EnglishisEasy/Elinglésesfácil

                                                                                         Let's start by saying that Spiderman is not my favorite superhero. Superman is. But there is something about the Webslinger that appeals to everyone, perhaps his hard luck, his wisecracks while fighting villains, his undefeated belief that justice will prevail in the end. Also Spiderman is Peter Parker, a college student who helps his aunt because his parents are long gone (their whereabouts unknown since Peter was an infant) and his uncle is dead because Peter made a mistake. It is precisely to make up for that mistake that Peter uses his powers (obtained when a spider bit him) to ensure that evil never gets the upper hand. Spiderman is so popular that several comic books f...

Warning: major spoillers ahead. The picture that accompanies this article was first seen in the first Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott. It shows the fossilized corpse of a gigantic space pilot sitting below what it seems an immense telescope. The cause of his death is apparent: a hole in his chest indicates that something burst out of it killing him in the process. This unknown alien came to be called as the Space Jockey and for years fans speculated how the Jockey race was first attacked by the Xenomorphs as are called the mindless beasts of the Alien(s) saga.  Enter Ridley Scott and his Prometheus movie that is a prequel to the Alien movie he directed in 1979. It turns out that Prometheus is the ship that transports human beings to the moon (LV-223) of a distant planet. The reason why they are going there is that recently (it's the late 21st century in this reality) archaelogists have found evidence that indicates an alien race could have visited Earth in the ancient p...

                                                   Learning English is more similar to a bridge than a school subject . I have never understood why we insist on teaching English as something it is not. It is not a school subject but a language, and as such, it is the same as a living being: it changes constantly because it was not meant to be motionless. School subjects have to respond to a series of parameters that restrict teachers and students to a classroom and to the opinions of people who spend their time inside offices, small universes that exist apart from the reality of a language that grows and gets richer every day. As a result, many important elements are forgotten along the way and one of them is that a language is a gateway to another culture(s). This detail is widely and usually neglected, but it's essential to understand a language in its r...

"I got this T for just two dollar." E nglish is a redundant language just as much as Spanish is. There are plenty of examples, but here is one that concerns Spanish learners (Guayaquileans in particular). Street vendors often offer all sorts of objects from pencils to toy cars, from balloons to candy bars and all of them are (what a coincidence!) priced at one dollar and therefore offered at that price. Nevertheless, there are times when they ask for a higher price and then the following occurs: "¡Gafas a dos dólar !" they say. Of course, in Spanish that is a mistake. They should say: "¡Gafas a dos dólares ! (Shades at only two dollars!). Now, here is the question: are those vendors really wrong? Is it really incorrect to say two dollar (or dos dólar for that matter)? Is it 2 not more than 1 and thus already a plural? Guayaquilean street vendors are usually partially illiterate so using the word dollar always in singular regardless of the number is something ...

Prometheus was a Greek Titan, to be more precise the son of another Titan, Iapetus and Clymene (who was one of the marine deities collectively called Oceanids). Unlike the other Titans that rebelled against the gods and Prometheus was in fact welcome in Olympus, home of the gods. It was while at Olympus and when Zeus was unaware, that Prometheus took the fire that only existed in that realm and gave it to mankind. He's believed to be the creator of man (not woman for Hephaestus did that) and is also described as the owner of great intelligence and thepossessor of the unique  ability to foresee the future.  Were his acts for mankind acts of love? At least that's how it was perceived by ancient Greeks. Let's not forget that a titan was basically a god, perhaps more powerful than some of them. In other words this was the god that should have been worshipped by the Greeks and not Zeus who was more a tyrant ruler and cared very little for human beings. For his "tr...

What makes an English teacher? Mmmhhh, tough question. There are so many things that one needs to be a teacher. An English teacher requires a lot more. In the caleidoscope that is the world of EFL teachers in Ecuador there are so many individuals that call themselves English teachers and truly they lack the most important, and obvious, element of them all: an English teacher has to, first and foremost, know English. Having nice teaching strategies and colorful material helps but in the end what a learner needs is a model to follow, someone who provides him / her with the necessary elements for that learner to set up his/her cognitive structure and those elements are Grammar, Vocabulary, Pronunciation and of course, knowledge of the culture. A good starting point is taking English classes and to learn the culture...if you really want to become  a good English teacher

The last of The Big Four is dead. The Big Four of Sci-fi were actually only three and  none other than Robert A. Heinlein (1988), Isaac Asimov (1992),and  Arthur C. Clarke (2008) but not including Ray Bradbury in this group is ignoring his unique contribution to the world of Sci-fi. Bradbury who passed away on June 5th, this year was different from the other three in that technically he was not a science fiction writer but just a writer. His works did not include detailed descriptions of starships, sentient computers or humanized robots.  He focused more on the characters and the situation itself, only that his most well-known stories are set in the future, one that is not mechanized but only a projection of what we have now and who we are at the moment. By association his readers "decided" he was a Sci-fi writer though science is nearly absent from his works if not absent at all. Besides there are those works of his that were not set in the future and are pu...