Mark Pentleton, of Coffee Break Spanish and Radio Lingua fame, has set himself a challenge to learn Catalan in four weeks. As he admits, he knows some already from his travels, but wants to be able to hold a proper conversation when he goes to Barcelona at the end of the month. He’s begun with a couple of posts this week, in Catalan. Very impressive!

Well, over the last few months, Mark and I have sporadically corresponded via Twitter in Catalan after he mentioned plans for One Minute Catalan and I said that’d be good but why not Mallorquí. The truth is that I learned Catalan at Sheffield University, taught by Alan Yates (of Teach Yourself Catalan fame) and then spent a year at L’Universitat de les Illes Balears in Mallorca. On returning for my final year, I had great fun making myself understood as my fellow students had been to Barcelona and Valencia and couldn’t understand my unique accent.
During my time in Sheffield, I wrote essays in Catalan, read countless books, adored La Plaça del Diamant, worshipped Villalonga and was gutted when Josep Llompart died whist I was in Mallorca. I even managed to deliver a talk to the highly critical, fiercely Mallorquí students of Català1 at UIB – and survived! I really did enjoy it. However, since then, I have no opportunity to use my skills and they are therefore horribly rusty.

So, I’ve decided to join Mark in his challenge. Before you get overexcited, I won’t be posting great essays in Catalan – or Mallorquí – but I will tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve decided that, as term is just starting (shame I didn’t think of this a month ago!), I’m going for the ‘poc à poc’ approach (that reminds me of a Catalan joke, but it’s rude and I can only recall the punchline!).
I started off by tweeting Mark in Catalan:

After one particular tweet in which I shared my favourite Catalan refrán (probably the only one I know off by heart!) I’ve started reading ‘De mica en mica s’omple la pica‘ by Jaume Fuster once more. I read it at Uni – that was a long time ago, but I have to say that I’m really excited that I can still understand most of it – and the bits I’m looking up in my dictionary are actually familiar once I know what they mean!
Today, I’ve rediscovered one of my favourite expressions – it means don’t worry!

I’m hoping to find a phrase like that for each day – so any suggestions are very welcome!
Might even try to post some 12seconds.TV videos of me talking!

I really enjoy using Twitter to talk to people, and am rather peeved about the withdrawl of mobile tweets, making it rather tricky to use it at school where it’s blocked :o(.

However, thought I’d share with you a little table that @iusher has just sent me – the UKEdTech TwitterLeague!

The competitive streak in me is not too chuffed at being midtable, but I’m glad that there are 259 people interested in what I’m Tweeting. And there’s no point trying to compete with the Mighty Mc or that other SuperTwit, the irrepressible Drew Buddie – coincidence that they’re both Scottish??

On checking Twitter this morning, I saw that Doug @dajbelshaw was trying out something new – called 12seconds.TV. I’m a nosey soul so when he offered invites, I was there like a shot.

Doug was kind enough to send me an invite so off I went to discover more.

It’s one of those ‘does what it says on the tin’ sort of sites – it’s all about 12 seconds of TV, a bit like Seismic but with a time limit. Just as Twitter limits you to 140 characters, here you have to be succinct too. You sign in with a username and are assigned your own channel – mine is http://12seconds.tv/channel/lisibo and then you just need a webcam and microphone – although Doug Belshaw managed here without a microphone ;o)

I had a first try waffling about nothing in particular, and answered today’s 12challenge – which is the best Star Wars film?

Then I started thinking of uses for 12seconds.tv, and came up with using it for a challenge – learn and perfect a Spanish tonguetwister.

Here’s the first one – from Puerto Rico

Spanish tongue twister #1 on 12seconds.tv

Trabalenguas #1 –
miel de abaja, miel de abeja, miel de abeja ……

I started thinking I’d put the widget in my blog sidebar – which I will do – but then thought I’d add it to the school web page and use it to set the challenge to pupils, staff, parents and the wider community. There’s not much going on the site at the moment and in the last year there have been three regular contributors, one of whom has left, one of whom is the administrator, and the other who loves pink and bling ;o) so I think any content will be welcome. I also take pride in promoting languages within the school – as I don’t have my own class, it’s the way most parents get to know who I am. Added to which, I like the idea of promoting language learning to the wider community – and tonguetwisters are such fun. Using video will help as I always find it easier to see the person’s face when I’m learning languages and trying to imitate pronunciation. And the 12 second limit makes it snappy – not an onerous task and within most people’s attention span.

I’ll let you know how it goes – but I’d love to see others having a go – perhaps you could join 12seconds.tv and post your attempts at the Spanish tonguetwisters?

Or post your own in French, German, Russian, Dutch, Chinese etc. or even a phrase in your local dialect? I’ve got 10 invites to give away if you’d like one!
We could start a whole new trend for linguistic 12seconds.tv videos!!

I’ll post another one in a day or so!

Both my boys wanted to play on the computer this morning at the same time on different things – 9 year old is a fan of Fizzy.com and was playing Swords and Sandals 3 (about Roman gladiators apparently) whilst 6 year old was eager to visit Cbeebies and BABW. Eldest had grabbed the house PC and youngest looked at me with his big brown bush baby eyes…

So I did something I haven’t done for weeks – I got out my laptop! And I could not believe how SLOOOOOOOOOOW it was! I’m so used to the speed of my MacBook that the slowness of my laptop was even more marked than it used to be. After nearly eight minutes of waiting and clicking, it finally got working – only to immediately crash! Started it up again – and although it looked promising, it’s just crashed again. Consequently, boys are now exercising cooperation and playing on house PC together – and whatever they’re doing is obviously tickling them as I can hear belly laughs as I type!

