Cultivating your English #16: Crazy ideas and analysing difficult quotes
❤️“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has”❤️ Margaret Mead.
Hi there cultivators!
Thank you Rosa who pointed out that nobody in Spain spells whisky “güisqui”.... So true! I’ve seen different versions but never the “correct” spelling according to the RAE!
She also sent me a really fascinating article about “bilingual” schools in Spain and the teaching of subjects like geography or science in English.
https://elpais.com/educacion/2021-07-03/colegios-publicos-que-abandonan-el-bilinguismo-es-un-engano-los-ninos-ni-aprenden-ingles-ni-las-materias.html
(For any non-Spanish speakers an approximate translation of the article’s title is “State schools give up on bilingualism, the children don’t learn English or the target subjects”: this gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s about!)
One of the things they mention is that teachers earn a bonus for teaching subjects in English- anything between 80 and 170€ per month. This, the article suggests, is a possible reason why more schools have not abandoned the initiative.
I was also thinking about the image I shared in the last newsletter- the one about the importance of small steps if you want to be successful. It got me thinking about what small steps I/we could take to get to a multilingual Spain in 20 years time.
One of those small steps is encouraging people to watch films/series and documentaries in the original version. People often tell their children that they “must” learn English when they don’t speak English themselves. This is very ineffective I think! If you smoke cigarettes it’s difficult to convince your children why they shouldn't smoke. It’s a similar principle.
I think parents who want their children to speak English should at least make an effort to watch things in original version- with subtitles in Spanish if necessary of course.
I would love for the dubbing industry to slowly die out. Fairly recently I watched a Korean film called Parasite. I speak zero Korean but I watched it in original version with subtitles of course. I did this because you lose so much when a film is dubbed. (it’s a great film by the way!)
When trying to rationalise to or convince students why the original version is so much better I often say to them: “imagine watching https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_que_se_avecina dubbed into Catalan” or how about watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plats_bruts dubbed into Spanish?”
Sooooo, here’s my crazy idea….. Let’s take an emblematic Spanish scene from a film or series and dub it into Catalan ourselves, or vice versa!
I think it could be a great way to “dejar en evidencia” how absurd and what a huge missed opportunity dubbing really is! (unless it’s https://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading of course- which is simply awesome imho!)
Which film or series would be a good one to choose? Torrente? Betty la fea? Maybe a famous clip like “pillotes! Me encantan!”? Cuñaooooo? etc What do you think?
How could we do this? I certainly coudn't do it on my own. I wouldn’t know where to start with the technical side of it for a start! I think it would be really good fun though 😅
🐵Challenge🐵
Take a listen to this audio I recorded explaining in a little more depth my interpretation of some of the quotes I have included in the newsletters. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DTGw0Lg46si9s_z3yJR6XZC7tAwMtNkA/view?usp=sharing Let me know if there is anything you don’t understand or if you didn’t understand any of the other quotes.
See you in #17, thanks for reading!🙏😺