Believe it or not, after my last post about the subjunctive I had resolved to take a long break from writing about verbs. But as part of my research I just performed the following summary analysis, which I found so useful that I couldn’t resist sharing it. The series of tables below summarizes the fate […]
My second-favorite souvenir from a Spanish-speaking country is a reading list. (My absolute favorite is a mama cuchara, an oversized spoon that I bought at the open-air market in Otovalo, Ecuador.) This precious list was a parting present from a professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where I took summer classes about six years ago. She […]
When rereading one of my favorite Spanish novels, Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s Cuatro días de enero, which I’ve written about previously here and here, a sentence I’d missed the first time caught my eye: El cadáver de Reme y el círculo de curiosas y curiosos, hablando en voz baja, observando aquel quebranto de la vida […]
I just finished Jordi Sierra i Frabra’s Siete días de julio, his equally dynamite sequel to Cuatro días de enero, which I wrote about last month. This is rapidly becoming one of my favorite book series in any language. I’m looking forward to reading Cinco días en octubre soon — right now it is out of stock at […]
My time and thoughts have mostly been in my classroom over the last few weeks, so this post is more teacher-y than usual. But it does, I hope, contain some interesting observations about some core grammatical issues in Spanish. As I noted in an earlier post, Spanish teachers have to explain many differences that exist […]
This page is for materials that you may find useful if you teach Spanish. The two best bits are the first (clothing project) and last (subjunctive writing assignment). Note: if you are a teacher, your school’s internet setup may block you from downloading these files. In that case, please email me so we can figure […]