Learn from the Presidential Candidates

In a few days, either Barack Obama and John McCain will be the next president of the United States. You might not care who wins, but you can learn a great deal of English from them.

Political campaigns are about communications. The candidates use all means–TV and radio ads, live debates, stump speeches in rallies, door-to-door talks–to present their positions and to persuade the voters. In the presidential elections like this one, the candidates and the teams behind them perform the communication craft in the highest art form.

Visiting the multimedia pages of Obama and McCain (also available in the YouTube Channel), you’ll have plenty to watch two candidates talking about the wide range of issues, and–no surprise–attacking to each other. Such great show only comes along once in four years. So take in as much as you can.

Rocky’s inspirational speech

Rock knows how to hit his opponents hard with his fist; he does even better to his love with his words.

Learn from the Onion

The Onion, a news media that many have never heard of, claims itself the “America’s finest news resource”. It is, except that every reporting it does is faked. But all are the finest in the form of parody.

Besides its print circulation, the Onion last year launched The Onion News Network (ONN), a daily web video broadcast. It produces several shows that mock the mainstream news media, with the name like Today Now, or War for the White House. To get a taste of the Onion, watch one of its recent report called “Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas”.

The Onion demonstrate that speaking a decent English is a small potato; making others laugh is the hard nut to crack.

How being multi-lingual can boost your career

According to the report from The Independent,

“In the multilingual, globalised workplace, knowledge of another language can provide a wealth of opportunities – and boost your salary by as much as 20 per cent”

Click here for the full article.

Learn English with Tongue Twisters

When your English teacher has not driven you crazy yet, try teacher Joe:

Learn from Joost

In the past we’ve recommended HULU, a cool online TV that offers some good-quality shows and full-length motion pictures, for learning English while having fun. It turns out that goodies always come in pairs; we found another online TV that competes with Hulu (let’s thank free market).

It’s called Joost. They used to ask for a software download in order to watch their shows; it was a painful process. Now they let you watch through the website directly, just as Hulu does. It features many good TV shows and movies; two of the best are the comedy show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the sit-com Friends.

It has a great collections of music, too. Not bad if you don’t have MTV in your cable lineup.

How to Break the Language Barrier

It’s not easy to try at home:

American Accent Becomes More Popular in India

Indians speak English with an unique accent. AFP has reported the latest trends:

“In India, speaking English with an American accent is no longer the preserve of call centre workers. Children, business people and the elderly here are now seeking a US twang.

The phenomenon has spread from the Indian offshore operations boom in the late 1990s to a wider cross-section of society, whether to help them get on in business, communicate with family State-side or just show off.”

For the complete article, click here.

Learn from the Financial Times

Just several weeks ago, most people might have guessed that the word “derivatives” is somewhat related to the relatives of a detective. As the global financial crisis has been the headline of every newspaper and broadcasting lately, we know it has little to do with a detective and his uncle; it’s from the sharks, or professionally called traders on Wall Street.

Better to know the sharks’ language now. We’ve recommended several business and finance publications in the past. We want to add one more to the list: Financial Times, a daily newspaper published out of London and circulated worldwide and probably the only one outside the U.S. that competes head-to-head with the Wall Street Journal.

At the video section in its website, you’ll find many short and well-made video reports. The guys featured in the videos usually wear suits and talk in a serious tone.

They all seem to have the right kind of the British accents, too.

Something Stupid

It’s something stupid, but might be the great way to learn: