It’s been an education. It still is.

This is my answer to a challenge started by a German teacher’s blog, so I guess it will probably not qualify at all, being written in English. But hey, it’s a teachers’ challenge and some of my online homies are participating, so how can I resist?

Great advertising

Sometimes it is just too easy to forget the obvious – when I told my class to send me links to funny commercials, I omitted to mention that they should, of course, be in English. So far, I’ve only received one English one – actually, it was a Danish commercial advertising English courses – but due to profanity I couldn’t link to it from a teacher blog.

So, to give you an idea of what I’m looking for, here’s a wonderful Australian beer commercial that Der Englisch Blog featured sometime earlier this year.

Guinness went on to spoof the original commercial:

So what would you like to dip into the water?

What’s going on in the House of Lords these days?

Let me begin by admitting that I usually don’t think very much about what the House of Lords might be doing. I could probably come up with a few facts about them, such as that

• the peers (known as Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, which sounds both Biblical and Early Modern to me) no longer have a hereditary right to their seat, but are voted into office
• as of this year, the HoL no longer serves as the court of last resort in Britain.
• they also have a right to veto, or delay, legislation for twelve months.

And so on. To cut it short, the House of Lords  is a leftover from medieval and early modern times that has little real power left.

Why a post on such a quaint institution then? Well, there’s this blog called A Don’s Life by Cambridge professor Mary Beard, and today’s post was about a HoL debate about the lack of foreign language skills in Britain. Mary Beard’s post is a neat summary of the debate and very entertaining in its own right, but I decided to follow her link to the original debate and that kind of made me wish I could sit in the House of Lords.

Listening practice

Learning to speak a language certainly isn’t easy, but learning to listen to it certainly isn’t easy, either. Spoken words just don’t behave in as orderly a fashion as written ones, sometimes running together; real life speakers don’t finish their sentences or use words that aren’t on any of your vocabulary lists; and of course, every language has many different spoken varieties. This is particularly true for English, which not only has countless native varieties but is also used by many people as a bridge between speakers of other native languages.

The best thing you can do is to listen to English in as many varieties as much as possible in order to get your ear and brain used to the experience. Fortunately, much of this practice is a great deal of fun, and also largely free, even if there aren’t native speakers around. Some ideas:

• watch films in English with English subtitles. German subtitles won’t help you understand the English any better, but English subtitles will subtly help your brain to process what it’s hearing. Watching a film this way is really listening practice – in real life, you’d usually see the person you’re talking to, right?
• The same thing goes for funny little videos. Yes, there’s lots of rubbish on Youtube, but there’s also some really good stuff. And it’s even better if it makes you laugh, because enjoyment makes you learn more easily.  Listening to many variations of “Do you know who I am?” is good for your English. Really.
• Finally, there are hundreds of wonderful podcasts out there. If I had to recommend just one for learners, I’d go for the BBC’s Six Minute English. Recorded in various accents, it is a weekly podcast about various topics with a focus on language learning. During the podcasts, the presenters draw your attention to some vocabulary items, idioms and grammatical difficulties; the website also provides additional material. It’s well worth the six minutes!

I’ve written more about podcasts here, here, and here. And I listen to this podcast every day (well, almost) and this one every week. It’s a good justification for expensive mobile listening devices – Christmas is coming up!

Feminists don’t have a sense of humour

Agree or disagree? Whatever you think, watch this video, it’s smart, funny and very accomplished:

Some word explanations (thanks, LDOCE)

• vicious: violent and uncruel; unkind
• funny bone:  the soft part of your elbow that particularly hurts when you hit it
• degradation: an experience or situation that makes you feel ashamed and angry
• rampant: very fast-growing and difficult to control
• objectification: treating a person or idea as a physical object
• lighten up: used to tell someone not to be so serious about something

Dance break!

When classes collide, we’re all going to die!!!

The British class system is very easy to make fun of, but here are two great videos from the Catherine Tate show that I really like.

The first example is from the Aga Saga Woman series, in which Catherine Tate appears as an over-the-top aspiring upper middle class lady who is painfully  and hilariously anxious about the smallest things in life. The worst thing that can happen to her is to have a lowly mechanic or, horror of horrors, an agency nanny from the North come to her house.

Another incarnation of Catherine Tate – perhaps her most famous one – is Lauren Cooper, the chavvish teenager with a working-class background, a attitude and the standard phrase: “Am I bovvered?”

Browse Youtube for more Catherine Tate fun!

Robert Harris: Lustrum

One of my top book recommendations in recent years has been Imperium, Robert Harris’ thriller-like novel on the early career of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Now the second part of the trilogy, Lustrum,  has appeared, and like most second parts of trilogies, is darker and more depressing than the first one.

It’s 63 BC and Cicero is on the eve of his consulship, when a particularly gruesome murder is brought to his attention that turns out to foreshadow even worse things to come. His term as a consul is troubled by the Catiline conspiracy, which he manages to uncover and put down at the last moment, but at a terrible personal and political cost. The execution of the conspirators will haunt him for years to come, while at the same time the vulture-like Caesar, together with powerful Pompey and rich Crassus, is preparing to disembowel the republic…

As expected, Harris turns the well-known story into a ripping yarn, and the historical protagonists such as grim and grimy Cato, lascivious Clodia and the truly blood-curdling Caesar are very memorable. I also really liked how Harris constructs a plausible motivation for Cicero’s descent into corruption and self-aggrandizement. However, this book wasn’t quite as much a page-turner as the first one, but I don’t think the blame can really be laid at Harris’ feet: at this point in history, I found it very hard to care for the fate of the Roman republic, which comes across as a thoroughly corrupt system designed merely to make a ruling elite rich and  stripped of all that had initially been sensible about it. I mean, I am all in favour of republics and so on, but this one just seemed to have run its course.

