Confidence

I have just been watching a couple of videos about conversation skills in English, and I have realized that these videos can encourage some friends of mine who are having problems of confidence when they have to speak English. I would like them to know how much fun they are missing just because of their fear. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes, who doesn't? It is part of the learning process.
During a conversation, whatever the language is, you need to keep it alive. Therefore, you can't stop talking continuously, or whenever you make a mistake. You have to keep going. The most important thing is that, in the end, people you are talking to can understand the message you are trying to communicate.
Below, you can click a couple of links where you can watch the videos I refer to above. I hope you enjoy them and I would love if they help you to overcome your fears.
Video 1
Video 2

Small print

Are most of us illiterates? It feels that way. Lately, it seems that you can't read if you forget to read the small print in every kind of texts, mostly in the important ones. Besides, the small print is getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, it will be necessary an electronic microscope to read it.
Do you have the same feeling I have? I am almost sure that everybody is trying to deceive us. In response to that, people is getting more and more suspicious about other people. This is similar to an snowball effect.
I must admit that I have always been a bit distrustful, and I can't help it. What can I do? It must be in my genes, I don't know. However, in the current situation, I consider this quality really valuable. It can help you to avoid being a victim of most part of  deceptions.
Small print has become a powerful tool. Unfortunately, it is a useful and simple tool to hide important information in order to scam people. It is useful because it really works, and it is simple because you only have to change the font size of letters in a way that you can make a lot of people be unaware of certain critical conditions in all sort of legal documents.

This is my advice. If you ever read a paragraph like this, you are not a fool and you are not easy to deceive. Make sure you read and understand the whole text before signing anything.

Heroism

Two brothers have just finished their daily run of about 12 miles. They are walking next to the lake when they hear a big noise and see how a trolleybus was sinking after falling from the dam wall. The older brother swam to the place where he saw the trolleybus sink. He dived into the water in order to help almost one hundred people who where inside that underwater coffin.

When he reached the trolleybus at 10 meters below surface he had to break the back window with his bare feet, and he started to pick up people and bring them back to the surface, where his brother took care of them. He recovered around 30 people from the lake bottom, but only 20 survived. After all that effort in those extreme conditions (cold water, zero visibility, the wounds in his legs, and water pollution) he fainted and remained in a coma for 45 days. All this ruined his brilliant career as finswimmer (11-time World Record holder, 17-time World Champion, 13-time European Champion and 7-time USSR Champion, and he was only 23 years old).
What would you think about the story above? Do you think it is real or just the plot of the last movie I watched? I would probably think the same as you, but the truth is that it really happened. It was in 1976, and the hero in this story is Shavarsh Karapetyan who wasn't recognized by his heroism until 2 years after the event. This delay was due to the fact that, apparently, politicians didn't want to make public the inability of the rescue services to handle the situation. This wasn't the only time he risked his life to save people. In 1985, he was again severely injured when he entered a burning building that had people trapped inside to help them to get out.
In my opinion, this world needs more people like this man, who are able to risk their lives to save other's. Unfortunately, there are more people who are willing to hurt others in order to get their goals. As an example, we have the person who kept hidden this story for two years, just to avoid taking responsibility for the fact that someone who worked for him wasn't doing his job correctly. I just hope that all of us are heroes, and if the situation requires it we will be willing to help no matter what it takes.
I have a question. Why on earth do we idolize athletes, artists, or politicians and we ignore people like this real hero? Do you have an answer?

Some news

It has been a while since my last post. I think I was not in the mood for writing. But, now I am, or at least I am writing and I hope I will post it, eventually.
I put English learning aside for a while, and almost everything else. However, I came back stronger than ever (I mean, I came back), and now I continue trying to improve my English, and I started to learn French in a more serious way, studying a bit every day. I will let you know when my writing skills in French are good enough by my standards writing something here.
For now, I am trying to expand my vocabulary, and get used to listen to people speaking French. In order to help me to get my goal, I am using several tools, but the most helpful until now is this website. They use an interesting method to teach languages (Spanish, French, and German at this time). As part of your learning process, you have to make translations of pieces of documents that you can find on the Internet.

The man behind this idea is the same that invented well-known applications captcha and re-captcha. The main idea of this project is quite similar to the one behind re-captcha. A lot of people will help to do a huge job that computers are not able to do by themselves yet. Indeed, translating all the documents on the web to the most extended languages in the world is not easy task. However, this project intends to use millions of people to help to get the job done.
In my opinion, the most clever idea is the way to achieve that that amount of people help with the task for free. And the answer is giving them (or us, because I am a user too) a quality language course in return. Moreover, there are experts that think this could be Google's next big acquisition (for more information, read this article).
Anyway, I think it is a very helpful and amusing project, and I believe it is going to help me learn French and who know what other languages.

