Headed into the break but still want to practice your Spanish? Check out these six Spanish short films for quick and easy immersion! Each film is directed and filmed for and by native Spanish speakers, and they come from a wide range of countries. Many of the shorts are also favorites at film festivals around the world! Make sure to check out Uno by Javier Marco. For more Spanish shorts, check out Short of the Week, and sort by country to find more foreign language short films.
Detrás Del Espejo (Behind the Mirrors) by Julio O. Ramos
Best for: Beginners
Genre: Action
Location: Peru
Watch for: an exciting short with a dramatic end
Pre-COVID, I would’ve never considered taking notes digitally—I’ve been told, time and time again, that physically taking notes helps you remember your content better. However, Zoom classes led to a change of heart. I realized, like many others, the advantage of having notes up on your computer while on a Zoom call. I’ve come to realize many other advantages to online note-taking: easier organization (and reorganization), more layout and design freedom, and—my favorite— command F capabilities.
The software one uses for note-taking is also essential. I started out using the built-in Apple Notes app but quickly realized the limited capability. The only variability in text allowed is a pre-set list of five options: title, heading, subheading, body, and monospaced. Users can also bold, italicize, or underline. Past that, there are no further options.
So, I went in search of a better alternative. My favorite: Microsoft OneNote (free for college students with the Microsoft Office Interface).
For a semester project here in the language lab, I chose to investigate narrative levels and how they interact and change in stories. To do this, I attempted to replicate a project published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics, a journal focusing on the intersection of data and human action. The project aimed to understand how narrative levels work, as well as how uniformly standard definitions of them could be identified by different scholars in different places. The project lays out three main types of narrative that deviate from the main speaker, narrator, or story:
Uninterrupted narrative: this is just a narrative by itself. It has the same speaker, the same time period, and the same point of view.
Embedded narrative: A story within the original narrative. The original narrative will always signal a reason for an embedded narrative. These typically take place in dialogue, when a character is prompted to tell a story.
Interruptive narrative: a structural separate narrative in the midst of the original narrative. It is usually signaled by some sort of stopping point in the original narrative, such as a chapter end or a section break, and often changes narrator or time period. Unlike the embedded narrative, there is nothing within the original narrative that prompts an interruptive narrative.
Speculating on how COVID-19 will shape the future of higher education, Mousumi Mukherjee, an Associate Professor and Deputy Director for the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building, asks, “When we have failed to build respectful and inclusive on-campus teaching and learning environments to build societies, how can we do it online?”
The challenges educational institutions are currently forced to grapple with illuminate existing difficulties that arise from stark disparities. Consequently, Mukherjee emphasizes that solely relying on digital alternatives to resolve the current educational crisis is inadequate. However, educators and scholars speculate on whether the recent turn to ed-tech platforms represents a “watershed moment,” foreshadowing a long-term educational innovation, or whether it functions as an unsustainable stopgap to long unaddressed issues.
Regardless of what the future holds, institutions and schools struggle to find suitable and equitable solutions to manage the present crisis. Below, I provide an overview of crowdsourced resources that educational technology platforms, strategies, and resources that higher education institutions have adopted in the transition to online education and distance learning.
Students in Peru use laptops from the OPLC Initiative. The initiative asserted its goal to revolutionize education in the developing world through the distribution of innovative software and educational devices. When Negroponte pitched the idea at a Tunis summit, a participant emphasized the greater urgency of facilitating the obtainment of “clean water and real schools.”
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the capacity of education technology to overcome the the national and global digital divide was already under debate. In late December of 2019, blogger Audrey Watters published a commentary highlighting ed tech’s exacerbation, appropriation, and oversight of the structural inequalities — including educational, racial, social, and economic inequities — that constitute the digital divide. Watters discussed the catastrophic failures of the self-serving projects of Ed-Tech philanthropists and initiatives, such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) Initiative.
I was recently asked what the best apps for learning Spanish were, and since I haven’t learned Spanish through apps in a while, I wasn’t sure. So, I dove back into the world of language-learning apps to see if anything had changed.
Andrei Tarkovsky is one of, if not the most famous Russian film director of all time. One of his most beloved films by Russian people, Зеркало (1975) is a semi-autobiographical sequence of clips playing with memory, war, and daily life in Moscow.
The film features stunning creative techniques, such as Tarkovsky’s famous long shots. The one above is considered not only one of his best shots, but one of the best in film history. Other techniques include color schemes and themes such as the mirror, time, and poetry, which is read by different characters and narrators throughout the film.
The plot is kind of tricky to explain. A dying poet is the narrator (something that isn’t revealed until the end), but the story is far from linear or clear. The scenes switch between different time periods, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with which one you’re actually in.
I’m no film buff, but this is definitely one of Tarkovsky’s most important works. He’s a hard director to understand no matter what, so you might as well start here! The Russian is fairly hard to understand, and I did need the help of subtitles to understand what was going on.
Transitioning from English-French dictionaries to French-only dictionaries is a big step towards fluency but it can be intimidating. Luckily, online resources exist to help make French dictionaries more accessible.
