(Avanzado 2) I love to read

If you're into reading (not much, I presume sadly...) one of the things that you might do to improve your skills is make the most of the possibilities that the Internet offers. Too skint to afford that thick book you were craving for, desperate to find out what happens? Not willing to waste any more money on books?
Well, you're not likely then to read the latest fiction but if you just want to read for the sake of it, because it broadens your mind and to learn more English, these are a few websites where you can either download books in pdf. format or else read them online or even get them in e-format if you happen to be one of those early adopters who buy the latest gadget, the newest in-thing, and you have one of those e-book readers that -I foresee- one day will take over paper books, then a relic of the past.
Freebookspot is an online source of free e-books download. You can search and download free books in categories like scientific, engineering, programming, fiction and many other books. No registration is required to download free e-books.
Free-eBooks is an online source for free e-books, you also download free magazines or submit your own e-book. You need to become a Free-EBooks.Net member to access their library. Registration is free, though. You can read Moby Dick by Herman Melville or some Dickens too.
ManyBooks provides free ebooks for your PDA, iPod or eBook Reader. Why not read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë? This novel is a must! Of course you can find Jane Austen too. And if you're an anticapitalist you can handle The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels...
Planet PDF A small collection of classic novels all in PDF format. You've got some Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence. Ever heard of them? Classics of British and American Literature they are!
Planet eBook -Free classic literature to download and share. You can read 1984 by George Orwell (Big Brother is watching you!) or Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (don't even think for a second it's a book for children, even though you probably read one adaptation when you were little.)

Scribd is just a bit different. It's actually an online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats. You can download a document, a slideshow, a book or anything that someone has just uploaded to share with the rest of the world. You need to register to have access to the materials, but it's free. Try typing down, for example, English Advanced Grammar in Use in the Search box and hey presto! What d'you get? 350 pages of free grammar practice.
You might also be interested in Audiobooks. If reading is such a drag just prick up your ears for the words of well-known fiction writers while you're commuting or gone for a jog or a stroll down the park. I'll be supplying you with some stuff next...
That's all.

'I love to read' photograph by Carlos Porto. See his gallery at flickr

(Avanzado 1) Elllo elllo, you say elllo I say goodbye...

Actually The Beatles said Hello, Goodbye, but they might as well wanted to use this terrific website that I came across a couple of years ago, just by chance, probably browsing through the web expecting to find something else.
The page is called elllo (it stands for English Language Listening Laboratory Online) and offers a wide array of listenings, ranging from interviews to listening games. It is probably the best website for improving your listening skills, in my opinion.
I have just prepared a screencast to show you about how it works and the contents you will find there. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not that I think you are clumsy when it comes to dealing with computers, it's just in case you are one of those who say that computers 'don't love you'. If after watching the screencast you still don't know how to use the page, you're in for trouble in this increasingly technological world...
You'll see a slideshow embedded below. Just watch it. You'd better change to the Full Screen mode so you can read my notes. Eer, yes, if you're one of those the full screen is the icon with the arrows...
Then send a comment for feedback- what do you think about the page? Did you like it? Did you do a lot of listenings? You'll have to anyway, as I'll tell you to do some homework about it quite often from now on.



Clear? Then you know what to do next...
See you in class! You say elllo, I say goodbye, elllo elllo...

(Avanzado 1) A turning point

For some gossip...ok, here's my turning point (roughly): When I was living in England after university I broke up with my girlfriend, a girl I had been going out with for...wow, it must have been six years or so!!! I felt miserable, honest.
If I hadn't broken up with that former girlfriend of mine I would probably have stayed in Britain longer. Not that I was having the best of times, broken-hearted as I was, but I'd probably tried to make up for the time I'd lost with some girls I had developed a crush for...Anyway, I decided to come back sooner than expected. If I hadn't come back, I could have met someone back in England. If I'd fallen in love again, I might have looked for a job to earn my living. If I'd started working there, I'd have started looking for a flat to live and perhaps I would even have got married there, and my children would have had red hair and freckles.
But...well, I would never have met you! Sob, sob...
Can you send in a post about a turning point in your life which made it be different from what it used to be before? Something that make you start all over again?
Another thing to do is: There is an interesting dilemma faced by the main character in a film. There is a little girl who gets kidnapped, but she is taken to live in a much better home than her own (her mother is out doing drugs all the time). Patrick, the lead character, finds out about who took her and is the only who knows where she is. He then has to decide whether to turn the kidnapper in and get justice, or keep quite and give the girl what might be a better life. What would you have done?
That's all. Send your comments!

(Avanzado 2) The art of displacement

You might as well have been practicing the flip, the roll, the tuck and strange body movements. Not that free running is popular in Pamplona...yet, so you might become the pioneers.
As you noticed the other day in class, the DVD player was going a bit haywire. I've just been checking the DVD at home and it just worked great. That means it wasn't really my fault (you know I'm a tech-freak). Just in case today 20/Jan we can't possibly watch the video again, here's the homework: just follow this link and then do the listening exercises that I gave you out the other day.
For some jaw-dropping, awesome performances, just watch this video.


Can you beat that?
See you in class...