I had a good laugh with this YouTube clip about New Year’s Resolutions:
Still, I’m a big believer of setting goals at the beginning of a year. For the year of 2008, I added this one to my New Year’s Resulotions: write Kantalk blog as often as I can.
It won’t be as easy as not eating fast food any more; but it won’t be as hard as stoping taking drug either.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Happy New Year!
As we approach the holiday season and enter a new year, we want to say THANK YOU to every one of you. We are truly happy to have you in our learning community, and grateful for your contribution and support to us, as well as to your fellow members.
We hope your learning journey at Kantalk in 2008 will be more rewarding.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The Kantalk Team
The only way to speak fluent English is to practice as often as you can. Yet, even for intermediate-level learners, it’s hard to practice spoken English with someone.
To help ease that pain, we released a new feature, FunTalk Conversation Lesson, this week. We carefully designed each lesson with a YouTube video, a colorful picture, a set of questions for discussion, and a list of vocabularies and idioms. It’s fun, simple and fresh. Let the lessons guide your conversations; you’ll find it easier to practice with anyone.
For ESL teachers, FunTalk Conversation Lesson is a great complement to your curriculum for spoken English practice. Pair up the students, assign the lessons, and let them talk. You may have a hard time asking them to stop talking afterwards.
To connect with others at KanTalk, you can invite a member who’s online at the time through Skype text chat. If accepted, call to start practice together. Or you can create a Skypecast based on a lesson, and invite others to join you at the scheduled time.
We’ll add fresh lessons each week, so you’ll never run out of topics. You can also create your own lessons.
We are eager to hear your feedback.
The Kantalk Team
As the user base at Kantalk continually grows, many of you have built ever bigger network within the community and developed a closer relationship with one another.
To further help you better manage the relationship, we added one more feature at your profile page. It’s called What’s New?
After logging in, you can view in What’s New section of the latest actions and changes that your friends did in the last seven days, such as new recording, video submission, etc., as well as the update from the groups that you’ve joined. It’s a convenient way to stay in the loop of your friends and groups circle.
Separately, we integrated LiveTalk feature into the Group function. This allows you to create a LiveTalk for the group, of which you are a member, and to inform other group members about the group discussion. We hope it helps increase the group activities.
(Note: we’ve still been experiencing technical problems at Skypecast, on which our LiveTalk function depends, for a month or so. Sometimes, the calls to the scheduled LiveTalk failed; sometimes, only a few could get into the room; sometimes, the host couldn’t control the microphone. We’ve reported the irregularities to Skype’s technical team, and wish the problem will be addressed sooner.)
Enjoy your learning journey at Kantalk.
The Kantalk Team
We always thought Group function is neat. It’s up close and personal to connect with a smaller circle of users who share a common interest, just like a study group you can count on at school.
So we added Group function today. One great feature is the discussion board within each group. If you have a question to ask, or want to share a learning experience with the group, simply post it in the board.
As always, we look forward to hearing from you for any feedback or suggestion. Let us know how we can further improve Group function, as well as the Kantalk community.
Enjoy your learning journey at Kantalk.
One month ago, we opened up our Recording capacity to allow three recordings for each user. Some of our users thought that’s still not enough. They are probably the firm believers of “Talk is golden”.
We are more than happy to provide them the golden opportunities. From now on, each user can record up to ten recordings, each of two-minute long. So, let the creativity run wild, and let it be heard in the Kantalk community.
Look forward to hearing a lot more interesting recordings from our users.
After hearing the “Please Call Stella” recordings at Kantalk, many of our users graciously made the text comments on what went right or wrong with the pronunciation. The feedback helps the fellow members identify the particular sounds to improve upon.
But some found it’s not always easy to explain the “right” pronunciation in writing. After all, it’s a sound. The solution, however, is pretty straightforward—commenting in voice. That’s why we added a feature that allows user to record a comment. Now, instead of describing how to pronounce “th” or the subtle difference between “l” and “r” sound, just click the Record button and say it out aloud.
With this new Voice Comment feature, users should easily give and receive an earful of advice.
Recording “Please Tell Stella” is quite a popular feature at KanTalk. Many of you have done it. Even more have listened to others’ recordings and posted comments. Some of the recordings were quite creative, and tremendously fun to play over and over.
We thought it’s a great idea to let loose our users’ creativity. So we made multiple recordings available today. Besides recording “Please Call Stella” to get feedback on accent and pronunciation, you now can record a response to a TOEFL (speaking section) sample question. Better yet, we also provide a blank space so that you can record whatever your want: reciting a poem, singing a song, impersonating a politician or a comedian, or just talk about yourself.
Ladies and Gentlemen, ready? Start your engine, erh, Record button.
We’ve just released another cool feature—video transcribing. It’s very easy to use.
You watched an interesting video at YouTube, liked it, but not sure you completely understood it. Well, copy the URL of that video clip, submit it at KanTalk, and transcribe what you’ve heard. Other users can watch it, give you feedback, or offer their transcript to the same video. Then you will know exactly what’s being said in the video.
Transcribing something is an excellent way to improve your listening comprehension. It does a magic to your ears. Try one and you will see what I mean. And you won’t be guilty anymore for spending too much time at YouTube.
Let us know how you like it and what we can improve further.
David and Danielle
It used to be quite tedious to record your self-introduction at Kantalk. You need to download a piece of software and install it first, run it to record, save the audio file to a local folder, and then upload it to your Profile. For anyone who’s less nerdy than Bill Gates, it’s a daunting task. Some of you must have given up somewhere along the way.
Now, it is a piece of cake. Since we released the Recording tool two weeks ago, it only takes a few button-clicking to record your voice at Kantalk. Many of you have done it already with “Please call Stella”. It’s easy and fun. So we made the same tool available to record you self-introduction. We also added the “Delete” function; in case you don’t like what you hear—either self-intro or “Please call Stella”, simply delete it.
So, please introduce yourself, with the clicking of two buttons: Record and Stop. Done
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.