When I first moved to Spain, I found that many Spanish words are similar to high-register Latin-root words in English. It was easy to start cruising along, thinking this language learning wasn’t so bad after all, when suddenly I’d be brought up short by something completely unexpected.
Once I’d learned to drop my aitches – easy enough for an Essex gir! – I could cope with hotel and hostal, but staying in a pensión was somewhat less intuitive.
Continue reading “something to celebrate”
As a follow up to the pictures of pigs post, another story from the BBC:
BBC News photographer Jeff Overs was stopped and questioned for taking photographs in Westminster.
(I took the photo to the right on a trip to London earlier this year. Nobody tried to stop me, although, with hindsight, my choice of perspective of the monument seems far more suspect than the usual tourist might choose.)
Continue reading “Westminster sunset”
There was an interesting article on the BBC yesterday, about “information visualisation”, written by Davd McCandless, the guy behind the Information is Beautiful website.
The article discusses how information can often be shown more easily by pictures than by text, and includes a number of different types of graphic to demonstrate the point.
Continue reading “picture a fact”
Every school pupil in England is to be taught that domestic violence against women and girls is unacceptable, as part of a new government strategy.
Which is all very well – and I’m glad they got that comma right – but what about domestic violence against men and boys? And what about violence in general?
Continue reading ““back to common sense””
Translating an article on Brazilian beaches, I’ve just learned a new word in Spanish:
carioca.
1. adj. Natural de Río de Janeiro. U. t. c. s.
2. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a esta ciudad del Brasil o a su provincia.
(definition from the Diccionario de la Lengua Española.)
I suppose it’s my lousy accent than makes me connect it to karaoke. It does mean, though, that I should find it relatively easy to remember carioca by picturing the Rio carnival procession all singing karaoke as they dance the samba.
Actually, that’s such a dreadful image that I hope I don’t have much call to talk about the people and activities of Rio in Spanish.
don't confuse the narrator 