Learn English with Teacher Joe

My favorite season, summer, is coming to a close. We’re getting a bit more rain in Beijing and the evenings are turning quite cool. It’s comfortable for now, but I hate the thought of another cold winter coming. Still, there are some good points to the fall season. I remember as a child, growing up in western New York State, all the leaves changed to different shades of red and yellow. It was almost magical to see the colors everywhere. I was reminded of this recently when I read a quote by the French writer Albert Camus who wrote: “Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf is a flower“.

Thinking back to those days, autumn seemed almost perfect! But then I found another quote, by the English writer P.D. James. She wrote: ”It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life“. Yes, when I think back the reality of my childhood, there weren’t that many truly perfect autumn days! And in my hometown, autumn can be terribly cold!

But I have spent most of the last 20 years (wow, that sounds like a lot!) in Japan and China, where fall IS the best season of the year. Here in Asia, I have not seen as many colorful leaves as back home, maybe because I’ve lived in big cities with fewer trees, but the weather is very mild. I was reminded of this by reading a quote by Samuel Butler: “Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits“. I’m pretty sure Butler was talking about people more than the seasons, but it applies to what I see outside everyday.

How about you? What is your favorite season? Why? Have you lived in different countries or in different climates before? What is your ideal climate? Leave a comment to join the conversation!

Sunday was the Mid-Autumn Festival in China. I saw no full moon because it was raining in the evening, and I did not eat any traditional “moon cakes” either. I did, however, get to see various athletic events of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games at the Bird’s Nest. I saw several gold medal races including both wheelchair racing and among athletes with artificial legs. It was both impressive and inspirational to see these athletes overcome their disabilities in such a dramatic way. The one-legged sprinters, in spite of having an artificial leg, can run almost as fast as the best athletes of the main Olympic Games, and they can run MUCH faster then I can! Now, if they can be so dedicated and so strong in the face of adversity, they anyone can be.

 Check out the Paralympics (click here) and also watch some videos (do a search on You Tube) to see what I mean. I found the wheelchair basketball, floor volleyball and football for the seeing-impaired, which I watched on TV, to be especially entertaining. Check out your own country’s athletes and give them your support! 

Okay, I finally got to see Olympic events this weekend. In my new job I have Sunday and Monday off. On Sunday, I went to Chaoyang Park and saw two quarterfinal matches of Women’s Beach Volleyball. Two tall, beautiful Chinese women in bikinis beat two tall beautiful American women in bikinis, setting up an all-Chinese semi-final. That guarantees a Chinese team will win at least a silver medal for the first time in the history of beach volleyball. After that match, I watched two tall, beautiful Brazilian women in bikinis defeat two tall Australian women in bikinis in the other quarterfinal match. I think I’m becoming a fan of women’s beach volleyball!

On Monday, I saw boxing quarterfinals in the Workers Gymnasium not too far from my apartment. I was surprised to find the stadium barely half full at the beginning. When the Chinese Super Heavyweight easily won his bout with a smaller Kazakhstan opponent, only about a third of the stadium was full. I think boxing is much more interesting on TV anyway. It’s so hard to see the punches as they happen. Olympic boxing now uses a computerized system so we can see the five judges points come up on the scoreboard as they make their decisions about what is a good hit and what is not. Unfortunately for the spectators, when they look up to see the scoreboard, to check if a punch was really a successful punch, they miss what comes next. On TV you not only get the commentators explanation, you can get instant replays, in slow motion even.

A friend of mine here in Beijing has a blog and wrote an interesting post on his Chinese students’ reaction to the Games. You can read Matt’s post here. He is a very thoughtful writer, so be sure to read to the very end of his post.

Some of you must remember learning from the news story about solving traffic problems. That was a bit difficult because the real meaning of the story was not so obvious. Students had to really listen carefully to get the humor. Here is another news story, but this time the humor seems obvious, maybe TOO obvious. Still, for me this is quite funny. Your job as students is to try identify WHAT, specifically, is funny about what the people say. Click on the link below, watch the video, then come back here with your comments! Try to give specific sentences that you think are funny and explain why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JUu8sHpH6Y

Hi Everybody!

