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Hot Dudes Reading for a Good Cause

Bookworm-fetishists on Instagram have been enjoying the view on the page @hotdudesreading, and now thanks to a collaboration the non-profit First Book the men with “good looks and good books” are helping to raise awareness about the biggest hindrance to literacy in the world: access to books.

First Book provides reduced-cost and free books for educators and programs that work with underserved students. First Book shares some shocking statistics about the reality of underserved children. For example, in some of America’s lowest-income neighborhoods, there is only one book for every 300 children. Books are not only missing in homes, but also in many pre-schools and after-school programs that serve low-income families. First Book aims to give these children the chance to grow into engaged and capable bookworms by making books more accessible to families, educators, and organizations. First Book has doled out 125 million books to date.

The brainy dudes showcased on the Hot Dudes Reading website and Instagram page had their favorite first books that sparked their appetites for reading and set them up to one day become models for literacy. By submitting pictures of men reading books (no e-readers allowed!) with the hashtag #hotdudesreadingforacause, Instagrammers can raise awareness about the funding drive on Kickstarter. A $5 donation can provide two books.

To donate to Hot Dudes Reading for a Cause Kickstarter, click here.

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Netflix Produces Two Original Spanish-Language Series

pictures for netflix of film roll and 3d glassesLast summer, Netflix announced the production of its first Spanish-Language original series, Club de Cuervos. The series centers on a family feud among heirs of a soccer club. It was directed by Mexican producer, Gaz Alazraki, and is set to premiere this year. “Gaz has the disruptive vision and creative storytelling we were looking for in producing our first original series in Mexico,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer.

“We’re confident our members in a market as important to us as Mexico and Latin America will love this family comedy.” A second Spanish-Language Netflix original series, Narcos, is also in the works. Narcos will be a Columbia-set drug crime thriller directed by Brazilian director Jose Padilha.

About the Show

The emergence of a middle class consumer market in Latin America has attracted big attention from internationally expanding companies. Netflix recently said it has signed more than 5 million subscribers in Latin America since its September 2011 launch. It’s quickly risen to become the dominant subscription video-on-demand service in the market. The second-largest regional over-the-top service, Claro Video, chalking up only an estimated 1 million subscriptions.

“We are investing in content that would be attractive to (Latin America) but would also appeal to viewers across the world,” says Netflix communications chief Jonathan Friedland. He adds that original Netflix shows are also in production in France, the U.K. and Canada. Tony Wible, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, estimated in a report this year that Netflix will spend almost $5 billion on original productions in 2016.

The NMABE State Spanish Spelling Bee

Picture 1Five hours and 18 rounds after the competition began, Alexis Gutierrez, a seventh grader from Hagerman Middle School was crowned champion of the 22nd Annual NMABE State Spanish Spelling Bee sponsored by the New Mexico Association for Bilingual Education (NMABE), the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Spanish Resource Center and Santillana, USA. The first through fifth place winners are now eligible to compete in the Fifth Annual Santillana, USA National Spanish Spelling Bee which will be held on Saturday, July 18, 2015 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. NMABE began the Spanish Spelling Bee in an effort to promote bilingualism for all children in an environment that nurtures the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of the state of New Mexico, and continues to promote the event throughout the Unites States.

 

Spanish is the Happiest Language

ThinkstockPhotos-71036477A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences revealed that human language has a universal bias towards positivity, and out of all the languages tested, Spanish was the happiest. The study is a big data confirmation of the 1969 Pollyana hypothesis, or the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones. The name comes from the 1913 novel Pollyana by Eleanor H. Porter, which follows the story of a girl who plays the “glad game” and tries to find something to be glad about in every situation. “Put more simply,” said the two psychologists who came up with the hypothesis, “humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life.”

