Advice to improve your English. (Week 15)

Writing blogs in English every week can help your brain to start working quicker when it comes to develop a theme in your second language. It's good to have a different topics to discuss every week. This way, students get to look for vocabulary of different fields. 

Nevertheless, it would be good to have more requirements and restrictions when it comes to develop the theme of the week. Restrictions and requirements such as, to make a few researchers and include them in a bibliography, number of words, to watch a few videos to comment on them... Different ways when it comes to write about a topic. 

_____________________________________________________________________________

To improve my English I've been doing exercises about multiple choice and open cloze due to the English grammar.

Color meaning. (Week 14)

Morning Bloggers, are you keeping up with all the food this Christmas? 😂
I was pretty busy these previous days but I don't forget you!
Today I'm going to discuss the following topic: Color meaning and Symbolism. To give my opinion I'm going to continuously reference the next article from Rebecca Gross. She entitles this article as "Color Meaning and Symbolism: How to use the Power of Color in your Branding" and here I leave you the content https://www.canva.com/learn/color-meanings-symbolism/.

Is it true that any color conveys a meaning? In my opinion colors can stand for certain feelings, institutions, countries, sensations... anything that I can think of. When you think about a particular color, there must be an idea that come straight to your mind.
Let's think about the color red for example. What have you thought of in the first place? The first idea that has come to my mind is Christmas. Obviously, the different associations to colors depend on other factors such as one's culture or ideology. Therefore, if you ask a Jewish person on Christmas the same question about the color red, he or she probably is going to come up with other associations.

Additionally, not always a color has positive connotations. Rebecca Gross mentions in her article that the color red, not only has positive connotations but also negative ones. Red can be the color of fire, blood or danger. However, it can be also the color of love and passion. Sometimes these connotations are attached to a particular color just because that certain material or fluid in reality has the same tone of color, as happens with blood. But, what about abstract concepts? Abstract notions are not represented in reality with a physical shape. Thus, we cannot visualize the color of them. Nevertheless, through history, people have always been attaching colors to certain abstract ideas due to their relation with other visual concepts in reality. A good example is the concept of love. Love has been always represented by the red color. An explanation for this attribution can be the relation of the heart with the abstract concept of love. You love with your heart and the heart is red. As a result, love must be represented with the color red.

The same happens with the rest of the colors although the number of associations to them can vary. In the article of Rebecca we can see a few examples of colors and their possible "universal" associations. Nonetheless, as I have mentioned before, these associations to a particular color is a question of culture and ideology.



Through the using of colors in a particular picture we can also deduce the emotions and feelings that an author wants to emit. Here I present a well-known painting of Edvard Much which is called "The Scream".

In this picture the author is using strong colors as red, yellow or blue to highlight the intensity of the character's expression. And you, what do you think?
______________________________________________________________________________
To improve my English I've been doing exercises about multiple choice and open cloze due to the English grammar.

Making decisions. (Week 13)

Hello everyone!

Today I'm going to do a short review about not a movie but a TV show called "13 Reasons Why" have you watched it? 

13 Reasons Why is "an american drama-mystery web television series" created by Brian Yorkey. The main protagonists of the TV show are Hannah Baker and Clay Jensen. In the first chapter of the season Hannah Baker is introduced as a character who has recently died. The following chapters are about a series of contributions that have been enough for Hannah to kill herself. Both the audience and rest the characters of the TV show get to know all her reasons to her own death through 14 tapes that she has recorded herself. 

This TV show has gained a great success due to the plot that it develops. The principal location of the plot is the high school, where all these characters spend most of their time. This high school is as one where you can feel an atmosphere of prejudices upon people. There is this division between the popular ones and the nerd ones. Hannah is not categorized in any of these groups, she is depicted as the weirdo of the high school due to she is the new one. 

Hannah's contact with this new atmosphere is not quite successful. She tries to make friends but these friends seems not to be the ones that last long. Therefore, Hannah starts to collect her bad experiences all together which give rise to her fatal inner emotional state. Consequently, as she cannot bear this situation, she puts an end to her life. 

The plot of this TV show can be pretty influencing from a negative point of view. I like how the characters are performing on stage as you can take them seriosly, nevertheless this does not mean I like the plot. Hannah's exaggerion of her feelings is taken to an extreme which is not the solution to her situation. The solution to students who can be bullied both psychologically and physically, they must go to the authority in each case, and let know what is actually happening.

