30/6/2013 0 Comments Term 2 End of term PhotosThis term our students have really given their best! We specially had many people who were really determined to learn as much as possible in order to get ready for their experience overseas.
We said goodbye to many, some will come back after their holiday and some others, instead, have decided to make a life change and will live in another country for a while. I love seeing the excitement of the days before the departure and the mix of emotions that everyone feels when is about to face a new challenge. I try to encourage my students explaining that, of course, there will be difficult moments where they will probably feel completely lost :-) but the good moments, will certainly be more and the satisfaction of coping with all different things in another language, will be the best reward. My tip for all of you who is about to leave for the trip of your life is: " Don't worry, relax, speak as much as possible and have fun!" :-)
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28/3/2013 0 Comments What a successful term!This was indeed a great term! We had full classes and most of students haven't missed a lesson! That's commitment!!
From this term we have started delivering certificates of completion at the end of each term and I must say that they were all very deserved!Congratulations to all of you! Here a few pics for all different courses. WOW, Spanish for Travellers was a great success this month. We were fully booked and everyone was very committed and determined to learn as much as possible! Our teacher Lorena said :“The students were so much fun that I didn't even feel I was working” "Teaching is a very rewarding job, especially when you see that students are enjoying themselves and learning a lot at the same time" So, a big congratulations to all students for completing the course and thank you very much to Lorena who did a great job, not only delivering the lessons to such a high standard, but also providing yummy home-made sweets for Tea Break! Muchas gracias y hasta pronto! All very engaged I must say! Mmmm... ¿cómo se dice en español? Tea break! Yum! 3/12/2012 0 Comments Dias de veranoFinally summer has arrived and we would like to take the opportunity to discover and post different Spanish songs, movies, poems and more about this beautiful season. The first that we want to post is "Dias de Verano" by Amaral. Amaral is an award-winning music group from Zaragoza, Spain who have sold more than four million albums worldwide. The band consists of Eva Amaral (vocalist) and Juan Aguirre (guitarist), who write their songs together. Here you find the video and the lyrics of this nice song. Remember that listening to songs is a great way to learn the language! Chao!Jessica DIAS DE VERANO
No quedan dias de verano para pedirte perdón Para borrar del pasado el daño que te hice yo Sin besos de despedida y sin palabras bonitas Porque te miro a los ojos y no me sale la voz Si pienso en ti siento que esta vida no es justa Si pienso en ti y en la luz de esa mirada tuya No me quedan dias de verano el viento se las llevó Un cielo de nubes negras cubria el ultimo adiós Fue sentir de repente tu ausencia como un eclipse de sol Por qué no vas a mi vera? Si pienso en ti siento que esta vida no es justa Si pienso en ti y en la luz de esa mirada tuya Esa mirada tuya Es de esos dias de verano Vivo en el reino de soledad Nunca vas a saber como me siento Nadie va a adivinar como te recuerdo Si pienso en ti y siento que esta vida no es justa Si pienso en ti Esa mirada tuya Esa mirada tuya No me quedan dias de verano No me quedan dias de verano No me quedan dias de verano No me quedan dias de verano Article found on " The New York Times"
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE Published: March 17, 2012 SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task. The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving. Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page. The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not. Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset. Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint? 4/12/2010 0 Comments Christmas in Spain - Navidad
Christmas time is the best opportunity to enjoy of food and drink, specially prepared to celebrate the season.
The main dish could be accompanying by a selection of soups, seafood, pates and serrano hams. Spain has to offer the most common dishes around the world:
About dessert we can offer trifle or fruit, however mostly Spanish Christmas sweets are prepared:
Christmas is one of the hopefully celebrations of the year, especially for kids and celebrated even by many non-Christians. The holiday is observed generally December 25th to celebrate the Jesus's birth, the central figure of Christianity. We have lot of reasons to consider traditions like deeply religious throughout Latinamerica and Spain. In the most countries of Spanish culture, Navidad (Christmas) lasts around 30 days begins December 8th with Immaculate Conception's feast and runs through January 6 with Three Kings Day, when children find gifts left by the Reyes Magos (Wise Men). A tradition similar to the role of Papa Noel (Santa Claus), children write them letters requesting special gifts. The Christmas Eve in Spain, known as Nochebuena or the Good Night, has an atmosphere really festive and the tiny oil lamps are lits in every house. According to the history, the rooster was the first to announce the Christ's birth, is that the reason for people celebrated a mass at midnight, known in Spain and Latinamerica as "La Misa del Gallo" or "Rooster Mass". Once meal and mass over, people return to home to realize the most hopefully tradition activity, where children receive gifts in named of "The Wise Men" 4/12/2010 0 Comments Spanish language historyThe Spanish language originated in the Southwest region of Europe known as the Iberian Peninsula. Sometime before the end of the 6th century BC, the region's first inhabitants, the Iberians, began to mingle with the Celts, a nomadic people from central Europe. The two groups formed a people called the Celtiberians, speaking a form of Celtic.
Under Roman rule, in 19 BC, the region became known as Hispania, and its inhabitants learned Latin from Roman traders, settlers, administrators, and soldiers. When the classical Latin of the educated Roman classes mixed with the pre-Roman languages of the Iberians, Celts, and Carthaginians, a language called Vulgar Latin appeared. It followed the basic models of Latin but borrowed and added words from the other languages. Even after the Visigoths, Germanic tribes of Eastern Europe, invaded Hispania in the AD 400s, Latin remained the official language of government and culture until about AD 719, when Arabic-speaking Islamic groups from Northern Africa called Moors completed their conquest of the region. Arabic and a related dialect called Mozarabic came to be widely spoken in Islamic Spain except in a few remote Christian kingdoms in the North such as Asturias, where Vulgar Latin survived. During the succeeding centuries, the Christian kingdoms gradually reconquered Moorish Spain, retaking the country linguistically as well as politically, militarily, and culturally. As the Christians moved South, their Vulgar Latin dialects became dominant. In particular, Castilian, a dialect that originated on the Northern Central plains, was carried into Southern and Eastern regions. Castilian & andalusianThe resulting language was a hybrid because Castilian borrowed many words from Mozarabic, and modern Spanish has an estimated 4,000 words with Arabic roots. The creation of a standardized Spanish language based on the Castilian dialect began in the 1200s with King Alfonso X, who was called the Learned–King of Castile and Leon. He and his court of scholars adopted the city of Toledo, a cultural center in the central highlands, as the base of their activities. There, scholars wrote original works in Castilian and translated histories, chronicles, and scientific, legal, and literary works from other languages (principally Latin, Greek, and Arabic). Indeed, this historic effort of translation was a major vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge throughout ancient Western Europe. Alfonso X also adopted Castilian for administrative work and all official documents and decrees. The Castilian dialect of Spanish gained wider acceptance during the reign of the Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón, who completed the reconquest of Spain in 1492 by pushing the Moors from their last stronghold in the southern city of Granada. Isabella and Ferdinand made Castilian the official dialect in their kingdom. In the same year the Moors were defeated, an important book appeared: Antonio de Nebrija's Arte de la lengua castellana (The Art of the Castilian Language). It was the first book to study and attempt to define the grammar of a European language. The Castilian dialect of Toledo became the written and educational standard in Spain, even though several spoken dialects remained. The most noteworthy was Andalusian, a dialect spoken in the southern city of Seville in the Andalucía region. 4/12/2010 0 Comments First Post!
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