by Kevin Burton Today’s post is kind of a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the best countries for expatriates. The BBC did that story, based on a survey of people who had left their home country and settled elsewhere. My wife read it and asked “What about health care?” The story didn’t mention …
Category Archives: Mexico
Survey Names Mexico Best Location For Expats
by Kevin Burton I’ve done it before; I could do it again if I had to. So file this under “just in case.” The BBC recently published a list of ten best countries for expatriates – people who leave their home country to live abroad – based on a survey by Internations, the …
Continue reading “Survey Names Mexico Best Location For Expats”
Helpful Hints For Tricky Words And Phrases
by Kevin Burton I can still hear Rosa, one of my English as a Second Language students trying out a new word, “seldom.” I was a reasonably good teacher without having had any training. She was a very good student, having had better teachers in the earlier levels of English study. “Seldom.” …
Continue reading “Helpful Hints For Tricky Words And Phrases”
Chocolate And More Words From The Aztecs
by Kevin Burton If you have an appetite for words and/or dinner and dessert, you’re in the right place. One of the recent Words at Play columns from Merriam-Webster featured words from the Aztecs, who lived in central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. The language they spoke (and about …
Giving The Gifts Of Love And Devotion
by Kevin Burton The best jokes around our house don’t start with “knock knock” or “a guy walks into a bar.” They start with “what do you want for..” On our calendar we have spaced birthdays, Christmas, and our anniversary so that at all times there is some kind of gifting occasion on …
Hey Marketers, Watch Your Language
by Kevin Burton The good people at http://www.thoughtco.com have poked into some language-barrier marketing stories and discovered some of them are simply not true. The first one burst my bubble. I heard somewhere that Chevrolet had to stop selling Nova cars in Mexico because “no va” in Spanish means, “it doesn’t go.” …
Wobble Talk And Fighting Words In English
by Kevin Burton Here’s one subject that never came up when I was teaching English in Mexico – thank God! In English, when you see the vowel combination “ae” how do you pronounce it? This was brought to my attention on an otherwise glorious Saturday morning by our friends at the Merriam-Webster …
Continue reading “Wobble Talk And Fighting Words In English”
A Language That Goes Beyond Words
by Kevin Burton Surely you’ve heard this old joke: What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American. A wicked, sweeping generalization that. Not entirely fair. But …
Speaking Of English, Speaking In British
by Kevin Burton Not smashing, not daft, something mid-table I’d say, to use a football analogy. I thought I was ready, so I had a go, with middling results. Every day Merriam-Webster sends me an e-mail to help me watch my language. A few weeks ago they announced “The Great British Vocabulary …
My Bilingual Doubletalk In Mexico
by Kevin Burton My career as an English as a Second Language teacher came to an abrupt early end one night under the streetlights outside a small taco shop in Puebla. To tell you how and why that happened, I first turn to BBC writer Nicole Chang, who recently wrote about what speaking …
Page 7 