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! 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...