Fiestas y tradiciones

Acabo de crear una nueva colección para la biblioteca de LingQ que he denominado Fiestas y tradiciones. Mi idea es utilizar esta colección para hablar de cultura, fiestas y tradiciones populares. En España, como en otros lugares, existen fiestas y tradiciones generales, que celebramos todos, y después, cada región tiene sus propias celebraciones o particularidades. Este es el caso de Cataluña que, posiblemente por su historia cultural, tiene un puñado de tradiciones o particularidades propias.

Aprovechando que estamos en diciembre, la primera lección que he creado es sobre las Navidades en Cataluña. Al ver que se convertía en un tema extenso, he decidido dividirlo en dos partes. En la primera, la que ya está lista, hablo de algunas celebraciones que son propias de Cataluña, o de celebraciones nacionales, pero desde el punto de vista catalán, es decir, cómo las celebramos aquí. En la segunda parte, hablaré del resto de celebraciones.
Sólo quería puntualizar que llevo unos días bastante resfriado, por lo que mi voz no está en su mejor momento. Si la semana próxima estoy mejor (eso espero) volveré a grabar el audio de Navidades en Cataluña (1ª parte).

Espero que os guste y ya sabéis, podéis comentar o preguntar lo que queráis!

New microphone for recording lessons

Samson C03U.

Since I've joined LingQ as a Spanish tutor, I've started creating lessons for students to share in the LingQ library. I'm really enjoying it! I write my own things, or try to find some interesting short and long articles about Science & Technology, Environment, Health, etc. Then I record them in two versions, the first one in normal/natural native speed for advanced learners, and the other in a slower speed for intermediate learners.
So, what's the matter with the microphone? Well, I tried to record my first lesson with a Logitech headsets with microphone, the one I use for conversations through Skype, but I hated the sound quality and the noise created! Then, for the first 10 or 12 lessons I used the built-in webcam microphone. The sound was better (there was less noise), but I was really disappointed with the sound quality!
Of course I'm not a sound expert, but I'm quite picky about sound & image quality. So after some research, I decided to buy a studio quality condenser microphone with its mic stand, shockmount unit, antipop filter and so on! It's really great! I've just recorded my last 4 or 5 lessons with it and I'm delighted!! Now I'm just trying to learn a bit of sound processing with Audacity and Sound Forge just to make the best of it!! I hope you'll enjoy my Spanish lessons, especially the new ones recorded with this great microphone!!

Spanish tutor at LingQ

Hi Everybody! I'm very excited because I've recently joined LingQ also as a Spanish tutor. But, hold a moment, what's LingQ?
Well, it's an online global language learning community in which you can learn one or more foreign languages (there are several to choose from) in a natural way. Forget about classic language learning (that is, boring textbooks, grammar rules...), and just enjoy real interesting material. Surround yourself with meaningful input that matters to you. Well, that's more or less the concept!
I discovered it some months ago because I wanted to improve my English fluency and I've been really addicted to LingQ since then. I've recently started to review my French also.
And now, I'll have a more active role in this community, because a part from keeping emproving my English and French, I'll be tutoring Spanish and helping Spanish learners to improve their skills!

That's the reason why from now on I'll also write some post here in Spanish, or at least, in both English and Spanish!

So, I hope to talk to you soon!

Almost 200 pages read in a weekend!!

Wow!! I’m really excited! This weekend I went, with my wife and my two kids (they’re 19 month old twins), to my parents-in-law’s second home in Empordà area (it’s two hours driving from Barcelona). The idea was to be able to have a bit of rest (you know, grandparents help with the children) and also to work a little. So I brought my laptop but.... Oh no! In the rush preparing things to leave, I forgot my pendrive with all my work in my desktop!!! So what did I do? Well, fortunately I had the book I’m currently reading, and also my iPhone with the audiobook version: Deception Point, by Dan Brown.
Oh my God, I can’t remember reading/listening so much in just two days!!!
Friday afternoon, when we left Barcelona, I was on page 154. I was on the page 340 when we came back home on Sunday night. So altogether almost 200 pages read in English and also almost 8 hours of audiobook listening!! I’m really happy!!! And I’ve discovered that reading while listening is really fantastic!!!!

