English Recordings

--<Hey jude (Korean baby's song)>-May 14th 2010 20:57

What do you think?
어때요? -怎么样？

SThis is so cute!
너무 귀여워요! -多么可爱！

I guess Korean is probably not easy for him , either .~` ^^/
아직은 아마도 한국어도 그에게는 쉽지 않을 듯 하네요.-估计他连说韩语也还不容易的了。

But I would like to give him a big hand of applause.
그렇지만 열창에 박수를 보내고 싶어요!
不过我想给他热烈鼓掌！-（ 不过对他的热烈的表演我想热烈鼓掌！）
Adorable! ^0^

http://lang-8.com/117072/journals/482042/Hey-jude-%28koran-baby%60s-song%29

It`s a good day! May 19th 2010 11:52
Wow~~Today the weather is so good.
This good weather makes us feel so good!
We people are easily influenced by the weather.
Yesterday it rained the whole day/ all day long,
so today, it brought such a wonderful day.

Air?....... Very clean , and very fresh!
Spring trees.?.....The sun is shining on the trees' yellow-green leaves .
(The yellow-green leaves on the trees are shining.)

I hope you everybody will have a good and clean day ,just like today`s air and spring leaves!
bye-
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://lang-8.com/117072/journals/487302/It%60s-good-day%21

Thanks for recording for me.~♥

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Disolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said,
"Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

Please make use of the internet in order to learn and enjoy your life!

You just lost it.

As a first-time commuter, I soon got sick of spending 2 hours a day listening to the same music and radio deejays day after day. You can only hear "Who Let the Dogs Out" so many times before before you just want to bang your head on the steering wheel.

Since I couldn't figure out how to get my computer in the car, and reading a real book just seemed unsafe, I decided to try some audio books. For those who are unfamiliar with audio books, let me explain. An audio book is a tape recording of someone reading a book out loud. As you can imagine, this can be a wonderful thing, or your worst nightmare. A lot depends on who is actually reading the book.

For example, imagine listening to Fran Drescher reading War and Peace. Sure, her voice was perfect for her character The Nanny, but after six hours, it would be like nails on a chalkboard. That is one thing to think about before you buy an audio book. Some of the readers may be people you have never heard of before. What if you buy the book, and then hate the voice? It will be a VERY LONG six hours. You may want to start out with books read by famous and familiar voices.

If you carpool, or plan to listen to audio books with other people in your vehicle, I would be careful in my selection of books. These are read word for word from the text, and they are not censored. I was mildly surprised to hear the "f" word several times while listening to my first audio book. My first thought was, "geez, glad there aren't any kids in this car." I would not recommend listening to any Stephen King novels while carrying out your duties as "soccer mom or dad."

These books are by no means inexpensive. I find the price to be comparable to a hard cover novel. For those of us who generally wait for the paperback, this may seem excessive. There are a couple of ways around this. You can check your local library. They often offer several bestsellers on tape, and this would be a good way for you to find out if you like audio books, before you drop a ton of money on them. You can also sign up for the Audio Book Club. Similar to the music clubs, like Columbia House and BMG, you get several audio books for a small amount of money, while agreeing to purchase a couple more at regular price over the next few years. I chose to do this, and it works well for me. I get a better chance of finding books I want to hear than at the library. After you fulfill your original commitment, you can cancel membership in the club, wait a couple of months, then join again.

I must admit, I would much prefer to read a book myself than have it read to me. Even the best reader has a difficult time developing distinctly different voices for each character. This can make it confusing to follow parts of the story that are heavy in dialogue. The reader may also emphasize dialogue in a different way, or use a tone that changes the meaning of the words. If you are an avid reader, you will understand what I mean. Part of the joy of reading is in making your own interpretation of the story. When listening to an audio book, you are allowing someone else to interpret the story for you. But this is an excellent way for me to constructively use the 2 hours a day that would otherwise be wasted.

Some people have a hard time reading for extended periods of time. Others may not enjoy it, or like me, may have large blocks of otherwise wasted time. For those people I would definitely recommend audio books. It definitely keeps your mind off road rage!

