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A tool (game) to practice vocabulary and grammar: Connections

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Recently, I have become dangerously obsessed with a new game "created" by The New York Times : Connections . Wyna Liu , creator and editor of Connections   says she was inspired by cartoonist Robert Leighton , and not by the BBC gameshow Only Connect , although the similarities are plenty . Anyway, I had no idea about the existence of the BBC gameshow, and since the Wordle acquisition I have been accessing the NYT Games quite frequently, and even more since Connections arrived about a year ago now. It was just a month later that the user and designer Swellgarfo  created in just a couple of hours a free archive of all NYT Connections  and a way to create your own Connections . I did not discover this masterpiece until a few weeks ago and since then I have been using it to create Connections for my family and friends. I have also been using it in my Spanish lessons and it works perfectly. You can make them work in pairs and show you their guesses with a mini-whiteboard, you c
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Why the Spanish term "machista" does not mean "chauvinistic" or "sexist" or any other English word

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This week we have seen in the news the terms  machismo and machista . For example, in this article from The Guardian , they quote a sentence said by football player Jenni Hermoso : " I felt vulnerable and the victim of an aggression, an impulsive, machista act, out of place and without any consent on my part. " The Guardian decided to add the word "chauvinistic" next to the word machista  to help readers understand the meaning of the word. However, it is not quite the same, and there might not be a word in the English language that clearly means what machismo  means. On Sunday the 20th of August, Spain and England played the final match of the FIFA Women's World Cup where Spain won 1 - 0. There was a celebration where Luis Rubiales , then President of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, kissed Spain forward Jenni Hermoso on the mouth. As the player herself explained, that kiss was not consensual, and some people from the sport community, mostly other women,
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GCSE 2023 results are here. What do they mean for Spanish GCSE?

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Ofqual , the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, the ones in charge of checking that qualifications like GCSE "reliably indicate the knowledge, skills and understanding students have demonstrated" and that "assessments and exams show what a student has achieved", among other tasks, published an informative article in 2019 . In it, Ofqual wrote that they had decided to adjust grading standards in GCSE French and German to align them with the ones in Spanish. They had prepared a research about it and realised that by doing this they "will make French and German less severely graded in statistical terms", meaning that French and German seemed more difficult for the students in the UK than Spanish, and they had to intervene. They came to this conclusion after an inter-subject comparability project that started in 2015 where they arrived to the following evidence: "French and German appear to be consistently harder than other GCSE subjec
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