The revival of learning

Here am I! After some months of inactivity, I've decided to restart my blog.

I've changed the title and the description and I'm ready to fill it up with my new English learning experiences.

Let's start by the beginning! When I finished my degree in Translation and Interpreting I started to work as a general freelance translator. Then I specialized in localization (that is, software and web content translation and adaptation). So I've been working with this for the last 8 years (a part from also proofreading and translating Spanish <-> Catalan). Reading and translating, reading and translating...

So guess what happenned? My speaking skills get worse and worse and really worse. I also forgot a lot of basic, everyday's vocabulary because I just read technical English.

A couple of years ago I met a couple of german friends of a friend of mine and I didn't feel confortable and a bit embarrassed when I told them that I was a translator... Yes, I know, it's strange, I'm not really fluent in speaking, but you know, I just read and read those boring technical manuals.... Oh my God, what a disaster!!

But the real change in my mind happened last autumn, when I decided that I wanted to be a High School English teacher here in Barcelona. I love to teach and I know that the English level of the students here is reeeally bad, but doing my CAP course (Pedagogical Aptitude Course) I had a worderful, optimistic and full of energy teacher that transmitted me some of that energy.

I did my Practicum in a high school and it was fine! As I just told you, the level here is really low in general, but I realized that if I want to be a teacher, I don't want to be the kind of teachers I've always had in my school time... you know, those teacher that used to use more Spanish/Catalan in classes than Englih, who just used boring textbooks, the traditional grammar approach and this kind of stuff!!

So I realized that I needed to be more fluent to feel selfconfident and being able to manage a classroom just in English!!

What was my first step? I went to Ireland just to broke the ice and start talking and feel that I was able to do it!!

Take a break, I'll continue tomorrow....

A Wearable Motorcycle?

The Tuesday session was a bit stressful, because I wanted to talk about 3 cities, and also, due to technical planning I had to play the final PowerPoint presentation to review all the contents that we had been working on. Conclusions: too many things for a 55 minutes class! I know it! But as I considered that the presentation was more important because I’m going to use it to check out what they’ve learnt, we worked on Philadelphia, Washington DC and Las Vegas veeery quickly!

Like the first presentation, this one was also very successful. They could locate all the cities worked in class and they recognized all the photographs. Even students with more difficulties to learn English were really engaged with the presentations.

On Friday, for the last session, I prepared an exercise to work on groups based on 4 different texts. Three of them were about the Greenest American cities, and the last one had nothing to do with US cities, but I chose it because I thought that it would catch their attention. It is called A Wearable Motorcycle. As a matter of fact, it attracted my attention when I was looking for interesting readings for my students. So I decided to adapt it to their level and made them watch the video related.

The session was great, but a bit messy at the end. During the first half an hour they worked more or less concentrated and in a relative silence, but gradually they started talking and getting distracted.

I’ve noticed that working in small groups is more difficult than it could seem, because you can’t be everywhere at once. Maybe with a couple of assistants...

Do you know where is Grey’s Anatomy set?

They couldn’t tell me which recent very important political figure was senator for Illinois and live in Chicago, but obviously, they know where is set Grey’s Anatomy TV series, in Seattle, of course!

In this session I introduced a new exercise that I hadn’t planned at first. The day before I assisted to my practicum mate class, who was implementing his Didactic Unit about cinema with 1st of Batxillerat students. One of the exercises that they made was a Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana) song in which they had to fill the gaps with conditional tense verbs. It was a very successful exercise so I decided to do it myself and implement a Nirvana song at the end of my session, as I was going to explain them that grunge was a musical subgenre that emerged in Seattle during the mid-1980s. So I thought that it would be a great opportunity to play a Nirvana song, The Man who Sold the World.

As expected, the song was a very successful activity. To the point that they started suggesting me a lot of songs for other sessions. At the end, I had to tell them that I would like work with all these songs, but that this was the English class, not the Music one.