The Language Revolution

I'm not good as profeta

So I'll try it as poeta
Write about it in gaceta
I announce it with trompeta
"Toussier's Cognate Words" is here!


Now you start on new proyecto
Get a dose of intelecto
You'll speak Spanish soon correcto
(Or some other dialecto.)

For this method necesario
Study short vocabulario
It might help increase salario
You'll be linguist honorario

Say it slow, with claridad
You'll be glad eternidad
When you speak with variedad
Gives you more seguridad

You see, you know it, the definición
You know the root, by cognición
Now learn the ending by repetición
Soon you'll speak by intuición!

It's really not so complicado
All these words that I've aislado
The best, the easiest, the most apropiado
It's really not exagerado:
Spanish words ilimitado

This new method atractivo
Something new educativo
Results are in, they're conclusivo
You'll learn fast, I'm positivo

You don't believe? It's just promotion?
Can't be so fast, such locomotion?
But you see, I'm a magic marciano...
Puf ! You're reading Italiano !

(read cognate in Italian)
Another language! It's incredíbile!
( in cre DEE bee le )
This is really impossíbile!
For the teacher the soluzione
( so lu TZION ne )
A Second Language Revoluzione!

You want to start, you're impaciente
That's very good, it's excelente!
But you've already started, it's evidente

This was your first lesson equivalente!

A Short-Short Lesson, part I


There are more than 7000 words in English with Latin roots. These words are known as "cognates". The terrific thing about cognates is that you don't have to know any Latin in order to be able to use them instantly in Spanish or French or Portuguese or Italian. As I have written in my book, "Toussier's Cognate Words," all you have to do is learn a rule to translate the word intuitively, according to the ending in English. You can learn these rules very, very easily, because all the words in English that follow the rule rhyme with all the other words with the same ending... and they usuallly have the same ending in the foreign language! For example:


ALMOST EVERY WORD IN ENGLISH THAT ENDS IN ...ity EXISTS IN SPANISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, AND PORTUGUESE, AND ENDS IN

...idad / ...ité / ...itá / ...idade

© 1987 Ellis Toussier-Ades Bigio-Antebi
etoussier@hotmail.com
http://www.rajeun.net/revolution.html

Our Crazy Language-Why is it that way??

Did you know that "verb" is a noun?

How can you look up words in a dictionary if you can't spell them?

If a word is misspelled in a dictionary, how would we ever know?

If two mouses are mice and two louses are lice, why aren't two houses hice?

If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

If you've read a book, you can reread it. But wouldn't this also mean that you would have to "member" somebody in order to remember them?

In Chinese, why are the words for crisis and opportunity the same?

Is it a coincidence that the only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable?

Is there another word for a synonym?

Shouldn't there be a shorter word for "monosyllabic"?

What is another word for "thesaurus"?

Where do swear words come from?

Why can't you make another word using all the letters in "anagram"?

Why do fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing?

Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?

Why do people use the word "irregardless"?

Why do some people type "cool" as "kewl?"

Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

Why do we say something's out of order when its broken but we never say in of order when it works?

Why does "cleave" mean both split apart and stick together?

Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?

Why does flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?

Why does the Chinese ideogram for trouble symbolize two women living under one roof?

Why does X stand for a kiss and O stand for a hug?

Why doesn't "onomatopoeia" sound like what it is?

Why don't we say "why" instead of "how come"?

Why is "crazy man" an insult, while to insert a comma and say "Crazy, man!" is a compliment?

Why are a wise man and wise guy opposites?

Why is abbreviation such a long word?

Why is dyslexic so hard to spell?

Why is it so hard to remember how to spell MNEMONIC?

Why is it that no word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple?

Why is it that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?

Why is it that we recite at a play and play at a recital?

Why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?

Why is the plural of goose-geese, and not the plural of moose-meese?

Why isn't "palindrome" spelled the same way backwards?

Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

Rules for Better Writing

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

5. Avoid clich=E9s like the plague. (They're old hat)

6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually)unnecessary.

9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

10. No sentence fragments.

11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.

