“I don’t remember the time when speaking didn’t make me anxious”, she mumbled, still trying to smile but unable to look me in the eye. “I feel you, sister”, I wanted to say, to help share her painful load and to show her that I’m proof of living with that […]
Archivos anuales: 2025
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Identity is not fixed. It’s more a multifaceted, fluid, ever-changing looking glass through which we view the world. Yet one of the most profound filters we use to interpret reality remains unchanged throughout our lives. As a migrant who left her native country 20 years ago, I have spent as […]
I originally wrote this article on 17th September 2011. Back then, I believed that the main purpose of language was communication. Now, ten years later, after ten years of teaching and exploring languages, my vision has changed a lot. In fact, I disagree with what I wrote back then. So, […]
I recently sent a questionnaire to my audience, asking them about their Spanish struggles and what they wanted or needed more of to improve and progress in their Spanish journey. One of the questions I asked was how interested they were in a poetry course in Spanish to improve their […]
Journaling in my mother language led me to write poetry, an activity I loved but which I stopped doing because I was young and influenceable and I believed then that if I couldn’t write good poetry (like the wordsmiths I studied in college), then I should not write at all. […]
Authenticity is a human need, like the need for belonging or attachment. When we are kids or teens, our need to belong to a group, fit in, trumps our need to express ourselves, and be authentic. This means that instead of listening inwards to our body’s clues about how it […]
A language is only a tool for communication and self-expression, and it’s an evolutionary development: a collective, generational development, not a single invention. So, as we evolved, the language evolved with us. Language is a human trait, a human behaviour. And language is key to all human activities, including self-actualization. Self-actualization is the process of […]
Whenever I ask my new students, subscribers, or any member of my audience what they struggle with, the answer is always the Subjunctive. And I get it. There are things in English whose logic took me time to get. And there are things I still don’t get, like the pronunciation, for […]
Every language has its own prosody – the patterns of stress and intonation–. That’s why when we are in a foreign country we can recognise our compatriots by hearing them speaking even if we don’t hear what they say. In this post you will learn: The intonation in Spanish Five […]