Hey everybody!  Now that I have you thoroughly terrified to fly…. Luis and I want to invite you to fly with us to Argentina and experience among our activities, the famous “Paris of the South” (Buenos Aires), Mendoza (wine country) and Colonia, Uruguay.   We WON’T be going to Iguazu! …. or maybe we will …  but for sure we will be providing an opportunity for you to experience the [...]

I looked around the cabin as we made our way to our seats, located once again, directly over the wings.  My shoulder was aching from the weight of my carry-on.  But the pain grounded me in reality and that was comforting.  The uneasiness I’d felt since we landed three days before in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, was swelling toward an unavoidable crescendo. [...]

If  language is how a culture verbally defines itself then it seems worthwhile to look beyond mere words to learn what else might shape a regional identity.  That is, language is not just a collection of words.   Language is a reference system that reflects the culture;  it is the expression of  life style, individual biography and history.  To be sure, regions are not just climate and topography;  there [...]

A couple of days ago Twin Citians were taken by surprise by a series of tornadoes.   We´re not Kansas to be sure, but we do get our share of twisters never-the-less.  And they are not the romantic rides The Wizard of Oz might tempt one to conclude … or like Luis thought when he first arrived in Minnesota.  I think I´ve mentioned before that for the first two or three [...]

…my parents were married.  I don’t know all the circumstances of that day or of the days leading to the big event and it’s not too late to find out, so I think I will have to do just that one of these days. I would love to know what they did, and felt and imagined and [...]

You didn´t think I was going to leave that last post at that did you?  Really?  How long have you been reading my Blogs?  Oh, nooooo, now it´s ‘balance the books’ time. So I am with Luis in front of a rather large gathering of prospective students that we have just served a couple of [...]

No, No!  This is not an X rated Blog!  This is an honest Blog about the rough and rocky road that one must take in order to learn another´s language. When I asked Luis this question he whirled around and looked at me with a combination of horror and true confusion.  I could see his [...]

Today I am going to do something a little different and really fun for me.  I am going to introduce you to a student of ours that became a friend and now is more a friend than a student but that doesn´t mean that she has stopped studying with us, only that we could lose [...]

Now who “they” might be and “how” “they” might even be in a position to pass on this little ray of sunshine is a bit of a mystery in and of itself.  We need to overlook the teensy issue that this popular myth assumes that the Internal-consistency method of estimating reliability was employed to reach a conclusion which is just simply impossible in both method or outcome.  That is, if we were divide a group of dead [...]