Social Media Manual for Online Educators

As social media creeps into every facet of our lives, many teachers and educators are interested in incorporating these new technologies into their lessons. In order to help

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Inglés para pervertidos (English for Perverts)

I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes fantasize about writing something much more interesting than a bunch of dry books about grammar. Writing Inglés para Principiantes

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Conversation with my trilingual girlfriend

Things that happen when you’ve been living abroad way too long… Girlfriend: Ahora que estamos de vacaciones, voy a aprovechar para hablarte en inglés. Me: Okay. Let’s do

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Conversation in the language school #3: Who’s the Governator of Texas?

A conversation from the language school in Madrid, where I work… Student 1: Who was the best governator of Texas? Me: Well, um… Governator is a term that’s

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Cómo ligar en inglés – Frases para ligar que sí funcionan

¿Cómo ligar en inglés? Ojalá supiera… Pero cuidado. Que hay muchos malos consejos sobre el ligoteo por ahí. A saber… Una importante empresa internacional de enseñanza de idiomas

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False Anglicisms in Spanish: friki, footing, puenting, feeling and more

Spanish people use a lot of false anglicisms. And today we’re going to talk about a few of the more prominent ones. The other day I wrote an

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Is spelling fascist?

Readers, I’m sick of this. This fascist spelling, propagated by (white, male, middle-class) dictionary editors. It’s bad enough that our public schools are teaching people “proper” English and

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Linguistics Pro Tip #1: How to deal with extreme prescriptivists

If you spend long enough in a liberal arts environment or anywhere language is studied, you’ll certainly run into a few extreme prescriptivists. The basic prescriptivist mindset runs

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Conversation in the language school #2

I occasionally used to have these fun conversations back when I worked in a big language school in Madrid. Me: The Grand Canyon is really the only thing

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The most ambiguous sentence in the Spanish language

“A ver si tomamos algo” is perhaps the most ambiguous sentence in the Spanish language. Roughly translated as “Maybe we could have a drink together some day,” it

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