Primer l'amor, després la tècnica (first love, then technique) 🏛️🌿
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salve Reader! Do you know the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí? He is the genius behind the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. He believed that love came before any technical considerations, and looking at his ground-breaking architecture, I think we can all agree that his approach worked. This love-first approach is key to language learning. If there is no interest in reading a text to enjoy a story, it is very difficult to find the motivation to look at the grammar holding it together. The challenge I have set my A-Level students this week is a great example of this. Absolutely everyone is fascinated by the phenomenon that is Nolan's Odyssey, whether they like it or not. So this week we are going to dare to enter Polyphemus's cave to study temporal markers in texts. Tomorrow we have our monthly masterclass, and we will be using Latin to craft fun stories and consolidate knowledge of discourse markers, which are unbelievably often left out of teaching, even though they are the key to understanding the flow of a text. If you have been on the fence about joining my A-Level Latin Course, this is your call to use the summer to 'live Latin, love Latin'! Sign up now, and you can join tomorrow's masterclass. Just reply to this email, and I will help you decide if this is the right space for you. in proximum! 🏛️🌿
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salve Reader! I hope you open this email while enjoying a well-deserved break over the summer. I am writing from my hometown myself, just hours before I head off to France, then back to the northern coast of Catalonia for my yearly holiday. Yes, there will be diving and ancient ruins, so here is a heads-up that I may take a bit longer to reply to emails. This has been quite the week for me. One of the highlights was observing an almost total eclipse with my children and experimenting with the...
salve Reader! If you have been following me for a while, I am sure you have noticed that I discourage my students from learning vocabulary through apps like Quizlet. I promote keeping a written record, reading extensively and using the words in new contexts. Still, I am aware that some students just love the app format. So, after much insistence from students on having a vocabulary list or suggesting an app that works, I have opted for a middle path: an app that has words unlikely to not be...
salve Reader, I am sure you have noticed I am not a native speaker of English. In fact, English was not even my second language until my twenties! I grew up and studied in Spanish and Catalan, my A-Level MFL was French, and I only really started developing my English after I received a scholarship to spend a summer in Ireland aged 21, where I kept talking to people in German because my English was still, ehem, a bit lacking. Young 20-year-old me enjoying the Irish summer Moving to England was...