LET'S LEARN ENGLISH THROUGH SONGS!

Before singing some nice songs which offer a chance to improve pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, click here to read an interesting blog post about music and language learning.

AS YOU LIKE IT

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1599.  Shakespeare drew the story from a story called Rosalynde written by Thomas Lodge and published in 1590.

The plot is very simple:  dramatic troubles caused by two evil brothers toward good brothers, and related obstacles to marriage for several couples in the play (most notably Rosalind and Orlando) are easily overcome, and a happy ending is never in doubt. On one level, the play was clearly intended by Shakespeare as a simple amusement; several scenes in As You Like It are essentially sketches made up of songs and joking banter. But on a somewhat deeper level, the play provides opportunities for its main characters to discuss subjects  such as love, aging, the natural world, and death from their particular points of view. At its center, As You Like It presents us with the respective worldviews of Jaques, a chronically melancholy pessimist preoccupied with the negative aspects of life, and Rosalind, the play's heroine, who recognizes life's difficulties but shows a positive attitude that is kind, playful, and, above all, wise. 

SHOULD, MUST OR HAVE TO?

Here you can download a PDF presentation of these verbs which refer to obligation. Click here to read about their differences.

Now you can do the following exercises: 

Must or Have to
Must or Have to
Must, Mustn’t or Have to
Should
Mustn't or Don't have to 

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Shakespeare is argued to have produced a large collection of work, including 38 plays and 154 sonnets. His plays are divided into four main sections: the Histories, the Tragedies, the Comedies, and the Romances. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a Comedy, even though it does have some elements of the magical Romance genre. His work has been produced since the Renaissance in all artistic mediums from the original theatre to opera, symphony, film, and ballet. It has also been revisited countless times by the same artistic medium because it is said to be timeless. Shakespeare's topics are about love, hate, murder, jealousy, miscommunication, chastity, history, and even magic. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream includes the classic elements of Shakespeare's comedies. It has a framing structure, with the Athenian world opening and closing the play, has a complex  plot using magic and fantasy, has a happy ending, and uses a major character as comic relief, so to speak. Most of Shakespeare's plays use this character of the clown, jester, or commoner to spark slapstick laughter. Bottom and his players qualify to this  kind of character in the play. Also, these lower-class characters speak in prose, not in poetry (iambic pentameter), like the rest of Shakespeare's characters.

This play is a combination of various  plots:  the Athenian lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius; the king of the fairies, Oberon who is at odds with his wife, Titania, because she refuses to relinquish control of a young Indian prince whom he wants for a knight and the band of Athenian craftsmen rehearsing the play Pyramus and Thisbe that they hope to perform for Theseus, duke of Athens, who is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Through these three plots, the common thread is the illustration of the ridiculous behaviour of lovers of every sort, every creature, and every class  -  it seems love is a wholly irrational passion, the slave of whim and fancy. On the contrary, the duke of Athens, engaged to Hippolyta, represents power and order throughout the play; he appears only at the beginning and end of the story, removed from the dreamlike events of the forest.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in 1595 and performed most likely for Queen Elizabeth  I and her court.
Here  you can find the full text of the play.  

FEBRUARY

"Why, what's the matter,

That you have such a February face,

So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?"

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

THE ART OF POETRY

Click here to download a PDF presentation of the elements of poetry.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.  W. H. Auden 

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.  Robert Frost

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.  Salvatore Quasimodo 

ENJOYING EMMA

"A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched - she admitted - she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's having some hope of a return? It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself! Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. Till now that she was threatened with its loss, Emma had never known how much of her happiness depended on being first with Mr. Knightley, first in interest and affection."

Here you  can download and read the eBook of Jane Austen's Emma; you can also listen to the full audio-book.

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Here  you can also read the post I wrote last year.

ANNE FRANK

Anne Frank was one of over one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. She was born Annelies Marie Frank on 12 June 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.

For the first 5 years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister, Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Otto Frank and his family fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he had business connections.

The Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940. In July 1942, German authorities and their Dutch collaborators began to concentrate Jews from throughout the Netherlands at Westerbork, a transit camp near the Dutch town of Assen, near the German border. From Westerbork, German officials deported the Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland.

During the first half of July, Anne and her family went into hiding in an apartment which would also hide four Dutch Jews as well - Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. For two years, they lived in a secret attic apartment behind the office of the family-owned business at 263 Prinsengracht Street, which Anne referred to in her diary as the Secret Annex. Otto Frank's friends and colleagues, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Jan Gies, and Miep Gies, had helped to prepare the hiding place and smuggled food and clothing to the Franks at great risk to their own lives.

On 4 August 1944, the Gestapo discovered the hiding place after being tipped off by an anonymous Dutch caller.

The Gestapo sent them to Westerbork; one month later, in September 1944, SS and police authorities placed them  on a train transport to Auschwitz. Selected for labor due to their youth, Anne and her sister, Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, in northern Germany in October 1944.

Both sisters died of typhus in March 1945, just a few weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. SS officials also selected Anne's parents for labor. Anne's mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived the war. Soviet forces liberated Otto at Auschwitz on  27 January  1945.

While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes, and experiences. Found in the secret apartment after the family was arrested, the diary was kept for Anne by Miep Gies, one of the people who had helped hide the Franks. It was published after the war in many languages and is used in thousands of middle school and high school curricula in Europe and the Americas. Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust.

Here you can watch a documentary about Anne Frank and her family. 

I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!

Anne Frank 

ANCIENT BRITAIN

Here you can download a PDF presentation of ancient Britain.  

Now let's watch a short video which explores the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Battle of Hastings, and the imposition of Norman power on Saxon England.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy by William Shakespeare which was written between 1598 and 1599.  The play was included in the First Folio, published in 1623. 

Shakespeare adapted the love-affair of Claudio and Hero from one of the Novelle by Matteo Bandello of Mantua, published in 1554, but the witty wooing of Beatrice and Benedick is original.

Much Ado About Nothing is generally considered one of Shakespeare's best comedies, because it combines elements of lightness and laughter with more serious meditations on honor, shame  and deception, and because its characters and intrigues are so engaging. Like As You Like It and Twelfth Night, it is a blissful comedy that ends with multiple marriages and no deaths. 
Here you can find the full text of the play.

ENJOYING SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Here you  can download and read the eBook of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility; you can listen to the full audio-book and watch an interesting review on the novel as well. 

Click here to download a useful guide which offers ideas  and tips on how to teach the works of Jane Austen.      

   

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

Here you can find a listening comprehension lesson about New Year's resolutions. 

JANUARY

The days are short, 

the sun a spark, 

hung thin between 

the dark and dark 

fat snowy footsteps 

track the floor 

and parkas pile up 

near the door 

the river is 

frozen place, 

held still beneath 

the trees black lace 

the sky is low 

the wind is gray 

the radiator 

purrs all day. 

John Updike

AULD LANG SYNE

Auld Lang Syne  is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song. It is well known in many countries, especially in English-speaking countries, its traditional use being to celebrate the start of the New Year at the stroke of midnight. 

It is common practice that everyone joins hands with the person next to them to form a great circle around the dance floor. At the beginning of the last verse, everyone crosses their arms across their breast, so that the right hand reaches out to the neighbour on the left and vice versa. When the tune ends, everyone rushes to the middle, while still holding hands. When the circle is re-established, everyone turns under the arms to end up facing outwards with hands still joined.

By extension, it is also sung  to symbolize other "endings/new beginnings"  - including  farewells, funerals (and other memorials of the dead), graduations. Moreover, the tune is played, and sung by the crowd, in the final stages of the annual Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

The song's Scots title may be translated into English literally as "old long since", or more idiomatically, "long long ago", "days gone by" or "old times".  Therefore "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be translated as "for (the sake of) old times".

Read Julianna W. Miner's beautiful article about this melancholy time of the year.