1st: ESL Podcast (http://www.eslpod.com)

You may heard about the word "Podcast". Accoding to wikipedia, "Podcast" means:

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital, audio, or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.

In Chinese, we translate it to "播客" which means a blog that has sound or video to broadcast. ESL Podcast is a site for "English as Second Language" learners. It provides podcasts and transcripts for many topics covering nearly every aspect of our daily life. You will hear a slow dialog at first, then explanation and after all comes with normal speed. Its material comes from our life, and thank Dr. Lucy Tse who writes the dialog with a lot of useful words.

I liked this podcast very much when I first listened to it and started to download them into my phone. I learned from this podcast by listening to it when I was on the bus or riding a bike, or sometimes did a dictation first, then compared it to the script. And with the words I learned, I tried to use them in my conversation with my English teachers and partners. By doing this persistently, I felt my English was proving magically. Hope this site help you too.

2st: CRI English (http://english.cri.cn)

When I was in high school, my teacher told us to listen to BBC or VOA Special English everyday to improve our listening. But just listened to them in a short period of time, I gave up. This was not because I was lazy but the material was too far away from my life and I felt very boring. I googled and found the site -- "CRI English". "CRI" means Chinese Radio Internation, which is a official radio station reports news and life in China to the world.

You can listen to the boardcast "Round the clock" at mms://livexwb.cri.com.cn/clock. And I also perfer the "Webcast". In this subject, we have news near us, interesting stories about people, and aha please visit and find the rest. Most of the stories have scripts, so you can listen to it and then compare. The most important thing is you will not feel boring but exciting to hear what is going on besides you, that is better than BBC or VOA in my opinion.

3st: Quick and Dirty tips (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com)

I found this site only in a few days ago by searching "Grammar Girl". "Grammar Girl" is a podcast program on this site talking about English grammar. I subscribed mail from this site and it sends me a short mail about grammar daily. To join this, click "Sign up for the grammar girl tip of the day".

Besides "Grammar Girl", it is a good practice to listen to other programs on this site. Every podcast has a script but the speaker uses native speed, so if you can't catch up with him, you can read it while listening.

To the last two podcast, I wrote two programs to download them. Check it out at Grammer Girl podcast downloader and ESL podcast downloader

So this is all my recent discovery, if any good opinions or good sites, please leave me a comment!

Comments

• 2009年07月9日, Yeerane writes: Does "http://www.scientificamerican.com/" counts?
• 2009年07月9日, april1985 writes: Thanks for your reply! Yes, it should be, but not to everyone. I buy Chinese Edition Science American every month and enjoy its great descriptions and amazing pictures. But for others, especially not major in scientist, they might feel hard to read it.

I just met this kind of person a few days ago. That was a little noisy before I went to sleep. Most of the time, I can’t fall asleep quickly as other roommates do. Maybe I think too much at night. I tried my best to sleep. Aha, gradually I felt my body was very relaxed and fell asleep.

Suddenly I woke from a very loud noisy. What was going on? Some guys were playing English dialog very loudly. I looked at my phone, it was 00:30. I got too angry and rushed out the door to see where the noise came from.

I found the room and shouted, “My god, why did you play that damn dialog at very night!”. I used most of my strength knocking the door again and again. To my surprise, no one answered. I got very confused, why there were no people answered the door?! How could the dialog play automatically?

I thought I’d better go. In addition to his funny dialog, my loud shout woke a lot of people. They were angry just as I was and wanted to see what really happened to the crazy person.

We knocked the door again and I even ticked the door. There still no one went out! How strange it was! My classmates told me we’d better to find out the reason, we were thinking if we had to broken the door.

It’s just one second before our action, the door opened. A person was very shamed and told us he was in a toilet when the computer came to be crazy. He closed his computer and said sorry to all of us. The night finally became silence. It should be an accident. People excused him and went to their room.

I was too excited after the funny thing happened. I had a really bad sleepless night.

The day came very soon and I was tired. We all didn’t know why the dialog plays automatically and at that loud. One reason I could tell was that he played the online movie but the movie was buffering and couldn’t play immediately. After a few minutes, it started to go. And at that time the person was in the toilet. How terrible the night was!

Some Chinese network may not be able to visit this site. You can try the online proxy at http://www.proxyie.com and then enter the address.

Comments

• 2009年04月7日, Mussabek writes: Hello Derek I didn't find your email on your site :) that's why i'm leaving my message as a comment. I found video about virtual surgery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvRcdGElR6Q. Can you tell me more about it ? What is this project for (commercial or scientific). Is it based on any particular paper ? Please email me back. I'm very curious about it. thanks Mussabek
• 2009年04月8日, april1985 writes: The detail about the video can be found here: http://www.april1985.com/?p=1576 This is a scientific research project and I have done a very beginning of it.
• 2009年05月6日, yurtdisi egitim writes: Why this web site do not have other languages support?
• 2009年05月7日, april1985 writes: My site was original a blog and the content was mainly written in Chinese. I started to learn English this year so I tried to write some English articles here to improve my English. So if you have any questions, please leave it in either Chinese or English. They're both OK for me.

To introduce what is vampire and how to kill it, the teacher showed us a short movie called Darcula. You may hear that before. Although I doesn't belive there is vampire, but teacher also taught us how to kill them:

1. Burn the dead body.
2. Drive a wooden stroke through its heart.
3. (Man only) Chop off its head with a gravediggers shovel.

And the end of the course, teacher played a clip of National Geographic. This clip could be found here: http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=28007

Is that real? I consider not. I don't belive vampires and ghosts.

After my class I attended Joe's study advice. I was new here. We talked about English study, he suggested us to practise at www.listeningexpress.com

At the end, write a tongue twister:

She sells seashells on the seashore, the shells she sells are seasheels. So if she sells shells on the seashore, I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

That's all for today, have a nice sleep.

But not all students weren't know what he said. A girl sat beside me, who brought a English novel, told me that is easy to know what he said. I did not lose my mind but listened carefully and tried to understand.

After a few moment, I was familar with his voice although I don't know some words. I tried my best. Finally I almost knew every thing he said. That's much better!

Complementary class was followed by private class, my teacher was an handsome American man. Todays' topic had been English in hard times, but we enjoyed talking about other things, so finally teacher changed his mind. To me, it's no matter what topic, I was listening and practising.

Here take some notes about what I learned today:

• Oh, my god. Thanks heavenas.
• handed it in
• carry away; who's taken it?
• tangible, intangible
• bolt of lightning
• shelter -- some place to hide from rain
• soaking wet -- really wet. Today is so hot that we are soaking wet.
• witness
• creak
• defiance, defy
• handout
• spouse -- wife or husband
• accuse -- eg. Maybe you have been accused of some crime?
• paralyze -- make powerless and unable to function
• bossy
• lousy -- very bad