For intermediate to advanced French learners seeking to take their vocabulary and understanding to the next level, The Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL) is an invaluable online resource. It is a searchable compendium of French language dictionaries, most notably Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé and the 9th edition of the official Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. For those interested in French outside l’Hexagone, CNRTL also has a searchable “Francophone” dictionary.
As a pedagogical tool, CNRTL, particularly when set to the TLFi (Le Trésor), does an excellent job of breaking definitions down into more digestible parts while also clearly differentiating between different uses of the words (metaphoric, literal, etc). Rather than struggling through an entire entry, the website quickly draws your attention to short portions of the text that are most essential.
By clicking “options d’affichage” you can toggle the color-coding settings to highlight what you’re looking for. The default settings use yellow for definitions, green for the word as it is used in a phrase, and orange to specify a certain technical domain or context in which the word may be used. Most un-colored text consists of examples of the word used in a sentence.
Beyond dictionaries, the portal also offers additional tabs such as etymology, synonyms, and antonyms, for those interested in the relations between words. The synonym tab is particularly useful when it comes to spicing up your writing (for example, when you’ve used “aussi” far too many times in one paper). It can also be helpful when it comes to making connections between the literal and metaphorical senses of words.
Here we can see, for instance, that while “esprit” has many definitions and connotations, the most often invoked synonym in English is “intelligence”. Esprit can be difficult to parse in French, since it can mean both mind and spirit, whereas in English we tend to clearly differentiate between the two. The analysis of synonyms here suggests that, outside of religious contexts, it is far more common for esprit to signify ‘mind’.
If you’re planning a trip to Russia soon or hoping to go there eventually, museums are a great way to learn about a city’s history and culture. Of course there’s the Hermitage in St. Petersburg: Peter the Great’s old palace that is now one of the largest art museums in the world. If you go to Russia’s cultural capital, you’ll have to stop by that one, but here are a few others that you can’t miss.
The Russian Museum
Established by Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Museum is the first and largest collection of Russian art in the world. It is housed in the Mikhailovsky Palace right off of Nevsky Prospect by the Gostini Dvor metro stop. The collection features Russian art from the 10th to the 21st centuries, along with a sizable amount of modern art from other countries. You can find names from Rublev to Picasso, and the layout is much less intimidating than that of a big museum like the Hermitage.
The Menshikov Palace
Built for Alexander Menshikov, a royal official and one of Peter the Great’s closest friends, Menshikov palace was the first palace in St. Petersburg, and the only one to survive from the beginning of the 18th century. The admission is free for students, and inside you’ll see rooms and furniture both from the time period of the palace and after. It’s located right on the Neva river, and is beautiful to walk around inside and outside.
Dostoevky’s House
Though only one of many house museums, this is perhaps the most famous, as it is for one of Russia’s most iconic writers. Dostoevsky was a known wanderer, drifting from house to house. This is partially his childhood building, and the last apartment he and his family lived in until his death. The museum is only a few rooms and features his own furniture and pictures from his family and daily life. After seeing this museum, be sure to check out the other house museums such as that of Nabokov and Akhmatova!
Much of the cast during a scene. Courtesy of Netflix.
Looking for a new Spanish tv show filled with dramatic teenagers and a series of incredibly unlikely but intriguing events? Elite has you covered.
Netflix released season 1 of Elite in 2018, and although being a Spanish show, it gained popularity around the world. Elite follows 3 scholarship students from a working-class part of town as they begin attending Las Encinas, a rich private high school, for Spain’s most elite. This parallels flashforwards to the main character’s mysterious murder. Throughout the series, viewers are watching the events that led up to the killing along with police interrogations following the murder. This leads a viewer to constantly ponder who was killed, who was the killer, and what was their motive.
Elite has also been recognized for the diversity of its characters and storylines, taking on tough subjects especially for a dramatic teen tv show. There’s an inclusion of a gay storyline between two male characters, and their struggle to be accepted by one boy’s Muslim family. Additionally, one girl struggles with her religious identity when her school requires her not to wear a hijab to school. One main character even deals with the trials of being HIV-positive for the rest of their life.
Elite tries to cover a large variety of themes, from those mentioned above, to class and race struggles. The show has been criticized for often glossing over these themes in order to focus on flashy drama. However, in comparison to other shows of the same genre, it still introduces many issues relevant to young people of this time.
Elite does a good job of developing its characters as well. Many tropes are used at the beginning of the show, but it soon becomes clear that each character has a rich and interesting backstory explaining their actions as the show progresses.
Samuel during the murder scene that the show is focused on. Courtesy of Netflix.
For Spanish-language learners, Elite offers great practice. The show is meant for native Spanish speakers and uses Spain-centric Spanish. Characters give beautiful dialogues, some slow and some fast. For any level of Spanish learner, Elite offers a learning opportunity. Beginners may opt to listen in Spanish but use English subtitles, intermediates may rely on Spanish subtitles, and expert speakers can face a challenge by watching the show completely subtitle-free.
