The best way to explain verb is to act it out:
Archive for June, 2008
Acting out the Verbs
June 30, 2008Learn from Slate
June 27, 2008Slate is the pioneer of the web-only magazine. It’ll have a paragraph, if not a chapter, in the history book some day, when the school kids ask what it was like to read a magazine on paper. In its seventh or eighth incarnation now, Slate covers politics and culture with a distinctive style. It becomes a must-read for many.
Last year it started Slate V to dedicate on video reporting. The sounds and images add new dimensions to its distinctive style. These videos are great treats for English learners. You will never get enough out of its Dear Prudence video column. From its a-letter-from-reader, narrated with animations and answered by “Prudence”, you will know how to deal with a crush, or handle a wild dog.
You can subscribe Slate’s newsletter to receive the video links daily through email.
Personality Shifts as You Speak Another Language
June 25, 2008If you speak more than one language, then you have the multiple personalities, according to a report by Reuters:
People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.
…
The researchers said the women classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.
“In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” they said.
Do it have more to do with the languages being spoken or with it being female? Well, the study isn’t assertive about it.
For more details, you can read the whole article here.
Meet Bill from Saigon
June 23, 2008And Bill is…a 60-year old Vietnamese who learned his English from movies:
Learn From Time Magazine
June 20, 2008Time, the first weekly news magazine in the U.S., celebrated its 85-year anniversary this year. It has had a great run over the decades. To keep up with the net generation today, Time is now reporting news in the video and audio forms at its website, just like many other print media.
Among the various video and podcast programs Time produced, the one called 10 Questions stands out. It’s an interview series. In each episode, the reporter asks a well-known public figure ten questions. The conversation is casual, the topics varies, but the answers are always revealing about the person.
The question for you is: What are you going to do with the 10 Questions?
Watch or listen to it as ofen as you can.
BBC Ads on Learning English
June 18, 2008When it comes to learning English, BBC can be very seductive:
Hit a Home Run: Sports English
June 16, 2008Even for the advanced learners, it’s very easy to get lost in the sports English, even if you understand every single word of a phrase–take “hit a home run” as an example. There are just way too much jargon from all sorts of sports. The teacher Jennifer explains some of the most common sport expressions.
Learn from New Yorker
June 13, 2008New Yorker is one of the best magazines that advanced English learners should read before turning off the light every night. The editors the magazine care about what to cover in each issue as much as about how each article comes across. They make sure the writers write well.
In its online edition, New Yorker puts out a lot of audio and video materials: the interviews with the magazine writers about the particular topics they covered; the discussions between the editors and the writers; the readings of the short fictions published in the past.
After turning off the light, you can listen to one of the great interviews at the New York website.
Indians Rush to Learn English
June 11, 2008Millions of Indians learned English many years ago, while the nation was under the British rule. Now even more are rush to do so. But the motivation is different. It has nothing to do with the colonization, but everything to do with the globalization. According to the report by the Voice of America:
“India’s English-speaking population has helped fuel its growing economy. However, only a fraction of the country’s billion-plus people are fluent in the language. Now, amid an economic boom, tens of thousands of people are trying to learn English, in the hope of climbing the economic as well as social ladder.”
For the details, you can read and listen to the report at this VOA page.
The “Wild Geese” Fly out of South Korea
June 9, 2008Koreans are known to be very determined to master English language. It’s not always an individual endeavor; it usually takes a whole family. Meet the “Wild Geese”, known in South Korean as the families that the mothers take their children to live in the English-speaking countries while the fathers stay behind and work to support financially. The Wild Geese typically unite a couple times a year.
According to the report by New York Times:
“Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.
…
South Koreans now make up the largest group of foreign students in the United States (more than 103,000) and the second largest in New Zealand after Chinese students, according to American and New Zealand government statistics. Yet, unlike other foreign students, South Koreans tend to go overseas starting in elementary school — in the belief that they will absorb English more easily at that age.”
You can read the full article and learn more about the life of the Wild Geese here.
