Podcast USA

I= Interviewer

D= David

E= Elias

Interviewers in order of presentation: Estefanía Benítez Sánchez, María Durán, Sandra Barranco, Sandra Romero, Francisco Manuel Alfonso, Patricia Domínguez, Elena Blanco.

I: Hello, welcome to “Thirteen Stripes and Fifty Stars”, a United States’ blog created by a Group of students in Seville. For more information, visit www.thirteenstripesandfiftystars.blogspot.com.es. Today, we have here a native speaker from USA and a Spanish speaker who has lived there for many years.

    For starters, David, where do you come from?

D: Well, I come from a, I mean, I was born in Spain but I live in California, in a small town close to San Francisco called Vacaville.

I: And you Elias?

E: I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States.

I: What do you think about your culture? I mean, what main differences do you notice between American-Spanish cultures?

E: Spanish culture in comparison to The United States’ is a lot, to me, I think it’s a lot more relaxed. In the United States everything seems to be much more fast-passed and people constantly are at work working for the entire day and at school all day; here you seem that you have more free time and time yourself.

I: Could you maybe explain the differences on specific parts of life? How is the educational system different, for example?

D: Well, since I studied both schools in Spain and in The United States I can tell you that the main differences between the school systems is that, you know, in Spain it’s a little bit harder but they teach you to be good at a little bit of everything; in The United States it’s, you know, I think that school’s easier and, you know, they have probably more prepared teachers but they teach you to be good at one specific thing as well you know you do later in your job, so you know, I think that’s what I find to be the biggest differences.

I: And what about sports?

D: In sports, there’s more variety in what people like. Over here in Spain, most people just like Soccer and the usual, I mean, they like other kind of sports but over there, you know, basketball is really, baseball is supposed to be most a national pass time, you know, but really American football, you know, is for most people like; I like basketball, I like baseball, I like hockey, boxing, it is more variety, I think when one comes to it.

I: What do you think about Spanish parties?

E: Spanish parties, they start a lot later in the night in comparison to the United States. Most of bar-clubs are closed at 2 am and here that’s the time that most of Spanish students are going up to the clubs. I find it a lot more funny here and it seems like it never stops and there is many more chooses every night.

I: To finish David, could you tell us a funny story that occurred to you while living in The United States?

D: I don’t know if it’s a funny story but it’s the only thing I can think of off the top of my head right now.  The first few weeks I started going to school in California I didn’t know English too well so I was really nervous in the class and every day I would tell the teacher that I was sick so I could go home. And that, you know, then finally one day, my parents, you know, I went to the nurses’ office and my parents were there and they told me I had to stay in school that day, I couldn’t keep going home. And looking back now it’s funny, back then I was really nervous, but you know it’s good that they did that because I was able to stay that day and learn English good and I was able to make friends and it all got better eventually.

I: And what about you Elias?

E: A funny story  I had when I first arrived in Sevilla was just me trying to find my way around the city with all my luggage probably looked ridiculous and asking people with my terrible Spanish and lugging around all of my luggage but eventually it all worked out  and after many hostals and talking to a lot of people in terrible Spanish I found my way.

I: Thank you for your comments and that’s all for today.

D: Thanks for having us, that was a pleasure.

E: You’re welcome, that was a pleasure.

Transcendentalism

            Transcendentalism is one of the most influential American intellectual movements. It is a set of ideas that no American author from the nineteenth century could escape from, either to criticise it or to accept it.

People from around the world started talking about it. Americans were proud about that fact. It is an obscure movement, mixing literature, religion and philosophy. Especially interesting is their view of God. They redefined their idea of Him, of man and of the relationship between the two.

The Transcendentalists had the concept of the oversoul (“what there is”). The oversoul may be divided into two: man and nature. 

And the place God (the divinity; it did not necessarily refer to a human-like being) takes is everywhere, in man and in nature. They considered him far from being a figure removed from man. The divinity was not the most important thing, not more so than man or nature. There was no way to reach the divinity, but there are two things that may be done to understand it better: understand, explore oneself and nature.

Transcendentalism occurred when the main philosophical ideas were Pragmatism, Empiricism and Utilitarianism.

The name of this movement is very self-explanatory: it means to go beyond; beyond material reality, towards the truth. To go beyond material reality one has to either be a poet or use reason.

A poet is the one who has the ability to cross reality with a special insight, and who is able to communicate it to other people. The poet works with intuition.

Reason was used then to refer to what we now know as intuition (or what Emerson called understanding) or instinct.

The most important transcendentalist poets were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau.

                                                  

To know more about these poets, I give you some interesting webs, in which you can see texts (how they used languange) , their biographies and more.

http://www.emersoncentral.com/

http://www.thoreausociety.org/

Source: 

http://www.alcoberro.info/imatges/thoreau.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjglskLt9YCE8bHoAxs5RWXlFhYCpw2KexgHF37-h4ifw1ae-TUPsFnrDBHUkdK8K0f_ZrOO4sdZOZeTWIAa-7iqZMbHcSB8CiVWl-APCc6f_XIT84MwH3FkPBbi5dCEqbibr0SY6pfpYI/s320/Ralph+Waldo+Emerson.jpg

The Stock Market, Wall Street.

The New York Stock Exchange is by far the the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization its listed companies at US$14.242 trillion as of Dec 2011.

