A few French people are a little ticked off after they found out the French song to be performed at the Eurovision song contest has only two lines in French. It seems the country isn’t too keen on being represented in English.

And who can blame them? I’d want my country to sing in it’s national language as well. You have 100 million viewers and a chance to display your language and culture…so why not use it?

Plus, French is widely touted as the language of love, so wouldn’t a French song sound better anyway?

Last but not least, Serbia’s Marija Serifovic won last year singing the ballad “Molitva” in her native language. Take a hint French song selecting people…

It’s no secret that over the last 6 months or so my Spanish learning efforts have been less than impressive. Well did I get punished for that over the weekend!

It’d been ages since I met up with my Spanish friends from down south so I decided to go and pay them a visit. We had dinner and all went out for a night on the town. Good times were had but I barely understood anything.

Now I’m pretty good with the Spanish now and can hold my own in most conversations…but I did not perform well that night. It seemed I got thrown into a whirlpool of Spanish slang and dirty jokes that had my brain aching.

The thing about learning a language is you can usually understand the overall theme but can often get lost on the subtleties. Well jokes and humour are full of subtleties…which makes it very hard for us poor non-native speakers.

The moral of the story is I’m going to have to spend more time with my friends if I really want to improve my Spanish further. So I’m committing to seeing them a lot more now!

But I will be taking aspirin when I do it…

I saw on digg there was an article where a city board decided it was ok that a shop had a sign stating:

“This is America: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH’”

Now without going into how stupid this is or reopening the whole debate on making English the national language of the US, I want to leave people with a thought.

What happens when the almighty ‘English speaking Americans’ come to visit Europe? Now they have to learn how to order from McDonalds in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Slovenian, …

I know thinking is hard, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try it…

Mainly because I’m not doing it, but also because learning new things is difficult and I like to whine!

Too many times have I said I’ll start posting regularly again and it just hasn’t happened. So I won’t promise anything until you see some results. Between you and me, I did come back to post more but every time I came back to hundreds of spam comments to moderate it was a little hard.

Because I had to click on every “teen webcam sex” link just to make sure it wasn’t a real comment. Turns out, none were, but better safe than sorry!

My dedication to learning Spanish has waned a bit over the last 7 months. I started a business that drained time, and I got an American girlfriend that stopped me needing to meet Spanish girls in bars. With my main motivation gone, what was I to do?

But the urge is creeping up on me again. I have 2 Spanish flatmates, and 2 other American flatmates that are studying Spanish far too much. This makes me feel inadequate and stirs desires of learning inside me.

Or I’m just hungry…

Since I don’t want you to go away empty handed, here’s a link to help those more motivated than me. Learn Spanish by podcast with the wonderful Ben and Marina.

That is all, class dismissed.

One of my rules for learning Spanish is to always live with Spanish speakers. This has been a good rule and resulted in a lot of the improvement. While I’ve stumbled off the optimum language learning path by having an English speaking girlfriend, things are about to get much worse.

Currently I live with 2 Polish girls and 1 Italian guy. It’s not too bad as they all speak Spanish to various extents and I am actually practicing again. The only downside is when my girlfriend is around the conversation turns to English. Her loss and as long as it doesn’t stop my learning then I don’t mind.

The problem with our current flat is the two girls are living in the lounge, the lounge that is the only way to get to the kitchen as well. So despite us all being lovely people, it’s a pain in the ass to live that way.

So I just found a new flat today but it’s run by TtMadrid, a TEFL school that I help out (btw, excellent TEFL course in Spain). So we’ll have new bright eyed and bushy tailed TEFL students each month…who won’t speak Spanish.

Am I ever going to master this language? Will I ever speak Spanish again? Will Batman and Robin rescue the cat from the tree? Stay tuned to find out!

I’ve recently became involved in a project for language teachers in Spain. It’s a website that helps teachers find English teaching work in Spain, with an initial focus on Madrid. The websites been around for a while but I’m helping to promote it and make it more popular.

Our vision is to create an easy-to-use system for academies and language learners to find teachers. Eventually it’ll have loads of new features and we hope language teachers and academies from around the world will start using it.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. We’re about to start promoting so fingers crossed!

I came across an article today called “why we don’t like English classes.” Apart from initially amusing me, I found I agreed with a lot of the points in the article. I like to think I’m one of the teachers that are ‘different’, so I thought I’d share a little of my philosophy.

Ok, so as the previous post recommends, look for a partner that you can speak with in the target language. If that’s not an option, and you can’t move to the target country, you need to recreate these conditions in your own study.

To learn a language, you must speak it. That’s the bottom line. Practice makes perfect, yada yada yada. You also have to listen to it, read it, and write it normally. The trick is to make your study as interesting as possible. It seems obvious but so many teachers and students seem to think language study is boring and teach/learn it that way. It’s simply not the right point of view to learn anything and the results show.

So, watch your goals. Language learning takes time, it’s that simple. Don’t aim to study every day for hours on end, you aren’t in medical school. What you could try is doing 10 minutes of study a day, but by study I mean HAVE FUN! My ’study’ approach for Spanish is to have coffee with my friends and watch the ‘Friends’ series on DVD along with other movies. It’s not hard, it’s not difficult, it’s fun and I enjoy it. Every now and then I wonder about a grammar point so I go and look it up. No stress, no worries.

The moral of the story: if it’s fun, you’re learning. If it’s not, you’re in for some pain. But some people like that…

And if you have a teacher that just likes to put grammar activity after grammar activity in front of you, you might want to suggest to them you’d like a little conversation. Not made up conversation about some artificial topic like global warming. Start a real conversation about your weekend and see where it goes. I believe a good teacher can lead even the lowest level student in conversation for an hour…can yours?

The hands down best way I’ve learnt Spanish has been though my super secret new technique. Curious? You bet!

Now the best way for my technique to work is to be without a current partner. If you have a partner, this technique may cause you more problems than you’d like. Oops, did I give the secret away…I thought I could get some money for this!

After learning Spanish for about 2 years now, the best improvement I had was when I started dating in Spain. It especially helps to date people that don’t speak your language, then you’re away laughing.

So go out, start talking to people, make friends, make more than friends, and learn a language the fun way!

Ahh the start of 2007, when I used to actually post to this blog. Well, long story short…very short: I was busy and distracted. I’ll be trying to get back into this blog a lot more and at least write a wonderful post for you all every week.

Will I actually do it? Will Batman save the day? Will George Bush be mocked for saying something stupid?

I think the answer to all three is a resounding ‘YES’!

So welcome back, I missed you. And I’m not just saying that.

70% de todas las paginas de web son en inglés. Pero solo 44% de usuarios son inglés nativos. ¿Por qué? ¿Cómo son las personas que no hablan esta lengua especial suponer usarlo?

If you don’t speak Spanish, or speak Spanish and still can’t understand my writing, that’s how the Internet feels for non-English speakers. The language gap is increasing the digital divide and more people are being swallowed by it. What good is Internet in developing countries if people can’t speak the language to use it?

I like to hope that as the Internet expands we will see more and more pages written in different languages. I also find it exciting as non-English speaking countries get to benefit from the birth of the Internet all over again by remaking the classic websites in their own languages. If your country doesn’t have an Amazon, or an eBay, you should be out there creating it.

I know the guy that brought the eBay like website of TradeMe.co.nz to New Zealand walked away with about $30 million. If you think the number of speakers of your language is too small to get you the big money, think again. New Zealand has a population of only 4 million. Now that’s something to think about, isn’t it?