This Is A Custom Widget

This Sliding Bar can be switched on or off in theme options, and can take any widget you throw at it or even fill it with your custom HTML Code. Its perfect for grabbing the attention of your viewers. Choose between 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns, set the background color, widget divider color, activate transparency, a top border or fully disable it on desktop and mobile.
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So far Andrew has created 170 blog entries.

Switching suddenly to a second language never fails to impress

April 20th, 2014|Tags: , , , |

James Bond or Jason Bourne - Multi-linguals are very common in Hollywood How many times have we seen films in which the hero switches seamlessly and unexpectedly into a second language? James Bourne or James Bond. It's a common Hollywood trick - along with playing chess - for suggesting high intelligence. I have recently been watching House of Cards and in Series 1, a billionaire suddenly starts talking Chinese on the phone. There were no subtitles but he seemed to be negotiating. Even though it was a TV stunt - I was impressed. It looked cool [...]

Multi-lingual Premiership Football Managers Trounce Mono-linguals

April 7th, 2014|

Mono v Multi-lingual Premiership football managers - who comes out on top? Update: I wrote this 3 years ago - if you look at the Premiership today (13 November 2016) it is clear - you HAVE to be multilingual to be a succssful manager. The highest ranking club is managed by a monolingual is Burnely, managed by Sean Dyche...currently 9th in the league. All above them are managed by multi-linguals. In today's top flight football, teams are typically made up of players from many different countries. For that reason it is assumed that football managers that can communicate with [...]

Languages and football – how languages impact team success

April 6th, 2014|

World class football managers learn languages At KLOO we are always banging on on about how languages can benefit many parts of your life. Your career, holidays, mental agility and even your health can all improve by learning languages. Listening to a match on BBC Radio 'Five Live' the other day, the commentators were talking about the impact of languages on the performance of football teams - or more specifically on the ability of the manager to successfully manage the football team. The commentators began by musing about how the new manager of Tottenham Hotspur, Tim Sherwood, was being held [...]

If you could learn a language like this – Just imagine how easy it would be!

March 21st, 2014|

Imagine you found languages really tough. Imagine you found learning vocabulary, gender, agreement, grammar and all things language totally bewildering. Imagine you don’t think you can do it. You switch off and decide to drop it as a subject. Many children and, indeed, adults feel this way. Then Imagine This… Now imagine that your teacher brings in a new game that makes language fun. Imagine the game shows you, in seconds, how to easily make thousands of foreign sentences. Imagine too that each time you played, you effortlessly picked up 15-25 important words. Imagine the whole [...]

Language Teacher Update: Better Learning, More Fun and Special Offers

March 14th, 2014|

What's the most potent tool for a Language Teacher? What simple step can a language teacher take to make a big difference in student performance? What motivates children to try harder and increases their focus? What accelerates learning and teaches important grammar principles, without it ever feeling like hard work? On top of all of that, what could help students to: Create sentences (in seconds) (see video of how) Speak out loud Effortlessly learn essential vocabulary (see video of how) See what teachers say (watch MFL teachers) And what would make language lessons a lot of fun and make [...]

It PAYS to learn a second language

March 6th, 2014|

Better careers and better incomes Second Languages are good for your career There are lots of reasons for learning a second language. A language will let you see the world through different lenses, allow you to appreciate other cultures and even bestows mental health benefits. It can also have a profound impact on your employment prospects, career and income - more so than other academic subjects. If you want to give your prospects a boost - employers look for competence in second languages as a way of sifting through CVs. If you have [...]

Learning a language: from Resilience to Brilliance

January 22nd, 2014|Tags: , |

The secret ingredient to be brilliant. You can be fluent in a second language too So often people make things look easy. Great sports people, dancers, singers all make their art look like a walk in the park...and so do people who have mastered a second language (I am talking of bilinguals who were not brought up with a second language at home). You can find yourself gawping at them and their ability to converse fluently  in different languages while you stumble to put together a single coherent sentence ...  and you wonder how [...]

2013 Language in review

December 31st, 2013|

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for Language Pie. Here's an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. Click here to see the complete report.

Why learning a language can have more benefits than you’d think

December 14th, 2013|

1. Learn a second language to get ahead in business If you’re a business owner, or work for a business which trades internationally, being able to communicate with your partners, suppliers or customers in their own language is a unique selling point for your business. I used to have a Swiss born boss who was fluent in French. All of our French clients wanted to deal exclusively with him for the simple reason he spoke French. He did great business and won many contracts on the back of his fluency. 2. Learn a second language to [...]

Never be lost for words! The best way to build vocabulary in a foreign language

December 6th, 2013|

Hand gestures only get you so far The bedrock of learning a language is vocabulary. Without it your ability to communicate is limited to pointing and hand gestures (and we can even get the meanings of those wrong!) When we start learning a language we need to accumulate high frequency words...words that are useful, appear often in the language and can be used in multiple situations. With several hundred well chosen words you can go a long way. What's the best way to learn them? Different ways to build your vocabulary There are [...]

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