“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”

The English would say: “You can’t have your cake and eat it“. However, I say: you can! You can have your coat and you don’t have to buy books written in English (which are, I must admit, not that cheap) in order to read them. There is our small school library where you can find a number of graded readers. Just come to our English classroom and choose the title (and the level 😉 ) you like, borrow it from the library, keep it for a week and enjoy reading great classics from the English literature! I would like to read about your impressions here. As the number of you who have read the same book rises, we will have discussions here! Because “Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting“. (E.Burke)

I’m starting tomorrow, and you? 🙂

Let’s Do It!

The other day I went to the cinema with a friend and we saw the new Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris. I enjoyed it enormously. The pictures of Paris, the appearance of famous people such as Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Paul Gauguin, the comparison of different eras… However, the most wonderful thing was the soundtrack. The music in the film was amazing: Charleston dance, jazz, can-can… It made me search for Cole Porter on the Internet and I realized what a genius he had been! The song that can be heard throughout the film is his „Let’s Do It (Let’s fall in Love)“. If you have time, listen to it HERE, this is a great version sang by an even greater jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald.

I liked the lyrics very much so I made a wordle out of then. It looks like this:

      Making a wordle is fun! Just type or paste the lyrics of a song and you’ll get something like this. The biggest words are the most frequent ones in the song. The smaller the words the less frequent they are. Since my song deals with falling in love, these words are repeated in the chorus and they are the biggest.

Try this out on http://www.wordle.net/  ! Make beautiful word clouds and let me know if you liked it! 🙂

P.S. Have a look at the educational sites I suggested, there is a good one dealing with lyrics 😉

Why, hello!

Welcome to the English Stew!

U pravu ste, biće ovo pravi engleski paprikaš (engl. English stew)! Biće tu tušta i tma sastojaka, kako mu i doliči: priča, pesama, slika, putovanja, gramatike, igrica, kvizova… Polako ali sigurno će da se dinsta i kuva ogromno naše znanje i ideje. Uz paprikaš prija i čaša starih ideja iz podruma, a obavezno mora da bude začinjen vašim novim idejama, mislima i komentarima! 🙂

Pitate se da li sam pogrešno spelovala ime zemlje o kojoj ćemo pričati? Englaland je prvobitno njeno ime, a u prevodu znači „zemlja Angla“ (The home of the Angles). Angli, Saksoni, Juti, Kelti… Od njih je sve počelo! 🙂

Moja želja je da vam približim kulturu i jezik o kome pričamo na časovima, a nemamo dovoljno vremena da joj se posvetimo koliko bismo hteli. Umesto dodatne nastave u učionici, sretaćemo se ovde i deliti ideje!

Nadam se da će ovaj naš paprikaš ispasti ukusan! 😉

Cheers!