New Resources - Mexico Information and Learning Languages

We've added three new links to our blog page to help bring more information to TEFL job seekers and foreign language learners, starting in Mexico City.

Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide by American Jim Johnston, living in Mexico City.

Chilangish invites expats to contribute to what is a bloggy feature magazine covering Mexico City and events, giving the lay of the land to the new arrival.

On the language front, we've added Fluent in 3 Months, a blog that covers the amazing round-the-world journeys of Benny Lewis. We are impressed with his abilities to pick up languages through talent and hard work.

TEFL Reading List - Globish

Next up on our must read list is Globish - How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum.

NY Time review.

and Howard Shapiro's review at philly.com

To anyone who travels beyond the United States, it's not news that, for better or worse, English has become the world's language.

No longer will people abroad automatically let you try out your French or Spanish or Japanese at the start of an everyday transaction in a restaurant, or shop, where your American-tinged tongue is more likely to draw an immediate English response, no questions asked. Sure, there remain places where this rarely happens. They are not the world's cities. And they are likely to be remote.

Well, good for us, you might say, we can be understood, a primary benefit of being human.

Well, bad for the world, you might say; it is becoming less diverse as English becomes the universal lingua franca.

Language not only defines a national culture, it also gives its speakers the tools to turn thoughts into something concrete - and among the beauties of different languages is that they offer different ways of doing so.

Robert McCrum, associate editor of Britain's Observer, is not out to wow us with old news about the ever-progressing global advance of English. Instead, his book is a thoroughly researched, cleverly told big-picture tale of how our language got to be that way - and just what that way means: ungovernable, he says, taken for granted, ever-changing.