As everyone knows, much worse is yet to come and Cicero is going to meet a sticky end. Which is why I am very much looking forward to book three!

Lev Grossman: The Magicians

If you have ever experienced the delicious dive into enchanting magical book worlds and still find yourself secretly or not so secretly longing for more, but at the same time feel a little embarrassed about the blatant escapism that marks so much fantasy writing, here’s a wonderful new novel that lets you eat your magical cake – and have it!

Quentin Coldwater is among the brightest of the brightest high school students in New York, but neither academic success nor the chances offered to him at prestigious colleges have yet managed to make him happy. He’s constantly feeling left out, ignored, spurned by potential love interests – in short, a typical unhappy teenager, whose one consolation are his daydreams that take him into the magical world of Fillory from a series of children’s books*. One day, on his way to an interview for Princeton, mysterious circumstances transport him to a secret magical college where he has to sit a highly entertaining and fantastical entrance exam and is eventually admitted.

This sounds familiar, of course. Actually, the students who attend Brakebills College appear to have all read the Harry Potter books and occasionally make jokes about broomsticks, but the magic practised at Brakebills is both more luminous and more difficult than what J.K. Rowling came up with. This is no stale re-run of a familiar plot: Grossman creates a world that is entirely his own and that anyone in their right mind will immediately fall in love with. This is no children’s book: there’s sex, drugs and a lot of drinking, but most of all there is a sense of threat and mystery that’s more reminiscent of books like The Secret History.

For magic is a dangerous thing, and it may lead you to places that are fare more threatening than their reputation may have led you to believe. When in the last third of the book, Quentin and his friends enter a new magical world, the story, despite all the monsters and spectacular fights and the nods to Narnia, is still a novel about reading, about growing up and about the disenchantment with the world that comes with adulthood.

This is truly an excellent read: fast-paced, funny, wonderfully imagined, cleverly tongue-in-cheek and also rather scary. Read it before everyone else does!

Listen to an NPR story about the book and read an excerpt – it’s from the wonderful exam scene!

Author’s website

*Am I right to assume that before the films came out, people here in Germany didn’t really know about Narnia, the beginner’s drug in fantastical literature? I read it as a child, and it was one of the first English books I read, but I’ve always had the impression that the books weren’t too popular here.

Happiness is a pencil, pots and pans and a hair full of head

Started off the new year 11 course with this song:

Lyrics can be found here. The rather idiotic (but kind of fun) exercise I came up with was having the students slot the things that make the singer happy into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This pyramid is reprinted (in a slightly different and, frankly, less understandable form) in our new book, Green Line 11/12. So where do you think the pencil full of lead goes?

Homework: Write a similar song about things that make you happy. If you don’t want to write about yourself, write from the point of view of a cat, an investment banker, a dairy farmer, Mrs Merkel, a little girl, whatever you like…

Summer reading, in brief

• Nicholas Drayson, A Guide to the Birds of East Africa. Reserved and old-fashioned Mr Malik is a man of passion – even if his friends at the Asadi Club in Nairobi (a place of gentlemanly leisure where elaborate bets about say, the frequency of Danish farts are discussed with utmost colonial decorum) have never noticed. He has long harboured a secret love for Mrs Rose Mbikwa, the Tuesday-morning bird walk leader, and when a former schoolmate turns up and becomes a rival for Rose’s hand, things start to get very interesting. This is a very charming and funny and moving book, with a quietly heroic hero, a tongue-in-cheek narrator and plenty of African action. Highly recommended.
  Will young advanced learners like it? I think so, if they enjoy gentle comedy.
• Julie Powell, Julie & Julia. It’s a bit lame to read the book just before the film comes out, but it was enjoyable enough, particularly the really rather sexy food parts.
  Will young advanced learners like it? Possibly, but they would  have to be into food.
• Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry. I’ve made another attempt to work up some compassion for the Irish Cause, but even though this is a very finely written novel with the punchiest dialogue, outrageously casual violence, a truly horrifying Irish childhood, mesmerizing characters possessed of a mind-boggling sex drive, I still fail to be particularly interested. That’s probably because Doyle himself has very little time for romanticizing Irish history. This, of course, is a good thing.
  Will young advanced learners like it? The extremely good writing, the fun, sex and violence certainly make it a good candidate, but you have to be able to tolerate a lot of history that you (or at least, I) don’t know a thing about.
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. John Ames, preacher in a small Iowa town, is dying and feels the need to account for his life to his six-year-old son. Written in ethereally beautiful prose, it tells of several generations of Ames fathers and sons, reaching all the way back to the time before the Civil War. It’s a meditation on faith, the justification of war, fatherhood, pain and joy. Very beautiful, and I will definitely re-read it soon.
  Will young advanced learners like it? I would suggesting waiting for a few more years before reading this book. But make sure you get round to it eventually, it’s really worth it.
• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies. I like seafaring books and books about India, so this one was bound to be a hit. The Ibis, a former slave ship, is about to depart from Calcutta with a cargo of migrant workers going to Mauritius, as well as several characters who are there for wildly divergent reasons. Fantastically colourful and studded with the oddest languages from Anglo-Indian to pidgin, it’s a rolicking good read that I really didn’t want to end (Ghosh has promised two more instalments, though!). If it doesn’t make the top tier of recent novels, it’s because some of the characters are a little too saintly to be believed. Nevertheless, an extremely enjoyable book!
  Will young advanced learners like it? The weird languages are a bit hard to understand, but otherwise this is a great adventure story.