English Spelling is Hard

If you feel that English spelling is hard, don’t be discouraged. It’s not easy for a native English speaker either, according to the Times’s recent article English Spelling: hard to learn, full of oddities and a glorious portal to history. Here is the excerpt:

There is no point in pretending that English spelling is easy. But then neither is water-skiing, nor horsemanship, nor playing the guitar, nor doing tricks on a skateboard. And the rewards are curiously similar: precision, communication and aesthetic satisfaction. English words are not dull products of an isolated and narrow monoculture: they reflect the kaleidoscope of history. They are eccentric, wayward and playful, thumbing (with that crazy b in the middle) their nose at dull phoneticists. No vowel sound depends on only one letter: we have peep and leap, weird and police, ski and key and people; we have truth and fruit and tomb and blue.

For the full article, click here.

Learn from the Biography Channel

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.

How Babies Learn Language

Forget about language, the baby is so cuuuute!

How to learn languages effectively

Here are the tips from LinguaGuide (it has a bit of sci-fi tone):

Learn from Motor Trend

Not everyone can afford a car, nor is everyone able to drive one. But everyone can talk about it. We have long passed the era of the Ford’s Model T, which all you need to know was whether a car could take you from A to B. Nowadays a car is more like a statement of fashion, social trend, and self-expression.

That leads us to the car magazine Motor Trend’s website. From the videos it features, the road tests give die-hard car guys (or gals) some great rides, the auto show bring you the glamour and fashion of the latest models, and car review may allure the potential buyers to dealerships.

Get on the driver seat and start the engine; you’ll be amazed by how much English you can pick up from car talks.

10 Tips for Taming the College Foreign Language Courses

When comes to studying foreign language in college, two professors offer the following ten tips at U.S. News and World Report:

1. Pick for a reason.

2. Attend all the classes.

3. Learn the conjugations—both ways.

4. Learn all the “moods.”

5. Pay attention to sentence structure.

6. Learn how it sounds.

7. Memorize in bite-size pieces.

8. Beware of “false friends.”

9. Make a real friend.

10. Entertain your prof in the language.

To read the whole article, click here.

Blog in Plain English

It’s plain, but he speaks fast.

Learn from the History Channel

To live in the future, you need imagination; to witness the history, watch the History Channel. It did a great job of making dead people alive and past events vivid through camera lens and narratives. History, as being re-lived, is fascinating.

Getting immersed in the history offers you at least one great benefit–better understanding of the western culture. Just take an example of holidays. The videos at the History Channel’s website will tell you about almost every holiday, ranging from Halloween to Mardi Gras. Check out Valentine’s Day, too.

Watching enough the video clips at the History Channel site, you will be able to connect with others at ease in a social setting by just talking about dead persons and past events, all in your second language.

Hey, Why Bother?

A new study on foreign language studies among the U.K.’s college students reveals that it’s not so cool for native English speakers to learn another language now than a decade ago, according to the report by the Independent:

Overall, the figures show the number of students accepted on to language courses has slumped by almost a quarter during the past decade.

The researchers, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and the University of Stirling, say there was a “steep decline” in the first half of this decade – with overall numbers tumbling by 20 per cent. Since then, French and German have continued to fall – although the decline has been partially offset by a rise in those studying newly-available languages such as Mandarin and Arabic.

The Britons have probably told themselves: Hey, since everyone else is studying English, why bother?

For the complete article, visit here.

Learn from BBC Worldwide

At the BBC Worldwide’s YouTube channel, the British TV network has uploaded about 3,000 video clips since February of 2007. That’s not even counting the BBC News, which runs separately and has its own channel.

Among those 3,000 clips, you can find every genre–drama, comedy, animation, documentary, you name it–on almost any topic. Just look at its Playlists, and you don’t have to be wonder why people spend average three hours in front of TV.

To start, check out its “50 things” first: 50 things to eat before you die, 50 things to see before you die, and 50 things to do before you die. So far, it only got six things out in each category and seems in no hurry for the rest; someone might actually die before all 50 things are revealed.

We bet learning to speak a second language is in the list of “50 things to do before you die”.