Reflection on the Pecha Kucha experience

When I first heard the term "Pecha Kucha" I haven't had a idea what this could be. The first challenge was the pronunciation of this word. After a considerable long time of searching the web, I finally found I funny video on YouTube, which we got shown in class the next day. It’s a 'cover' of the well-known song "Mahna Mahna" from the Muppet Show. I continued informing myself about the presentation style and I was actually really surprised to read that this is a well-known presentation style even beyond China. There are a number of events and "Pecha Kucha nights" organized. This presentation uses 20 pictures per 20 seconds. This meant that we would have only six minutes and 40 seconds for our whole presentation. My first thought wasn't negative at all! I found the task to create a "Pecha Kucha" presentation challenging but I was motivated to do it. 

For our presentation we chose the topic euronews because we found it quite fascinating that the channel is available in 13 languages. Unfortunately, when we started researching we found out that the provided information is rather subjective. A prerequisite for this presentation is high-quality, comprehensive and above all not only on-sided. The topic can be very dry and boring unless you have an interest in that area and we had so we started digging deeper. While writing our transcript we wanted to keep it as interesting as possible. We wrote thousands of mails (or maybe just nine hundred) to finally get an answer from an account director from euronews. We asked him some questions that were not to find anywhere on the internet. I have to say that we were really lucky that someone actually answered our questions. We combined the information what we felt was important to mention from the euronews official website, with the interview of the account director. At first I was a little bit skeptical if people would be interested in this topic but I think we managed to arise the interest mentioning the survey we have done in class. The central aim of our presentation was though, to make our classmates realize what a great opportunity this is to enrich our language skills. It provides countless ways to improve our fluency and to acquire some new vocabulary. I am sure that the spoken presentation was way more authentic than the written one and that we managed to deliver it in an interesting way. =)