Dalango
A star is born. Dalango is a brand-new web-based series of language courses (English, Business English, Spanish). 1/2 a year in the works, a major investment (so they say), Spotlight Verlag inside expertise and cool young dudes and gals bringing in new media ideas, some 300 minutes worth of good videos based on great scripts, […]
wordle
“Wordle” processes all of the words in a text – in this case a blogpost of mine – and presents them based on how often the words appear. Fun software for a language lover! Try the app at www.wordle.net yourself. Copy in a text of your own and see if you like being confronted with […]
Logic
I teach essay writing, and have found the following summary to be very helpful in getting students to think about their arguments: Fundamentals for logical analysis 1. Always remember never to say always and never (and all and none, and everyone and nobody). Reasonable thinking should be reflected in reasonable language. All-inclusive statements can rarely […]
HWGSATQ
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of Dokumenta 13 in 2012, answered the question where she was from by saying “HWGSATQ – How would Gertrude Stein answer that question?” and then explained that she was conceived in Italy, grew up in Richmond and “returned” to Italy later in life. “Heimat ist eine multiple Erfahrung und Simplifizierungen erscheinen […]
Back office business grammar
From my back office compact course: Susan is interviewing Karin about her job. Help them with their language. Mouse over but don’t click on the highlighted text in the version you think is correct. If you see “yes” you have got it right. Susan: What do you do / do you work? Karin: I’m a […]
The top 25 mistakes Germans make in English
1. I am born in Berlin. 2. We are meeting us next week. 3. I am living here since 1998. 4. I moved here for 6 years. 5. I have lived in Halle until 1997. 6. We have often meetings in Frankfurt. 7. We have opened in Potsdam our new headquarters. 8. Can you borrow […]
David Crystal on Obama’s rhetorical style
David Crystal has analyzed Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for rhetorical style in his blog, showing how Obama used the “rule of three” (creating vibrant triptychs), pairing, repetition, structural parallelism and the “rule of seven” (a memory-friendly number of details) to create the rhetorical drama needed to extend his listeners’ attention span and build excitement. Thanks, […]