P.S. If you are interested in learning or improving a language, I recommend you to try this tool.

Celebration

I am not really a football fan, but in the past I enjoyed when Spanish national football team won a championship. However, today I have been watching the game (the Eurocup final) in a bar full of people enjoying the historical event, and I didn't feel even a bit of excitement. I was reading a magazine during the first half, and I focused on TV only from time to time. Besides, I left the bar just after the fourth goal was scored, and before the game finished and the celebrations started. I don't feel I have anything to celebrate, and I am not pretending. When I was having my tea at the bar, I thought that the game was quite interesting, but nothing else. It was a feeling similar to watch a cricket match between England and Pakistan, I guess. I thought I was one in a million, I felt like a freak. Nonetheless, there are more people who feel like I do. I have just read this, and now I feel better. And I don't feel better because I am not a freak anymore (I don't mind about that, actually). I feel better because there are other people who know what is really important, and what is not. Finally, I am not criticizing people who enjoy Spanish team's victories. I am just worried about the fact that most people don't care about the economic situation of our country as much as about winning the Eurocup championship.

Note: I bet that tomorrow's edition of the majority of Spanish newspapers will put in their front page a huge picture of the Spanish football team, instead of a headline explaining the rising prices of gas, butane and electricity. And what is worse, people is not going to start reading until they find something related to the game.

Dreaming

I have just received a message in my phone. It is a poll about the actions to take against the last politician found guilty of accepting bribes. There are three basic choices: to let him out, to let him out and pay a fine for the double of the money he accepted, or to fire him and send him to jail for 2 years. You can also send your suggestions for the punishment, but I think the second one would be fair. There are still almost 12 hours left to send my vote. I will use my computer because the Internet connection in my phone is not completely reliable, but if you are answering an official poll there is no charge applied to the message.

By tomorrow noon the sentence chosen will be known, and 24 hours later it will be effective. I consider this punishments necessary and really effective in order to discourage other public servants to take advantage of their position to get personal profit. Besides, since this idea has been put in practice, the cases of corruption discovered have decreased in more than 65%.
I remembered when this system based in phone messages were used in those old TV programs like "Big brother" and the like to help to decide which of the participants were going to be sent home (expelled). It was a dark time in our recent history, however the consequences of that and other stupid things that happened then made people think, and in the end take control of the situation before it was too late. Back then, there were a lot of tools, but we needed to start using technology for something useful and not just to waste our time and don't think about things that really matter.
In my opinion, one of the most important decisions we take in the past using this system was about the maximum wages, and the ways to pay workers for their extra effort, or their value for a company. Finally, it was decided that there would be a standard monthly pay for every worker in the country, and there would be extra benefits in the form of days off, or to accumulate points that can be used to get promotions, change your job location, etc. The standard salary allows everybody to live with all needs covered and even some luxuries are possible.

This is just fiction, but I would love to read something like this during my lifetime. Do you think it will be possible? You can send an SMS to ...

The well

I remember when I was a child, maybe 8 or 10 years old. During the early winter, there was a time when people in my village usually made a powerful beverage called "augardente", meaning literally "flaming water". At the time, it was quite an adventure when my parents let me go to the place where the person in charge of the distillation was doing the "magic", I mean, turning the waste generated in grape's harvesting into that drink for tough people. There was a fire, and around it several people telling stories and tasting that transparent liquid, almost like water for the untrained eye. So similar to it, and at the same time so different. I particularly remember a story about a well that still exists today near where we were sit enjoying the warmth of the fire during the cold winter nights. I guess that they only told us that story to make fun of us, and because they knew we would believe it. The thing was that the well was so deep that you could not see the bottom of it, and if you got too close it would swallow you. After telling us how dangerous it was, and after catching our complete attention, they started to enumerate the things that had already fallen in it, and never came back. The list included a cow, several cats an dogs, a goat, and my neighbor's grandmother. Thinking about it, it was like a black hole in the Earth instead of in the middle of the universe. It is just a funny story now, however, at that time it was really frightening and scary, it was like a horror movie's script. And I have never been close enough to that well in order to see or not to see the bottom of it. Later, when I was a bit older, someone told me once that the well was actually quite deep (about 70ft), and several animals had fallen into it because there were no protections at all in that place. Nowadays, it doesn't sound really scary , but dangerous.