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Mostrando entradas de abril, 2019

When you can read Spanish but you can not speak it

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How to achieve a better pronunciation in Spanish? What about those people who can read Spanish but can not s peak it or understand when someone speak to them?  That difficulty has a simple solution. If y ou want to speak Spanish and understand when others speak to you, you should know very well the Spanish alphabet, what the letters are called, but above all how they sound. In Spanish-speaking countries we learn the alphabet by memorizing a song or reciting the lyrics, but I discovered a much better learning method, which is used in German-speaking countries, a language in which, unlike Spanish, the pronunciation is difficult. elucidate from the mere image of the letter. German-speaking children learn the letters, what they are called and how they sound from a familiar word that begins with that letter. they use, for example for A, A wie Anna: A as Ana, that way they know how the letter sounds from a known word. I have used this method with my Spanish students and it ...

... And one day I decided I was going to be a writer

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When I was eight years old, I ventured into the library we had at home for the first time. Actually, it was not a big deal: it was just a metal furniture with several shelves on which rested, in a disorderly manner, a score of books of different sizes and qualities. Not all were beautiful, but they were all quite interesting. My father had among his books, besides a big bible, in hard cover and golden border, some lives of saints. For me it was a pleasure to go through those truculent narrations of martyrdoms and unlimited dangers, of incredible fanaticism, of self mutilations and certain portents, perhaps, or invented. The photographs of the Holy Land that were in some of them made me anxious to travel. The books of my sisters, those who they had to read for a homework, to fulfill tasks that in those days could not be found on the Internet, they discovered other realities. Of all those foreign books, the one I remember most fondly is one that was already very deteriorated, w...

My student Doris, a successful inmersive experience

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Doris is an Austrian who has decided to spend a year in Colombia. For a happy circumstance we met and I started teaching her Spanish. Her case has helped me determine how someone can make the most of that immersion experience in a new language and culture.   Of course, as a Spanish teacher I have had the opportunity to meet many students who come to "submerge", but Doris's case is different, because she has done the real process, I mean, she is actually forced to use Spanish language daily, unlike other people who come to do immersion but live in an area full of bilingual places, t hey eat at Archie's, meet other foreigners and, therefore, speak in their native language or in English almost all the time . Doris lives in a neighborhood where 99% of the people are locals who barely know a few words of English and zero German. As she is a religious person (a strange thing these days) she does an educational work that involves all the inhabitants of her area,...