Personal descriptions

My dear avanzado students. If my memory serves me correctly, we started the course by practicing our ability to describe people (I’m a people person, he’s a good laugh, I keep myself to myself, etc.). Remember?

Recently I have asked you to discuss whether opposites attract (as the cliché goes) or not. We have also talked about personal relationships (longterm commitments, summer flings, lifelong partners, etc.). In all these discussions psychological descriptions tend to feature prominently. I even posted a video explaining lutalica, a neologism that describes “the part of your identity that does not fit into any category”. In short, we have spent some time going over personality types and we've done it in many ways (using adjectives like outgoing or creepy and nouns such as daredevil or nationalist).

So far so good? Okay. That’s why we are now going to sail in rather shallow waters: physical descriptions. Whether you like them or not, physical descriptions are necessary and can be explored from a virtually endless number of angles.

For those of you that need a vocabulary fix I've decided to share this short list of basic phrasal verbs that may come in handy:

Bear in mind that, when we discussed risk-takers, we focussed on a particular kind of person and when we considered holiday options we ended up explaining how "certain vacations are for certain types". It is somehow inevitable, isn't it? I do hope you get used to this because we're going to do a lot of revising.

N.B. Avanzado 2 students: don’t forget the essay (“Do opposites attract?”) is due before the Xmas break.