This TV show has shown a negative morality when it comes to give a "solution" to Hannah's life. As a conclusion, I think it is not the solution to bullying and that they should clarify this idea in the following seasons.
______________________________________________________________________________
I'm continuing doing exercises of word formation and rewritings to improve my English grammar constructions.

Have a nice weekend!

The Fashion Show. (Week 12)

Interview 

Jennifer Lawrence interviews Kim Kardashian: This is what we learned: 

1. Jennifer Lawrence got drunk with Kris Jenner.

"I've never seen my mom more drunk in our lives," Kardashian said about Lawrence's recent trip to Jenner's mansion for dinner and drinks. "I was way more drunk than your mom," Lawrence told her. "You take it easy on your mother." Kardashian and her husband, Kanye West, also attended the dinner, where Lawrence apparently asked Kardashian for gas relief medicine (hence the farting question).

2. If Kim was stranded on a desert island with her family, she'd kill Khloe last ... or maybe first.

Lawrence asked who Kardashian would kill last if she were stranded on a desert island with her family. "My kids?" Kardashian said. "Oh, wow, I forgot children ... now I feel guilty," Lawrence joked, before pivoting the question to just include Kardashian's famous siblings. Kardashian said she'd kill Khloe last "because I feel like she might kill me."

"Well then, Khloe would actually be the one you'd have to kill first," Lawrence noted.

3. Kanye West can fall asleep pretty much anywhere.

Lawrence asked about the weirdest thing Kardashian's husband does. "He falls asleep anywhere. He'll introduce me to people I've never met before and we'll be at a restaurant and he'll be, like, snoring at the table," Kardashian said.

Report on the interview 

In the first part of the interview it can be seen how Kardashian admits that she had not seen her mom more drunk in their lives. Nevertheless Lawrence reacts to this admission affirming that she was way more drunk that Kardashian’s mother. Apart from this, Lawrence said to Kardashian to took it easy on her mother.

In the second part of the interview Kardashian was asked who she would kill last on a desert island. To this question Kardashian responded that she would kill her kids with a sarcastic tone. Additionally she said that she had forgotten children and therefore, she felt guilty. Later on, Kardashian changed her mind and she said that would kill Khloe last because she felt like she might kill her. To this reaction, Lawrence noted that Khloe then would actually be the one who Kardashian would have to kill will have first. 

In the third part of the interview, Kardashian was asked about the weirdest thing that her husband did. She mentioned that he felt asleep anywhere and that he would introduce her to people she had never met previously and that they would be at the restaurant where he would be like snoring at the table. 

Here I show you some of my favorite trendy clothes that Kardashian is wearing:

___________________________________________________________________________

As I’ve mentioned in the previous post, this week I’ve been looking for exercises to practice word formation and phrasal verbs in English.

You live and learn. (Week 11)

Hello bloggers! how are you doing? 

The topic of today is “you live and learn”. I’m sure everybody has thought about going abroad and staying there for a couple of years to study. Nevertheless, information about programs that allow you to study abroad seem to be like taboo topics in the educational system. Nobody provides information about the great variety of programs that we have to study abroad, except for the Erasmus scholarship. Luckily, nowadays having internet we can make our own research about all these programs that offer this experience of going abroad to study. 

The decision of going to study to other countries depends on the situation of each one. A student can have the opportunity to study abroad not only in college but also in high school. There are also another programs that offer the activity of going to achieve academic skills abroad during the summer. 

Any program has its own requirements in terms of grades, language, price, locations… therefore, having decided your preferences, I’m sure you can find a program that suits your profile you perfectly. 

Having spent awhile looking for different types of programs of studying abroad, here I provide you the list of ones of the most successful ones: 

To study abroad in high school during both the academic year and the summer: 

— https://www.aspirebyapi.com/summer-study-abroad/ireland/dublin/walton-international-stem-experience/program-information

— https://forum-nexus.com/study-abroad-programs/forum-europe-summer-2018.asp?fnsrc=63

— https://www.aspirebyapi.com/summer-study-abroad/france/paris/french-language-immersion-program/program-information/

To study abroad in college during both the academic year and during the summer:

— https://www.cisabroad.com/?s=summer 

— http://www.fie.org.uk/programs/by-term/summer

— https://teanabroad.org/programs/summer-programs/

I strongly recommend to any student of any professional field to try one of these wonderful experiences. It will be a great positive point for your CV I promise!

