Talk is Golden by KanTalk.com

Reuters Newswires is another old media trying to transform itself in digital age; so far, the digital side of Reuters has been growing. That’s good news for English learners.

Competing with The Associated Press, Reuters deploys over 2,000 reporters in nearly 200 countries. It used to be all about breaking news at lighting speed. Now Reuters does more features and analysis, too.

Reuters puts out at least a dozen of video reports daily at its website. Each is usually less than three minutes long–a perfect “snack meal” of English contents. Take as many and as frequent as you can.

Smithsonian Channel draws its programming contents mainly from Smithsonian Institution, which consists of 19 museums (including the top 3 most visited museums in the world), the National Zoo, and 9 research centers.

That’s a tremendous resource to tap into. The Channel runs features and series in subjects including pop culture, history and mystery, science, and natural wonders. Many of its videos are available in its website.

The mandate of Smithsonian Institution is “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Be the receiving end of the mandate, while improving your English proficiency.

Eat Smart. Be Fit. Live Well.  That’s the Cooking Light magazine’s motto.

The magazine has over 130 video clips in its website to show you just how. They include cooking recipes, bedroom designs, and body workouts. You will learn a lot of useful English words in the categories of food, seasoning, cooking ware, and interior design. That would be your necessary daily survival skill when you live in an English-speaking country.

Even if you decide to eat dumb, be fat, and not live well anyway, you will still end up a winner.

For an adult learner, one of the best ways to speak another language well is to sing it.  Even when  the lyrics may not resonate sometimes, the rhythm and tune can still work like a magic.

Yahoo Music brings you thousands of the music videos, covering almost every possible genre. Pick the singers you adore, or select the types of the songs that please you ears. Sing along daily; while in the shower if you want.

Music has that kind of power, because language itself, when in a speaking form, is a fine piece of music.

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“.