12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's
highly superfluous.

14. One should NEVER generalize.

15. Comparisons are as bad as clich=E9s.

16. Don't use no double negatives.

17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be ignored.

21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words
however should be enclosed in commas.

22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.

23. Kill all exclamation points!!!

24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth
shaking ideas.

26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not
needed.

27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know."

28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist
hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.

29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.

30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

32. Who needs rhetorical questions?

33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

My Best Friend

Today I found a friend,
Who knew everything I felt.
She knew my every weakness,
And the problems I've been dealt.

She understood my wonders,
And listened to my dreams.
She listened to how I felt about life and love,
And knew what it all means.

Not once did she interrupt me,
Or tell me I was wrong.
She understood what I was going through,
And promised she'd stay long

I reached out to this friend
To show her that i care
To pull her close and let her know
How much I need her there

I went to hold her hand
To pull her a bit nearer
And realized that this perfect friend I found
Was nothing but my mirror.

Communicative Language Teaching(CLT)

 CLT is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. It is also referred to as “communicative approach to the teaching of foreign languages” or simply the “Communicative Approach”.  As such, it is most often defined as a list of general principles or features. One of the most recognized of these lists is David Nunan’s (1991) five features of CLT:
1-An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.
2-The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
3-The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also on the Learning Management process.
4-An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.
5-An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom.
These five features are claimed by practitioners of CLT to show that they are very interested in the needs and desires of their learners as well as the connection between the language as it is taught in their class and as it used outside the classroom. Under this broad umbrella definition, any teaching practice that helps students develop their communicative competence in an authentic context is deemed an acceptable and beneficial form of instruction. Thus, in the classroom CLT often takes the form of pair and group work requiring negotiation and cooperation between learners, fluency-based activities that encourage learners to develop their confidence, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well as judicious use of grammar and pronunciation focused activities.

One of the most famous attacks on Communicative Language teaching was offered by Michael Swan in the English Language Teaching Journal on 1985[2]. Henry Widdowson responded in defense of CLT, also in the ELT Journal (1985 39(3):158-161). More recently other writers (e.g. Bax[3]) have critiqued CLT for paying insufficient attention to the context in which teaching and learning take place, though CLT has also been defended against this charge (e.g. Harmer 2003[4]).
Often, the Communicative Approach is deemed a success if the teacher understands the student. But, if the teacher is from the same region as the student, the teacher will understand errors resulting from an influence from their first language. Native speakers of the target language may still have difficulty understanding them. This observation may call for new thinking on and adaptation of the Communicative Approach. The Adapted Communicative Approach should be a simulation where the teacher pretends to understand only what any regular speaker of the target language would and reacts accordingly.[5]

REFERENCES:

1- Luke, Meddings (2004-03-26). "Throw away your textbooks". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-03-10.
2- Swan, Michael (1985) in the English Language Teaching Journal 39(1):2-12, and 1985 39(2):76-87
3- Bax, S (2003) The end of CLT: a context approach to language teaching ELT J 2003 57: 278-287
4- Harmer, J. (2003) Popular culture, methods, and context ELT J 2003 57: 288-294
5-van Hattum, Ton (2006), The Communicative Approach Rethought

what s linguistics?

The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles that constrain the class of all languages. Generative grammar distinguishes between the knowledge of language (linguistic competence), which is represented by mental grammar, and the production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance).

If grammar is defined as the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, then a general theory of language is a theory of grammar. A grammar includes everything one knows about a language; its phonetics and phonology (the sounds and the sound system), its morphology (the structure of words), its lexicon (the words or vocabulary), its syntax (the structure of sentences and the constraints on well-formed sentences), and its semantics (the meaning of words and sentences). See also Psychoacoustics; Speech; Speech perception.

Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics. The form of language representation in the mind, that is, linguistic competence and the structure and components of the mental grammar, is the concern of theoretical linguistics. The branch of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance, that is, the production and comprehension of speech (or of sign language by the deaf), is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists also investigate how children acquire the complex grammar that underlies language use.