Welcome

Name: José Carlos
Surname: Godoy Aguilar.
Age: 29
City: Málaga.
Country: Spain.
Profession: Language teacher.

Reason for this blog: teach Spanish and create a space to talk about it: doubts, questions, experiences, mistakes, and practically anything. Learning a language means learning how to think, how to name things, involving many different matters at once. My students can also come here and look for further cultural explanations that have to do with grammar, even though I cover that in the lessons.

What I intend to do is to describe more deeply and with more detail what students usually don't fully understand in class. Sometimes it would take a long time to give a complete and full explanation about some topic, like the subjonctive, the articles, etc.

Experience: 2 years in 4 different schools in Kiev (Ukraine), 1 year teaching online and designing courses, for my own classes and for other websites. Intensive courses in Malaga.

Studies: Master degree in Spanish language for foreigners at the university of Malaga.

Culture + Grammar.-

Language are words, sounds and symbols, but it's also culture. No other culture has the word torero, just because they only exist in the Spanish culture, even though there are corridas de toros (another unexistent word in other cultures) in some other countries. Because that is a reality for this culture (unfortunately), the language needs a word to name that.

All the cultural references and things I'm putting in this blog are in Spanish from Spain, the one I know better, and which is not better or worse than the one from South America, just different, like the British, Australian or American English might be.

The word patio is a Spanish reality, an open space with no roof inside a house. English houses don't have this patios, so they call these things patios when they see one. They usually have a small garden in the house, though (jardín). We have the word jardín too, but for us, garden means a very different thing and reality. Spanish houses (the majority of them) don't have a garden. So, when you ask what the word garden means, you should also ask yourself: who's to answer the question?

That's stupid. I knew that.-

It is really, but some companies don't seem to keep that in mind. Some companies like Lidl (I think it's German) sell from time to time here in Spain: things for your garden. I don't know about Germany, but I'm sure they sell a lot more stuff for garden in Germany than what they sell here in Spain. Just because: who has a garden in the house in Spain? Few people.

That's why I'll mix both language and culture to better understand the reason why we say certain things, why we react in a certain way, why some things about the Spanish language are really non-sense and stupid and others are cool, and might not work in your native language.

Because languages are culture, and culture is created by people, and because people are alive, so is culture, alive and changing.

As Isaac Asimov said in his famous series of books "Foundation", the mass is predictable, but not the individual. Usually in books you see the most common way to say your name is Me llamo José. It's the most predictable thing you can hear out on the street when asking somebody's name. But you might also hear somebody else say: Soy José.

How to predict who will say one thing or another? IMPOSSIBLE. So, this is what I'll try to help you with, to give you the tools to cover most of the possibilities you might come across talking to Spanish speakers. We learn the most common and predictable things in the lessons, but what about the others? I hope to help you with that too... Let's get started.