Talk is Golden by KanTalk.com

The Home Shopping Network (HSN) meets the needs of one demographic group: those people who are couch potatoes and love shopping at the same time. With a simple studio and an army of the enthusiastic hosts, HSN brings the goods to the shoppers’ living rooms and lures them to buy.

You might resist hard and try not to call the toll-free number to order, which the host urges you to do every other minute. But you should embrace a golden opportunity of learning; HSN is the best place to acquire the tens of thousands of English nouns, not the useless abstract nouns, but the names of the everyday items you consume.

You can either watch it live at HSN’s website, or see the clips at its channel at YouTube.

The Discovery Channel started out as an educational programming in cable TV. It leads you to discover and explore all sorts of fascinating stuffs, like popular science (how bubblegum is made), animals (wild lions, deep sea sharks, and awesome dinosaurs), history (Inside Hitler’s Bunker), and more. In the recent years it also added some reality-based programmings.

“Entertain Your Brain” is the one of the Discovery Channel’s tag-lines. It might as well be “Entertain Your Ears” for English learners, as the varieties of its materials are great to improve your listening comprehensions. Here is the video section at its website that offers a lot of video clips off its various programs.

It lets you watch the full episodes of some of its programs online, but you need to download a player first.

The people–the nameless mass–have little to do with what is reported in the People magazine. Nobody cares to read about average Joe, unless it’s the one with celebrity status–Joe The Plumber. Covering celebrities relentlessly is what the People magazine is famous for.

Apparently, the people never get enough of celebrity news, which drives People the No. 1 selling magazine on newsstand every week. The traffic to its website, People.com, is heavy, too, particularly the Video section. It lists all the video clips under nine different “channels”.

You should probably spend more time at the channel of “They Said What?” than of “Who Looked Hot“.

Mixing investigative reporting, tough television journalists, and magazine-style of storytelling together, 60 Minutes is the most-watched TV news magazine for many years. It sets the golden standard of TV journalism covering the serious news.

In its current format, every episode consists of three 13-minute long stories–each narrated by one of its star reporters–and a short commentary by Andy Rooney in the end. The stories are centered around the current affairs, controversial social and business issues,  and news-making people.

Set your 60 Minutes clock ticking at the CBS News website or at the Yahoo News.

In a few days, either Barack Obama and John McCain will be the next president of the United States. You might not care who wins, but you can learn a great deal of English from them.

Political campaigns are about communications. The candidates use all means–TV and radio ads, live debates, stump speeches in rallies, door-to-door talks–to present their positions and to persuade the voters. In the presidential elections like this one, the candidates and the teams behind them perform the communication craft in the highest art form.

Visiting the multimedia pages of Obama and McCain (also available in the YouTube Channel), you’ll have plenty to watch two candidates talking about the wide range of issues, and–no surprise–attacking to each other. Such great show only comes along once in four years. So take in as much as you can.

The Onion, a news media that many have never heard of, claims itself the “America’s finest news resource”. It is, except that every reporting it does is faked. But all are the finest in the form of parody.

Besides its print circulation, the Onion last year launched The Onion News Network (ONN), a daily web video broadcast. It produces several shows that mock the mainstream news media, with the name like Today Now, or War for the White House. To get a taste of the Onion, watch one of its recent report called “Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas”.

The Onion demonstrate that speaking a decent English is a small potato; making others laugh is the hard nut to crack.

In the past we’ve recommended HULU, a cool online TV that offers some good-quality shows and full-length motion pictures, for learning English while having fun. It turns out that goodies always come in pairs; we found another online TV that competes with Hulu (let’s thank free market).

It’s called Joost. They used to ask for a software download in order to watch their shows; it was a painful process. Now they let you watch through the website directly, just as Hulu does. It features many good TV shows and movies; two of the best are the comedy show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the sit-com Friends.

It has a great collections of music, too. Not bad if you don’t have MTV in your cable lineup.

Just several weeks ago, most people might have guessed that the word “derivatives” is somewhat related to the relatives of a detective. As the global financial crisis has been the headline of every newspaper and broadcasting lately, we know it has little to do with a detective and his uncle; it’s from the sharks, or professionally called traders on Wall Street.

Better to know the sharks’ language now. We’ve recommended several business and finance publications in the past. We want to add one more to the list: Financial Times, a daily newspaper published out of London and circulated worldwide and probably the only one outside the U.S. that competes head-to-head with the Wall Street Journal.

At the video section in its website, you’ll find many short and well-made video reports. The guys featured in the videos usually wear suits and talk in a serious tone.

They all seem to have the right kind of the British accents, too.

The old saying goes that laugh is the best medicine to your health; so it is to your spoken English. For a prescription, go for one of the best comedian show–the Late Show with David Letterman. To get the maximum effect, watch the show five times a week, three months in a row as your first treatment.

If your listening comprehension is not up to Dave’s monologue speed yet, it can be painful; in his most famous The Top Ten List segment, Dave always shouts out the hilarious list in rapid succession. But his interview sessions with celebrities and politicians are usually easy-going. Dave is a great host with an unique sarcastic style and dry wit.

You don’t have to stay late in the night to watch the show, which is aired at CBS at 11:30pm. Watch the video clips of many segments at its website whenever you like. There is no risk of over-dose.

John F. Kennedy, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Madonna, you got the idea; and the list can go on and on. These are famous people, they are newsworthy, and their storied have been told from many different angles.

One angle in particular, told by the Biography channel, is fascinating. It doesn’t focus on publicizing the scandals or gossips of those people’s life, but on seriously uncovering their unique life experiences and achievements.

Go to the Biography channel’s website and check out the videos there. They are mostly the clips taken out of the full biography programs it aired in the cable channels.

Watching those famous people’s life unfolding, you will not just pick up English language; you will be inspired to achieve unbelievable things in your own life.