Marketing with animated characters

A British price-comparison website has had phenomenal success with Aleksandr Orlov, an animated meerkat.
Go to the website http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/to see how it is done, and to see what all the fuss is about.
And don't forget to compare the meerkats and watch the videos too :-)

Spoken poetry

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/21st-century-flux-dizraeli/

The 21st Century Flux

English. The new disease?
It pours out of television speakers and computer screens
Disregarding Babel with its very cocky fluency
Sticking on its labellings at every opportunity.
Nothing’s safe; it won’t stop when it begins to spread
it dominates the airwaves and reigns/rains on the internet
leaving cultures altered and confused as to what’s what
turns the dialecting of the youths to a hotch-potch
rag-tag scrabble bag; everyone’s affected
the little languages will not survive unprotected.
So hold your own, but get a firm hold of English
and every last one of us shall be a multilinguist:
sing it!
Shampoo juggernaut moolah hullabaloo
ad infinitum, pow-wow, kudos, déjà vu
Won ton, billabong, beef, potato, hobo, dream
Wha gwan with the wigwam boogie
mr Chimpanzee?
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
And when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice
The professor said, “Pif! What language is this?
Degenerate slang isn’t standard English!
We at the top must establish limits.”
I said “Prof! Language is the people that live it.”
Get loose, give it some vision and foresight
and juice; we can fling the dictionary door wide.
I live in a city where it seems like
every single idiom is intermingling stream-like,
Like streams, that know no barriers
No matter what dams and channels are established –
they are irrelevant. What matters is the message that is put across,
and the passion that’s invested in it. Nothing’s lost
it merely mutates, and lets the people speaking it
tweak it in new ways.
Meaning that meaning is whatever you say
Jilly, Jack, Hussain, in Iraq to the UK …
to all corners; through all twists and bends
Six billion personal versions of events
It’s thrilling when you think of all the tongues on a jostle
to express their puzzle in the best words possible.
The more words we have, the more ways we have
to express the world we have to co-exist in.
And if the English language is the lingua franca of this planet,
never say that it should be a closed system.
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice for the performers
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice to the chorus
Cos English isn’t English; it’s an elastic patchwork
A fantastically insane confederation
a very strange tapestry of foreign vernaculars
borrowed from Norse kings, and fettered slavemen
So if language is linked to the land which it springs from
English is linked to the globe in entirety
With fragments of every language you’ll think of
Roots in every type of society:
Welsh, French, Jamaican, Indian, Italian
Dominican, Hispanic, Germanic, Norse, African,
Norman, Dutch, Latin, Greek, Japanese, Yiddish,
Native American, Antipodean and Finnish…
The list could continue till my tongue went blue;
what I’m saying is the owner is you.
It lives as it’s spoken, and it mirrors the truth
And there isn’t any owner but you…
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice

written by Dizraeli

Breathing places

After you have watched this video, go to the website.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Santa vs Nikolaus

The Local tries to explain the confusion that appears to reign in Germany as to who really is Father Christmas.....

Celebrating Nikolaus in Germany

Pimp your vocabulary

Here's a less serious look at the modern English language, but one that may be useful if you have any contact with British students.

Pimp your vocab link

Link to online quiz

The trouble with interpreting

Every now and again I get asked to interpret - mostly at weddings. Although interésting it can also be tricky. So spare a thought for the poor man who had to simultaneously interpret Col. Gaddafi's UN rant/speech.

Gaddafi interpreter 'collapsed during UN speech'
Muammar Gaddafi's personal translator broke down towards the end of the Libyan leader's meandering 94-minute UN speech and had to be rescued by a UN Arabic speaker.
The Libyan translator matched the "Brother Leader of the Revolution" word-for-word for 90 minutes before collapsing from exhaustion, just after Mr Gaddafi denounced the popular Ottawa Treaty outlawing landmines

Read the rest of the story here....

New Business lessons

Good news for those of you who teach Business English.
As of this month, to accompany each issue of Business Spotlight, there will be monthly ready-made downloadable and photocopiable, complete lesson plans with teaching notes - written by me, based around an original article from the current issue of the magazine.
The lesson plans are available on the Business Spotlight website and the onestopenglish website - see direct links below.
http://www.business-spotlight.de/teachers-zone/activities/group-work/a-new-series-by-onestopenglish

http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?catid=60069&docid=157513
The first complete lesson and the introduction to the series are free for all to download. After that the lessons will be free for Business Spotlight subscribers and Onestopenglish staffroom members.

Do not embrace technology without knowing why and for whom you are doing so.

It seems we constantly hear about how using modern technology is the only way forward and to some extents this is so. But recently I've been wondering who the technology is for. My students do not write blogs, they have only disdain and contempt for people who twitter and they use other social networking sites in a completely different way to how we teachers do.
Now my feelings have been confirmed by a Microsoft researcher called Danah Boyd. You can read her article here
Some thoughts on technophilia
or simply go to her blog http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

Are things looking up?

Time for some good news.....


Read the rest of the article HERE

Infinite photo of Earth

go to the website via the link - INFINITE PHOTOGRAPH - keep clicking into the photo and see what happens