EGGs & NEGGs: books

I mentioned a while back that precision teaching spends a lot of time “training the inspector”: teaching students how to tell a good performance from a bad one.

Which you do by giving students as many examples and nonexamples as they need to learn the discrimination.

EGGs and NEGGs. Examples and nonexamples.

Thursday I spent a couple of hours in an actual bricks-and-mortar bookstore (bring them back ! ), where I discovered EGGs and NEGGs books for French and Spanish.

Happy day.

Now I need the same for listening and talking.

‘r’ is the hardest letter to pronounce?

Haven’t watched this yet, but 6 seconds in, Damon, of Damon and Jo, says “r” is the hardest letter to pronounce in any language.

Is that true?

I kinda hope so, seeing as how both the Spanish ‘r’ and the French ‘r’ have been the bane  of my many years of non-fluency in both languages.

The other morning, coming off a Duolingo Spanish session, I rolled my r perfectly twice. It just happened. A perfect Spanish r, perfectly rolled.

Then I couldn’t do it again.

Dual-language news at the Times

We’re spending 6 weeks in France this summer, so, in theory, I’m going to improve my French before then.

Either that, or spend a lot of time tracking down websites, books, software, and apps that would undoubtedly help me improve my French if I stopped looking for resources and started actually using the resources I’ve got.

Maybe tomorrow!

Anyway, in the interests of saving other people time tracking things down, I’m posting the URLs for Times articles in French and Spanish:

Nos reportages et tribunes en français 

AL DÍA

As far as I can tell, all articles have been translated from the original English to Spanish or French (possibly vice versa for some). So you can put the two side-by-side in a table, et voilà: dual-language news.

The Times also has a guía de The New York Times that doesn’t seem to be translated. However, the headlines are so familiar you can probably guess your way through and not be wrong. (“Las polémicas de Trump” anyone?)

What I really need, of course, is dual listening, and I think I’ve got the resources for that. Will post later.