Blog my life

My English teacher Leign told us a hot phenomenon on Internet especially on Facebook that many person wrote their "Top xx things". In recent days, I found some English learning sites for me and I want to write a list of these site. I recommend these to you. Just look at them and you may find it would be a huge treasure.

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!

When I first met ESL podcast, I found it was very useful for your listening and it expanded your vocabulary and your communicate skills. On the website, you can download all of the podcasts and read the scripts online by free. There are now 670-odd podcasts on the website, so it is a huge treasure for English learners.

I was wondering if I could create a tool and download them all at once including the audio index and the script and then convert them to a plain text form in order that I can listen to the podcast and read the script on my phone. To realize my idea, I wrote a small program by python under Linux.

Download it:

  eslDownloader.py (2.8 KiB, 486 hits)

How to steps:

1. Be sure you are using Linux or Unix system or Cygwin system.
2. Make sure you have installed Python 2.x
3. Copy the script to any folder you like.
4. Make sure you have right to create a sub-directory under this folder. My script will create a folder called "eslpod" to store the content.
5. Run this script.

You will see the script start to fetch the pages and download the podcasts. Downloaded files will store under "eslpod" folder and grouping by the tag. Under every tag, you could see the script with .html suffix and podcast with .mp3 suffix.

You can interrupt the downloading process by kill the process.

DISCLAIMER:

• Use this script at your own risk.
• This program may fail if the site was changed.
• Respect the authors' work and do not distribute without their permission.

And at last, be happy and confidence to study English!