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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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…

• 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.
  

The first recipe I ever made (at least, that’s what I remember) was the cheese soufflé that graces the front of my still-favourite cookbook, M.F.K. Fisher’s The Cooking of Provincial France. It’s hard to find these days, but here’s a pretty picture of the cover. Don’t you just want to make the soufflé now? Although a soufflé seems like a stupid choice for a first-time teenage cook, it came out very nicely.

M.F.K. Fisher was a famous American food writer, but for this book, she had a consultant who is even more famous and who may now finally become famous here as well: the inimitable Julia Child. Living in the USA in the seventies, my foodie parents couldn’t help being impressed by her, which is why I am planning to take them to see this:

It’s not just about Julia Child (although Meryl Streep as Julia and Stanley Tucci as her husband apparently steal the show), but also about a blogger called Julie Powell who, in 2003, started the Julie/Julia project in which she set out to cook all the 500+ recipes from Julia Child’s magisterial “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” volume. I won’t claim I recognized the blog’s greatness back then, but I did read a few entries. There was probably too much butter to keep me from reading on.

But it’s nice to know that pleasurable things like cooking and blogging can make people famous.

As a tie-in to the film, there’s a nice article by one of my favourite non-fiction writers, Michael Pollan, in the NYTimes, entitled “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”. And now I’ll have to get off my couch and make some food from scratch to feel better. Some haricots verts, anyone?

I recently enjoyed reading Neil Gaiman’s novel for older children, The Graveyard Book, which tells the story of Nobody Owens, who is raised by ghosts after his family have been slaughtered by a very mysterious assassin. Yes, it’s a children’s book, but these days, they’re sold as All Age books, aren’t they – and this one even comes in a different cover for adults. Neil Gaiman writes so very beautifully and manages to combine the horrific and the graceful so well that I think this book deserves a wide audience.

He also has a lovely voice, and on his website you can actually listen to him read every single chapter of the book. Frankly, I don’t think anyone will be able to sit still long enough to do that on a computer, but it’s worth having a look at.

Edit: I meant to say more about Neil Gaiman’s voice, which I first heard on a Guardian Books podcast where he was introducing Susannah Clarke and her short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu. In my very humble opinion, the sort of rich and slightly rumbling baritone he is blessed with sets off to perfection British English with its clipped consonants and overtone-rich vowels. Yum.

Professor  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who is an academic celebrity, if there is such a thing) was recently arrested when his front door wouldn’t open and he used the back door. The story really boggles the mind – or rather, to black people in America, it doesn’t.

Lawyer’s statement about the case

Interview with Gates (though it has to be said that both these links are from Root magazine, of which Gates is the editor-in-chief)

The police has another story, of course.

The Guardian sees the silver lining:

Gates at least has one consolation prize: a new television project has landed in his lap. He said he intends to make a documentary about the treatment of black people by the criminal justice system, with his story as the focus.