So – my advice? Get a Mac!
And if you can’t, perhaps investigate these products –

There are lots more adverts on the Apple site – always worth a look if you need a giggle!

Slideshow by Roelof.

Thought it was about time I adopted a pet for my blog.

There were no cows available at the Virtual Pet Shop unfortunately – anyhow, Angus would get jealous, wouldn’t he @mrmackenzie?

So, in honour of my friend, The Countess of Devon, here’s my new pet who will henceforth live in my sidebar.

Feel free to feed my sheep with hay or lettuce – just offer it to her and click for her to eat. Apologies that she’s a noisy eater.

One of my Google Reader / Feedly subscriptions is to a site called Noticias Locas which offers ‘Noticias curiosas, insólitas, raras …. pero rigurosamente ciertas‘, a bit like a site that catalogues ‘And finally…’ news items in Spanish.

I thought I’d share with you one that tickled me!

You can search here by title – find such gems as the Japanese biscuit with a special ingredient, the unfortunate Austrian girl with the tractor driving boyfriend, or Rory the horse who thinks it’s a dog.

A warning – you couldn’t use the site directly for pupils due to some dodgy adverts at the bottom, and some of the stories are of an ‘adult’ nature e.g this one about an interesting side effect of beer. However, if you pick your article and take a screen shot, or print it out, I think you could use some of the stories for gist reading – certainly in a secondary context, but also as an example of using all the clues you can to decipher meaning without understanding every word.

And, for amusement value, it can be quite amusing :oD

Whilst I’ve been getting overexcited about the exceptional performances of Team GB in the rowing, cycling, swimming and sailing – not to mention the gymnastics yesterday – Spain has been enjoying success too.

Yesterday saw Rafa Nadal win gold in the men’s tennis singles, beating Fernando González of Chile 6-3, 7-6, 6-3. And this morning he was crowned World Number 1, knocking Roger Federer off his perch!

And Spain won another gold on Saturday, courtesy of Joan Llaneras in the men’s points race in track cycling at the Velodrome (Chris Newton of Team GB won bronze)

Then today saw silver for Martínez and Fernández in the 49er sailing – oddly no British medals in that one ;o) They might even be promoted to gold after a protest over the (gold medal winning) Danish crew using a Croatian boat in the final race after theirs broke.

And Leire Olaberría didn’t quite manage to emulate Llaneras’ feat on Saturday, but did win bronze in the women’s track cycling points race. (Rebecca Romero, having won gold yesterday in the women’s individual pursuit, came 11th in her first attempt at the points race)
With good prospects of medals in the open water canoeing, hockey, synchronised swimming and triathlon amongst other things, Spain is optimistic of adding to its medal haul before the Games are out.

¡Vamos a ver qué pasa!

The lovely Joe Dale sent me the link to this video on Teachertube today – thought I might find it interesting. And I did, so I thought I’d share it with you too.

Adorable Spanish Elementary Plays is described as

High School Spanish students perform The Three Bears, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood plays for area elementary students.

The sound isn’t brilliant but the idea is clear – older pupils have worked on a play to present to younger pupils from neighbouring schools. This is an idea for transition that I love. It benefits both groups of pupils – excellence and enjoyment, anyone? The older pupils get to plan script practice and perform the play, using language they know and also stretching their vocabularies; the younger pupils are familiar with the story so don’t need to understand every word to be able to follow the plot. Both groups have fun, and links are made between the Key Stages, making ‘moving on’ easier for pupils – and potentially for their teachers too.

It’s good to see what can be done with a bit scenery, imagination and a good smattering of Spanish!

There are other videos from sparkenthusiasm that I’ve discovered via this one – more of those tomorrow :o)

Regular readers may have realised by now that I’m a sports fan – and even irregular readers probably have an inkling! So you can guess that I’m currently having a fine time keeping an eye and ear on events at the Olympics Games in Beijing. My boys are quite interested too and it’s fun trying to work out the rules of various rarely seen sports like fencing and judo as well as explaining those that I do understand like badminton and canoeing (again rarely seen on TV!)

Of course I’m particularly enjoying the cycling – Sami Sánchez (left) came good in the road race although Contador failed to make it a Spanish double this morning – my eldest was pleased though as he’s a Cancellara fan.

For those of you who are also enjoying the Games and fancy finding out more in Spanish, you can access the official site in Spanish – as well as English, French, Arabic and Mandarin.

Other places to check out –
Olimpiadas Beijing 2008
Clarín from Buenos Aires for a South American view
the sports pages of ABC and also El País (interesting article about Michael Phelps)
El Universal (Mexico City)
Terra (Miami)

And whilst I’m still on holiday for another three weeks (well, bit under I guess!), those of you in other countries will soon be back to school so here’s a link to some great Olympic resources from the Australian Olympic Committee – five lessons worth of stuff available in Spanish but also Arabic Chinese Croatian French German Indonesian Italian and Japanese. I’m thinking that I might use them anyway as part of EDL day – I know all the languages aren’t European but it’s about celebrating different languages and I’m never really very strict on them being European ;o) You could also check out this blog for some further ideas in Spanish.

And of course, don’t forget the Chinese policeman about whom I blogged before the Games – wonder how many people he’s helped – and in how many more languages he’s mastered greetings!

Anyhow, back to my sporting activities – I have a fantasy football team to complete – and it’s not going to plan as there are too few Spanish defenders in the Premiership to make my team fully Spanish so I’m haivng to cheat more than a little. Oh well!