Your coffee, your way

Today we tackle coffee lovers’ worst nightmare: ordering your coffee when you’re abroad. It might seem a mere mundane matter, but don’t let appearances fool you. We all want our coffee our way. So how do you order a coffee in English?

First and foremost, you need to let the waiter /barista know you want a coffee. Here you have some suggestions:

• Can/Could I have a coffee, please?
• I’d like a coffee, please.
• Just a coffee, please.
• Hi, a coffee please.

If you simply ask for a coffee, the barista will probably start grilling you with quickfire questions about the coffee blend, size, temperature, milk, sugar, syrup, shots, extras… but fear not. Ordering your coffee will be smooth sailing thanks to our tips.

The Geek vs Nerd debate

One difficult thing about learning languages is translating. It may seem easy to translate everything when you’re a beginner, but at some point you start finding lots of terms with subtle shades of meaning and therefore without a straightforward correspondence. Why? Because language is culture, and culture doesn’t usually give names to unknown things in its surroundings – or not known yet.

So when people ask us: “How do you say ‘geek‘ /giːk/ in Spanish?“, the answer is “We don’t have a word for that“, so we: a) simply use the word ‘geek’; b) try to make up a fairly close synonym (maybe ‘friki‘ /ˈfrɪk.ɪ/?); or c) just explain what we’re talking about.

If you decide to employ ‘geek’ as it is, it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the meaning. If you go for the second option, the problem gets even bigger when you use that same Spanish synonym for another word in English: ‘nerd‘ /nɜːd/. So today we’ve decided to go for the third option and shed some light on the geek vs nerd debate. The following infographic by MastersInIt.org will give us a hand. 

Life is like a box of chocolates

We have a theory: anything gets better with chocolate. Whether we’re talking about muffins, beer or a bad day, we’ve carried out a series of homemade experiments and can guarantee that chocolate always works its magic!

Yes, we admit it, we have a craving for chocolate. In fact, we enjoy chocolate as much as we appreciate design, so when we found this Chocolates with Attitude limited edition box, we just couldn’t help falling in love.

New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions* are promises that you make to yourself to do or to not do something in the New Year. The term ‘resolution’ implies that you are really determined to achieve them, not allowing anyone or anything to stop you. This is the utopian theory, but what happens in practice? I think most of us will agree you’ll be lucky if you manage to stick to your New Year Resolutions by the end of January.

If you think this is the most likely scenario, you ‘ll probably feel discouraged to invest some time and effort in thinking about your own resolutions. However, research shows us we may be wrong. Curious to know why? Then keep your eyes (and ears) peeled! 

Welcome to the English Cam!

We spend years and years trying to learn English. We study at school, sign up for extracurricular lessons, hire a private teacher and even go to an English summer camp. At least we can say we have an intermediate level of English now, right?

But we still find ourselves wondering how you say this or that in English, and then we realise some things can never be learned from coursebooks. Let’s face it, you only run into some stuff in real life.