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Netflix Produces Two Original Spanish-Language Series

ThinkstockPhotos-458070303Last summer, Netflix announced the production of its first Spanish-Language original series, Club de Cuervos. The series, which centers on a family feud among heirs of a soccer club, was directed by Mexican producer, Gaz Alazraki, and is set to premiere this year. “Gaz has the disruptive vision and creative storytelling we were looking for in producing our first original series in Mexico,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer. “We’re confident our members in a market as important to us as Mexico and Latin America will love this family comedy.”A second Spanish-Language Netflix original series, Narcos, is also in the works. Narcos will be a Columbia-set drug crime thriller directed by Brazilian director Jose Padilha.

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1st Bilingual Education Fair of Los Angeles is May 3rd

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Language Magazine is sponsoring Los Angeles’ first Bilingual Education Fair to be held on May 3rd at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. Organized by French Morning, with the support of the French  Embassy, the event provides the opportunity for up to a thousand parents of potential students to learn more about dual-language education. Editor Daniel Ward will be on the panel for the event’s opening roundtable on The Bilingual Brain & the Advantages of Being Bilingual at 10 am. The event provides the opportunity for parents of potential students to meet all the actors of the bilingual education community, including schools, publishers, and education businesses. Bilingual education opportunities and dual immersion programs have increased for children in Southern California, the state with the highest number of English Language Learners (ELLs) who have a heritage language other than English. The upcoming Bilingual Education Fair will give a comprehensive outlook for those who are interested in the growing trend.

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Confessions of a Hyperpolyglot

ThinkstockPhotos-503205667Timothy Doner has been referred to “The World’s Youngest Hyperolyglot” by various media outlets, and has been interviewed on his passion for words and languages by the BBC and The New York Times. Beginning with a casual interest in Hebrew, Doner eventually became enraptured with languages, using grammar books, iPhone applications, and online communities to further pursue his interests. He now speaks over 20 languages at the age of 16. However, as his public polyglot reputation solidifies, Doner struggles with the definition of fluency, and the question of whether his language skills hold up to the hype. In a recent Ted Talk, Doner says he, “realized that you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand parts of it. If the standard of speaking a language is to know every word — to feel equally at home debating nuclear fission and classical music —then hardly anyone is fluent in their own native tongues.”

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California Nominates ELL Advocates to Board of Education

Governor-Elect Jerry Brown Holds Meeting On California Budget DeficitCalifornia Governor Jerry Brown filled the last two openings in the 11-member California State Board of Education by nominating Ting Lan Sun, an executive director of one of the state’s oldest charter schools, and Feliza Ortiz-Licon, a senior administrator of the nation’s largest Hispanic Civil Rights Organization. Ortiz-Licon’s nomination is especially applauded due to her history of advocacy for English Language Learners (ELLs).

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Constructed Language and Game of Thrones’ Linguistic Lure

game-of-thrones-poster_85627-1920x1200Game of Thrones premieres this weekend and this season more and more people will be able to understand the two subtitled fantasy languages of the show: Valyrian and Dothraki. Starting with the snippets and phrases of the Dothraki language featured in George R.R. Martin’s series, A Song of Fire and Ice, linguist David J. Peterson created a full working language for the adapted HBO show. Last October, Living Language released an official language learning pack for Dothraki that features books, CDs, an expanded online course option, and even a companion iPhone application. There are over 6,000 world languages, but there are also over 1,000 invented languages from fantasy novels, sci-fi television shows, and other creative sources that have enough grammar and vocabulary to be fully used in everyday life. If revitalized languages or incomplete languages from video games and novels were also included in the count, there would be more invented languages than natural languages. So what exactly are invented languages, how are they created, and do they have a place in the modern world?

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The Endangered Language Alliance

ELA-web3The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), an independent non-profit founded in 2010 by a team of linguists, recently worked with Grubin Productions to produce the PBS documentary, Language Matters. The film premiered on January 19, 2015 and focuses on what is lost when a language goes extinct and how to save languages from dying. There are currently over 6,000 languages in the world and it is estimated that one disappears every two weeks. Language Matters, which can be watched in its entirety for free online, follows the stories of Aboriginal linguistic diversity in Australia, the endangered Welsh language of Wales, and Hawaiian language activists fighting to save their native tongue. The documentary is just one of the many projects by the ELA dedicated to fighting the increasing decline of linguistic diversity.

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