It’s been a while since I had time to post here.  As some of you know, I went to Shanghai this past weekend to participate in Toastmasters’ “District 85P Speech Contest”. There were six contestants, all of whom had previously won three contests to get to this level, so my five competitors were all good.  One of the speakers was clearly better than the rest and the judges correctly chose her as the winner. In my opinion, the rest of us were hard to tell apart. For some reason, the judges chose me for third place. You can see the video by clicking on the link below.  This is the same speech I gave before, only improved, so you may have already seen it.  My goal was to learn how to improve a speech, how to make it as good as it can be. I think this is about as good as that speech can ever be, but you can be the judge…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQL9139xfE

Hello English Learners!

I have a challenging task for you today. I hope all of you will check out this news report from my favorite news network in the U.S. The language used may be more idiomatic than non-native English speakers are used to and some sentences are quite complex. Please do not worry about every word. Instead, focus on getting the main message from this video.

To prepare you a little, I will tell you that you will see a news announcer at the beginning, then parts of news conference (an announcement is made outdoors so you can hear the wind a bit), with some “high tech” graphics to aid understanding. I found the final bit of advice at the end to be especially interesting, but maybe that is because I like statistics. (Language Note: “DOT” refers to the “Department of Transportation” which is the top government office in Washington dealing with all transport issues.)

Watch here: ONN Special Report.

As usual, I am looking forward to your comments and opinions. I will give you my own point of view in my next post. Happy viewing!

Learning English can be difficult when words seem to have so many different forms and uses. A storm is normally a noun, but when we talk about a group of people, it can become a verb. Here is the beginning of a news story from yesterday:

Hungry Haitians stormed the presidential palace Tuesday to demand the resignation of President Rene Preval over soaring food prices and U.N. peacekeepers battled rioters with rubber bullets and tear gas.

From the context we can see that the people were angry and peacekeepers had to “battle” them. Their behavior was like a storm, in a sense, with lots of lightning and thunder. And the reason they stormed the palace was interesting - because of “soaring” food prices. Did you know that numbers can fly? All around the world, prices are going up, so the meaning is clear. Prices are not just going up, they’re waaaaaay up there, as if they are flying.

Had you heard these expressions before? I think it’s very useful to see them in context, so that you can understand them without even using a dictionary.

You can read the whole news story by clicking the link below:

Original new story at Yahoo! News

My last post got me thinking about some of my experiences in learning French. Although I have had a lot of good teachers, it seems that when I started learning French I had a lot of really BAD teachers. (Maybe it was because of them that I became a teacher. I knew I could do it better!) In one French class in my university there was a student from Haiti who spoke French as his first language. He just took the course so he could get an easy grade. The rest of the students struggled in that class - we were always confused by how to use French words and grammar, or how to pronounce the words and sentences we were learning. Unfortunately, the teacher would ask questions of our classmate from Haiti who always answered perfectly, so she assumed we all understood. And if one of us could not answer a question, she would then compare us to the native French speaker and say, “You see, this is so easy!”.

Actually, I had even worse teachers when I went to France, but that is another story! I wonder if any of you have had some bad teachers. What problems did you face? How do you think the teacher could have done better? Let us know about your experiences!

I remember when I was a student, how hard it was to learn French pronunciation. Getting some of the sounds of French right was difficult, especially “r” and “u” as in “tu”. French rhythm is different too, with each syllable equally stressed but with a rising tone at the end of each sentence. I learned so much by listening to French. It took some time, but I finally got it.

My students learning English are also improving their pronunciation, but slowly. We have practiced sounds, especially vowels sounds (see my first pronunciation video on “You Tube”), and now we are working on English rhythm. I have found that students who master English rhythm  sound very much like native English speakers! We practice sentences such as in my third pronunciation video and recently we have started learning “tongue twisters”.  I made a funny video about tongue twisters. Though funny, it seems to be useful for them. They certainly enjoy trying to repeat those funny sentences!

Now I am wondering what people around the world need to learn. Are there some sounds in English that are too difficult? I know “th” is hard for many people, and in some countries “b” and “v”, or “g” and “k”, are hard to differentiate. What other problems do you have? Please let me know - maybe I can make a video to help you!

Hi Everybody! I just uploaded a new video to You Tube, showing natural English Rhythm. It may seem funny, but using this kind of rhythm can make your English sound so much better. So, give it a try…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLOBq2WcINY