Funny ESL Video

I just found this very funny commercial on the internet, which shows the value of learning English:



Thinking=pensando
Sinking=hundimiento

Glee

I know that Chileans were very excited to watch the first season of Glee. Unfortunately, many channels only played the episodes dubbed (dublado) in Spanish. Here is a website that shows the episodes in English, but with Spanish subtitles. This is a great way to practice listening.

In the United States, Glee is showing its second season (nueva temporada). If you want to see the new episodes, click here. I like the new season, but think it is VERY different from Season 1. I would love to hear what you think!

"La consentida" Rock version

Hi friends from TheSpeakerBox!
I'm Enrique again, well, if you remember i uploaded a video of me playing guitar.

Mmmm, now i've brought you a new video, of a friends and me...
It's a little rock version of the national song "La consentida", i hope you like this!

Websites to practice English

I don't know if you already know about www.chilehablaingles.com, but it's a great resource to practice English. There are also many websites where you can video chat in English with native speakers (livemocha.com, busuu.com). My favorite is lenguajero.com, which allows you to talk to people online, but also has flashcards to help you with vocabulary. If you want extra practice, you should check them out!

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Last week, I read an interesting article in the New York Times called "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" The article looks at different languages and discusses how the words available in each language affects a person's life. It is a difficult article to read, but here are some of the main ideas...

When talking about English and Spanish, the article focuses on the fact that everything in Spanish is gendered (el vs. la). For example, if I said in English “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor," I would not have to tell you if the neighbor was a man or a woman. Spanish, however, forces me to tell you if I ate with my vecina or vecino, even if I don't want you to know.

I think the article is even more interesting when discussing the genders of everyday objects. In Spanish, if a word is masculine (la mochila vs. el suelo, for example), speakers associate that object with more masculine characteristics:

A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

The article also discusses aboriginal people of Australia, who speak a language called Guugu Yimithirr. This language does not does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. So when they tell directions to a friend, they say, "go north until the bank, then walk east, etc." instead of "turn left and walk until you see the bank, then turn right."

If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

Because these people rely on using north/south/east/west, they need to always be aware of which direction is north: "In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying." Studies have shown that children in societies like this begin learning geographic directions at 2 years old, and know the system by 7 or 8.

Finally, the author discusses a study that says people also see colors differently, depending on their language. For example, green and blue are distinct colors in English and Spanish but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. Because we have different words for the two colors, we exaggerate the difference between the colors. Therefore, when we look at a painting, we see it differently than someone who uses the same word for the two colors.

Why you should join the Speakerbox...

(1) It is a great way to practice English
(2) You will learn about cool music
(3) I will give you extra credit (puntos extras!) for posting on the website. Help your grade and have fun at the same time!

If you have not received an email invitation to sign up for the blog, email me at meeganbrooks@gmail.com. Also remember, I can help you after school on Tuesdays!

Mashup Music

Inspired by Pedro's post on David Guetta, I thought I would tell you about mashup music. In English, a "mashup" is when two or more songs are mixed together. In Chile, the Classic Project is famous for doing this (the Classic Project, funny enough, is not famous in the US). In the US, a mashup group called Norwegian Recycling is very popular. Here is one of my favorites...



For more of their music, go to http://norwegianrecycling.multiply.com/music. You can download their music for free!