The NYSE floor is placed at 11 Wall Street, is composed of four rooms to make easier the trading. The main building is placed at 18 Broad Street, between the corners of Wall Street and Exchange place and was designated a National Historic Landmark.  

Who works in the stock exchange receives the name of broker.

What a broker does? Well,  a broker is the person or business intermediary between a purchaser and a seller, and he is paid for it with a commission. A well as this person or business takes charge of advise about matters related to the deal. A broker in the United States must pass two licenses examination  from the National Association of Security Dealers.

Nowadays, the New York Stock Exchange works through computers which process the information so fast, they cross information of bid and ask.  What we saw on films or TV shows, people shouting, talking on the phone, it’s something of the past, because now all the operations are carried out by computers. 

The stock market has a typical vocabulary, we will see some of these words:

-                       -Junk/high yield bounds: they are bound with a really high risk and high return. This is one of the reasons of the actual financial crisis.

-                     - Bear market/bearish:  this gives name a period of continuous falling down of the stock prices.

-                   -  Bull market/bullish: it is the opposite of I have explained previously (bear market).

And this is the famous bull of Wall Street.

 -    IPO (Initial Price Offer):  It is the first price of the any new stock that starts in the stock market.

-           Dividend/ yield: it’s a fixed amount of money that a company gives per share.

-        Commodities: This is a synonym for goods, and the most important market is the London commodities.

-        PER (Price Earnings Ratio) is the result of a division between the price of a stock and the earnings per sh

are. It is a very useful information about a company.

- Chart is the graphic where appears the price of the stock along the time.

- Shares/stock/equity, these are stock’s synonyms.

- Shareholders, they are the owner of the stocks.

- Target price, is the estimated price of a stock in a determined time.

- Fund, they are companies in charge of managing the money.

- Index, is the generic name of all the stocks markets.

- Exchange, is the place in which options, futures, and shares in stocks, bonds, indexes, and commodities are saled.

- Margin: A margin account lets a person borrow money from a broker to purchase securities. The difference between the amount of the loan, and the price of the securities, is the margin.

These words are used every day in the financial world. And a very famous proverb for all these world is the trend is your friend, which means what you have to do what everybody does, if you follow the trend in market you possibly will be rich, but you have to know how play with money.

http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/undervaluedovervalued/a/wall-street-vocabulary.htm http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_de_Nueva_York http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange http://www.investopedia.com/university/broker/broker.asp#axzz2FaKGVFlZ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agente_(econom%C3%ADa)

Positive and Negative Use of SMS

Effect on verbal language use and literacy

According to research done by Dr. Nenagh Kemp of University of Tasmania, the evolution of ‘textese’ is inherently coupled to a strong grasp of grammar and phonetics. David Crystal has countered the claims that SMS has a deleterious effect on language with numerous scholarly studies. The findings are summarized in his book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. 

In his book, Crystal argues that:

In a typical text message, words are not abbreviated as frequently as widely thought.

Abbreviating has been in use for a long time, and thus is not a novel phenomenon only found in SMS language. Furthermore, some words such as 'sonar' and 'laser' that are accepted as standard words in the dictionary are actually acronyms.

Both children and adults use SMS language, so if adults do not display the errors seen in children's written work, they cannot be attributed to SMS language alone.

Use of abbreviations in written work and examinations is not that prevalent among students.

A prerequisite to using SMS language is the knowledge of spelling, so use of SMS language does not necessarily imply low literacy.

He further observes that this is by no means a cause for bad spelling, where in fact, texting may lead to an improvement in the literacy of the user. There are others who feel that the claims of SMS language being detrimental to English language proficiency are overrated. A study of the written work of 100 students by Freudenberg found that the actual amount of use of SMS language found in the written work was not very significant. Some features of SMS language such as the use of emoticons was not observed in any of the written work by the students. Of all the errors found, quite a substantial amount cannot be attributed to use of SMS language. These included errors that have already appeared even before the advent of SMS language.

There are also views that SMS language has little or no effect on grammar. Proponents of this view feel that that SMS language is merely another language, and since learning a new language does not affect students' proficiency in English grammar, it cannot be said that SMS language can affect their grammar. With proper instruction, students should be able to distinguish between slang, SMS language and correct English and use them in their appropriate contexts.

Efficiency and economy

According to a study, though SMS language is faster to write, more time is needed to read it compared to conventional English.

Effect on verbal language use and communication

Although various other research supports the use of SMS language, the popular notion that text messaging is damaging to the linguistic development of young people persists and many view it as a corruption of the standard form of language.

Welsh journalist and television reporter John Humphrys has criticized SMS language as "wrecking our language". The author cites ambiguity as one problem posed, illustrating with examples such as "lol", which may either be interpreted to mean "laughing out loud", "lots of love", and "little old lady" depending on the context in which it is being used. However, it should be noted that ambiguous words and statements have always been present within languages. In English for example, the word "duck" can have more than one meaning. It could be referring to either the bird or the action, and such words are usually disambiguated by looking at the context in which it was written. The proliferation of SMS language has been criticized for causing the deterioration of English language proficiency and its rich heritage. Opponents of SMS language feel that it undermines the properties of the English language that have lasted throughout its long history. Furthermore, words within the SMS language that are very similar to their English-language counterparts can be confused by young users as the actual English spelling and can therefore increase the prevalence of spelling mistakes.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language

By Sandra Barranco Aguilar