If I was to name one thing that would have the greatest impact on the future of this planet, I would point to the World Wide Web. The possibility of searching 800 million pages of information [Nature, June 1999] in seconds or minutes, provides those with access to the Internet with experience that was not known to humans in the whole 40,000 years of human communication prior to WWW! With intelligent queries, you can get answers to questions ranging from cold remedies, GDP figures, impact of coffee on health to specialist articles, news, train schedules, stock picks, auctions, etc. It seems that soon the access to information is to stop being a limiting factor in your quest for more and better knowledge. Just the opposite, you are likely to be served with more valuable information than you will ever be able to process. To make a true use of the blessing of the web you need tools to prioritize, and process knowledge. Secondly, you will need tools to make sure that whatever you process does not volatilize as a result of your failing memory. It is quite likely that soon, for a significant proportion of Internet users, reading on paper will no longer be a viable option as compared with reading the net.

Have you ever heard of SuperMemo? If not ... you have got a gap in your knowledge of tools for learning. SuperMemo is a knowledge machine that lets you remember things almost without fail.

As an avid reader of Spotlight, you are probably eager to get a better command of English. That’s where SuperMemo comes in. Here’s how it works. Imagine you have heard a new word - for example: morganatic. If you want to make sure you remember morganatic you will probably have to repeat it a few times. Nothing gets to your memory and stays there for ever without practice. If you do not use the word, or do not repeat it in some way ... it is gone! The question is how often the repetitions should take place. You probably would answer: "if I do not refresh it in a week, the word is no longer there". You are right. Most of us, need a repetition within a week to stand a 90% chance to recall a word or phrase. But is a single repetition all that you need? Nope. So how about the second repetition? Should it come again in a week or can you afford a month-long break? There is no simple answer to the question.

With a personal computer and SuperMemo, you do not have to think about anything but the material you want to learn. You put full focus on the knowledge and zero focus on your private memory management.

It is all as simple as this: (1) turn on the computer, (2) click the SuperMemo icon on the screen, and (3) press the Learn button. Now just answer the questions on your screen and grade yourself (by pressing buttons Pass, Fail, etc.). The grading lets the program know how often to bring particular words back to your memory and tracks the record of how well you have remembered them.

In a month or two, SuperMemo will understand your memory better than you yourself do. This will let it schedule repetitions for you with accuracy that no other force on earth can beat. If you grasp the general idea, you will soon be banging grades and repeating in mind thousands of newly memorized words and phrases. All you have to do is to ask your computer-literate friends how to obtain a copy of the program, and how to set your first steps. All you need to know about SuperMemo can be learned within an hour!!!

Our personal experience

We first saw the CCED (the 2nd edition) in 1999, when only the paper version was available. We immediately felt it was something special. Normally, we use only software dictionaries, but we started using the paper COBUILD dictionary, because we liked the contents so much.

Today, we still like learning with the dictionary very much. When we need to look up a word, it helps us understand it and use it in our own sentences. Often, we look up one word, and then we feel like reading another one — the definitions and examples are so nice. Sometimes, we even like to read the CCED just like a book.

Conclusions

When you look up a word in a dictionary, you should be interested in what the word means. But you should also ask the question "What can I do with it?". The CCED answers this question very well by giving the most important phrases and grammar structures containing the word — both in the definition and example sentences.

Together, the definition and the example sentences give you an almost complete picture of how a word is used in the English language. After you read them, the word is usually "yours" — you can use it easily in your own sentences.

If you get a good English dictionary, you will be better than 90% of English learners. It's unbelievable, but most people (even people who want to learn English very much) simply go to a bookstore and buy the first dictionary they see.

That is a big mistake! A bad dictionary will give you problems sooner or later — maybe in two months, maybe in one year — and you will have to buy a good one anyway! Isn't it better to buy a good dictionary the first time?

Getting a good English dictionary is important because:

•A good dictionary will be your guide to English. It will teach you new words, how to pronounce them, and how to use them. It will help you understand English texts. Successful English learners use their dictionaries all the time: when reading books, at English classes, when writing e-mail, when doing homework, when surfing the Web.

•It is an easy first step in your English-learning program — you only need to spend a little money (much less than you would pay for an English course). Once you've made the first step, it will be easier for you to do the rest.

•It requires spending money. Yes, this is a good thing. :-) Spending some of your money on learning English will give you an impulse to keep learning and work towards your goal of mastering English.