________________________________________________________________________

This week I’ve been looking for exercises to practice word formation and phrasal verbs in English. Challenging exercises! 

Reports and proposals. (Week 10)

In this blog I'll present you and an example of a report and a proposal to stand up the different parts of them. Additionally, this will show how they differ from each other.

Here I provide the link where we find a good example of a report of the Brooklyn book festival: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/09/report-on-the-brookyn-book-festival-2009.html. 

Now, I'll copy and analyze the different parts of the report for you to see how it is constructed. 

Introduction: Maybe not every community should have a book festival, but Brooklyn, N.Y., showed how to throw an excellent one Sunday. With more than 150 booksellers, magazines and other bookish folks set up in tents on the plaza in front of Brooklyn Borough Hall, and dozens of free readings and panel discussions, the event was accessible (some people just stumbled on it) and festive (they stayed).

Discussion of where poetry, rock and hip-hop intersect focused:A must-attend panel, moderated by Touré, featured hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and poets Tracie Morris and Matthew Zapruder. Their discussion of where poetry, rock and hip-hop intersect focused on words. Fiasco -- who resisted fans' efforts to get him to say when his album will be released -- explained that before he worked with music and beats, he filled notebooks with words. "I had a plethora of words," he said. "See how many pieces I could collect." Zapruder concurred, saying, "I find words that attract me ... and I set myself this task of making something out of them." But Moore saw words as a mutable part of rock and roll, "slurred language," which could be misheard and mis-sung, unintentionally making songs over.

Future of literature and publishing:Two separate panels wrangled with the question of the future of literature and publishing. In the first, author T Cooper lamented, "I can't help but talk about the business, when I want to talk about the art"; Keith Gessen responded, "I like to talk about publishing. I live in New York, it's fun to talk about publishing." But the business got less attention than the Internet, blogs in particular, which were seen as amateurish and inclined toward posting book reviews next to cat photos (guilty as charged). An audience member -- writer Emily Gould -- asked what the future of literary fiction might be "if there's a consistent refusal to meet the audience where it lives," (i.e., online). Later, Gessen insisted that Gould had not been a plant.

"I do think people read differently online," Granta's editor John Freeman said in the second panel. "The trick now is to somehow make literature seem urgent." The worthwhile discussion was taped by C-Span for later broadcast; moderator Maud Newton suggested that literature had long been affected by evolving technologies -- and maybe our digital future isn't so bad. Despite the many looming challenges, this panel seemed optimistic. "In 10 years we'll look back on this conversation and laugh," said Dwight Garner from the New York Times. "Solutions that we cannot yet foresee will arise."

Comparison between contributors in Los Angeles Times Festival of books and The Brooklyn Book Festival: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books had its own panel, featuring Angelenos who write about Los Angeles: L.A. Times books contributor Richard Rayner ("A Bright and Guilty Place"), Nina Revoyr ("The Age of Dreaming") and Judith Freeman ("The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved"), as well as David L. Ulin, L.A. Times books editor and editor of the Library of America anthology "Writing Los Angeles."

But a great number of the more than 200 authors that appeared at the Brooklyn Book Festival have lived in Brooklyn, including Paul Auster, Edwidge Danticat, Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose and Colson Whitehead. The last appeared in the impressive marble-and-wood Borough Hall Courtroom and took this photo before his presentation, showing what it's like to be an author looking into the audience.

Conclusion: It's both wonderful and disappointing that the Brooklyn Book Festival takes place in just one day. For those who organized it, it's got to be a relief that it's over; but if it had lasted longer, I might not have had to choose between Jonathan Lethem and Mary Gaitskill (the latter, apparently, sang a Pizza Hut advertising jingle) and Jonathan Ames and David Cross, whose shenanigans closed out the main stage with much laughter. 

Here I provide another link. This time, with an example of a proposal http://grit.fltr.ucl.ac.be/article.php3?id_article=40&. This text is quite long to quote but it can be seen how the author proposes different plans to the reading of the book. She is making her own suggestions and opinions on the reading. 

Here through this outline of a proposal texts we can have an idea of the different parts that compose it:

Basically, the difference between both types of texts is that a report has as an aim to inform and the proposal has as an objective to make suggestions on something, that is, to propose regarding a theme.