The English language

Some peculiarities of the English language are on occasion noted by its speakers, as is the case with the use of because here, or the prevalence of the midwestern accent, disputed pronunciations of New Nork placenames and piles of misused words and expressions.

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?

Cloze test

Some of you were commenting on the challenging nature of task 3 in the reading exam paper so I'm posting a link to cloze exercises you can access here and some others at the eoisantander site.

Why do we like corruption?

Since our current topic deals with crime, you may want to practice some of the vocabulary we've gone over by completing this cloze on the Spanish Royals, the key to which can be found here, or read this somewhat old article from The Economist which tries to figure out the role of our Roman Catholic culture as an undelying explanation for our acceptance and endorsing of corruption. Seeing as our media is highly unreliable you might want to learn about what our government is up to by accessing more impartial reports such as this one by Reuters on why Spain is no country for judges or this one by The Guardian on how in Spain francoist torturers get away with murder and their successors refuse to pursue human rights!

Music

To start off, we'll go over some vocabulary pertaining to realm of music. If you're a musician yourself, you might be familiar with most of these terms. Although it's hard to pick out a single musician or style to deal with, I've chosen this interview with Stanley Crouch, who, in this interview with Tom Ashbrook, talks about his book on Charlie Parker. It is indeed hard to cater for all tastes, so for those of you who might be more into earlier twentieth century music, here's a link to a text on the Twelve-tone Technique (AKA twelve-tone serialism or dodecaphony) by Gary Bachlund.

On the other hand, describing music is by no means far from challenging. This dictionary includes terms we can use to describe sound and the effect a piece has on listeners, and here's a pianist using them to decribe piano pieces (scroll down), what do you make of her descriptions? Might it be also helpful to make use of images to convey a piece? Do you find these analogies satisfactory? Should we forget about it and just acknowledge that writing about music is like dancing about architecture?

Living Books

Had you ever heard of living books before? It is an actual type of library where the books are people, you can have a look at the project and learn more here.