. I will say that I did not like the editing function with regard to trimming. It was clunky, it didn’t really adjust so you could see what you were doing, it wouldn’t skip over parts you’d cut, the tabs stretched too far, etc. I’d gotten used to cutting out minor gaffes easily with Audacity, but Loom made that a chore.
Reflection:
I’d originally made this presentation for my junior year second trimester final, and I was super proud of it at the time. At that time, I’d been limited to what I could memorize and explain in French, so now that I was giving it in English (and with greater breadth of knowledge) I could go into more detail. The second sentence structure comparison slide is a callback to that. It was eerie translating the script back into English because I couldn’t remember what I’d intended to say, so I made a few mistakes in earlier attempts. Moreover, double checking my research more than a year later was hard because information had changed, and sometimes two articles were contradictory (looking at you, Wikipedia).
Additionally, some of the things that were of note when comparing Twi to French were gone in English, so I had to patch stuff in. Making the conjugation chart took a while, because my parents were both unhelpful and helpful at the same time. Being native speakers who hadn’t really needed to break down, or in some cases know, the super technical grammar rules made referring to my textbook hard. My mom had taken Twi in school (like how we take ELA/English classes) and some of what she told me contradicted my textbook, which was a headache.
All that said, I was really happy to connect to my parents. I don’t really get to talk to them a lot, so this was a nice project to do together. I definitely got flamed for my pronunciations (which you can kinda hear in the video!)