Learn English with Teacher Joe

Okay, it’s September 1st and Laugh and Learn English is now OFFICIALLY open! That means there will be one new page for each of the six sections every week. The planned schedule is below:

Sunday: a new video
Monday: a new funny mistake
Tuesday: a new joke with vocabulary explained
Wednesday: a new riddle
Thursday: a new “phunny photo”
Friday: a new Strange News story with vocabulary explained

Thanks for your patience, I know it’s been a long time since I started working on this idea! Please do give me feedback, either her or in my Google group. Also, don’t be shy about recommending the site to your friends. Enjoy!

Hello Everybody!

I’m back in Rochester, New York enjoying spring-like weather while the rest of you are probably sweating every day in the heat of summer. I want to go swimming but it’s too cool! I’ve been cycling almost every day for the past ten days, so it’s been fun, but I’d like to be able to jump into the lake too (Lake Ontario). Well, maybe next week!

During all of my free time, I’ve been building web pages (more than fifty so far!) for my new web site, www.laughandlearnenglish.com. I can’t upload those pages from my sister’s computer, so you’ll have to wait til August to see them. I’m planning a full “opening” of Laugh and Learn English in September, with four or five new pages every week after that.

Other than cycling, making web pages, and seeing relatives, I’ve been doing a lot of EATING! Lots of hamburgers, pizza, spaghetti, cookies and ice cream. I’m going to be HUGE when I return to Beijing. Well, my GUT will be huge! My students will be in for a surprise…

Hello everybody. I’ve been very busy with work and have had little time for blogging or other online fun stuff. Over the past weekend, however, I did find time to make a few new web pages. I’d like you to try out one page that I think will be useful for many students. It’s a very popular game called Hangman that helps introduce English spelling and new words. Please give me your feedback in the Comments section after you’ve played it a few times. I’d like to know what you think! Click here to get started…

Hello from Sunny Sanya!

“Sunny Sanya” is the name of the hotel I’m staying in, down in the very south of China. The city is Sanya, in Hainan Island. I left home in minus 4 degree weather, wearing five layers of clothes. By the time I arrived in Sanya, I was wearing a T-shirt in 29 degree weather, with lots of sun and NINETY EIGHT PERCENT HUMIDITY! I was sweating like a pig and loving it! I may never return to Beijing. Well, I have to return to Beijing, but for now, I am dreaming of staying here forever…

After unpacking my clothes, I walked along the beach for while (more crowded than I expected, with the holiday being over) then sat down in a cafe overlooking the water. It was so relaxing to sit in the shade, listening to the waves crashing, watching people play in the water. In the evening, I found another bar/restaurant/cafe by the water where a live band was playing.

But now I think I’ve had enough relaxation. Tomorrow I’m going to take some bus tours in the morning, maybe go to see another beach nearby, to see how it compares, then I plan to swim all afternoon. It should be good exercise. And fun!

Hello Everybody,

 The two-week Chinese New Year festival (called the Spring Festival in Chinese) is over. I made some videos of the fireworks (no, I did NOT cause the fire at the luxury hotel on the east side of town!) which you can see by clicking here (this was at midnight, to begin the new year) and then by clicking here (this was the final night, the first full moon of the new year).

My students have all come back to school well-rested, after spending a week or two or three visiting their families and relaxing. I, however, had only one DAY off, so I am not at all well-rested. But next week, finally, I will take a break. My plan is to visit the island of Hainan, in the south of China. I will spend a week swimming, cycling and sitting in the sun, AND planning future blog posts. I hope I will be able to add to this blog regularly when I get back to Beijing in March.

Let me know if you have any types of posts you like the most. Do you want more riddles? How about idioms? Maybe some jokes? Or are you interested in my life in Beijing? Write your requests in the Comments section and I’ll do what I can for you! 

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.

For my Chinese readers, here is the blog of the man who beat me (2nd place) in the Shanghai speech contest:  http://peterwan19.blog.sohu.com/  (It’s mostly in Chinese.) You may have seen my speech on You Tube. Well, his speech was better! Remember, if he can do it, so can you. 

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