We are not the worshipers of Barack Obama–at least not yet, but we like this song: Yes We Can.
You don’t have to care about politics, particularly American politics, to appreciate the song. Learning to speak a good English is more like training to run a marathon; there will be many times that you feel against the wall, that you run out of energy or hope, and that you want to give up. When those moments occur, you should sing along with Will.i.m.
Yes We Can.
All the English learners out there, let’s all thank the British taxpayers. They help fund two non-profit organizations–sorry, Britons, I mean “organisations”–that offer some great resources for learning English. The sites are free (the Britons may not happy with it), but they are superior to the most of the websites that charge you.
The two organizations and the links are:
1. British Council: LearnEnglish (http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish.htm)
2. BBC: Learning English (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/)
At both sites, you can access to a lot of reading and listening materials. They are uniformly better than those in your textbooks and CDs. And what do you do with these sites? Take our subtle advice: Keep reading until your eyeballs pop out, and keep listening until your ears bleed.
No pain, no gain. Right? That’s how you make a real progress. If you are health-sensitive, or afraid of blood, then try at least to read one article and listen to one news everyday. It’s even better to read aloud and record it at KanTalk for fun, as long as your neighbor doesn’t complain; if he does, tell him to get lost.
Each site also offers the grammar and vocabulary helps. They are no doubt good too. But trust us, ignore them. They are dull (no, we don’t mean Britons), and they don’t do you any good anyway. Better save the time to talk about what you read and listened with another user at KanTalk. Or with your cat, if you are really shy.
It helps a lot.
Apparently, the ESL class that the beer giant Budweiser put out in the last year’s Super Bowl TV commercial was so popular that it got extended this year.
Still featuring the same characters, they let teacher Carlos Mencia take the immigrant students out of the classroom an venture into a bar:
This time the student failed the teacher. The lesson learned?
Accent is sexy.
Hey, English learners, wherever you are, grab a Bud Light, cheers and drink up!
In the article “Is English the next Latin?” by the linguist Nicholas Ostler, it tells several variations of the “Standard English” from the different regions of the world. This is the English spoken in the part of Asia:
Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. Most Chinese schoolchildren learn English. Native speakers of Chinese may say “open the computer” for “turn on the computer,” since in Chinese the same word is used for “open” and “turn on.” Nouns often turn into verbs (”Do not noise in hallway”); the is often dropped, or used for proper nouns (”the England”); very may be used to emphasize verbs (”I very disagree”) and the “s” for plurals is often dropped (”three car” instead of “three cars”). Some linguists discern separate dialects in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland Chinese English. Most Japanese also study English for six to 10 years in school, and here, too, a creative local variant has grown up, as in “Let’s beer” for “Let’s have a beer,” or “I feel apple” for “I feel like having an apple.”
For the other variations, you can read the article here.
About: learning a second language? talk as much as you can, make as many mistakes as you have to, and never, never, never give up.