Archive for the ‘english’ tag
Language Learning Advices
I am really happy to be born in Ukraine. This gives me a huge advantage over any American, Englishman, Frenchman or German. You may wonder what possible advantage there may be. Well, my answer to that would be that we learn two of the most complicated European languages in early childhood — Ukrainian and Russian.
Then in school and university we learn some English which is rapidly becoming vital for everyone willing to get a well-paid job in this country. So by the age of 22 years majority of educated young people have at least some command of three languages.
Certainly, in every other country they have foreign languages as a part of standard curriculums as well. But the structure and grammar of Slavic languages is much more complicated than that of German and Roman.
It’s so entertaining to see explanations written for English-speaking learners of Spanish about nouns that have genders (”el libro” vs. “la vez”) or different verb endings for different persons (”yo hablo” for “I speak” but “usted habla” for “you speak”). We Slavic people understand this momentarily because it’s nothing compared to dozens of cases with different spelling and pronunciation which every Russian or Ukrainian word may take.
Nonetheless English proficiency is of vital importance to learn any other language. This is not only because there is the biggest amount of books and quality materials available in English, but also because English is the most straightforward and flexible tool for any kind of explanatory stuff. I honestly tried to use Russian materials for learning Spanish in the beginning and it proved to be no more than 5% as effective as using English ones.
My Discovery of TED
I can’t wait to share my excitement from discovering another brilliant place on the web. Here’s the quotation from the original site:
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week.
The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
For me personally these talks are pleasant entertainment, source of new ideas and chance to practice my english.
Another Great Business Podcast in English
Recently while surfing iTunes I’ve found another great podcast about Business in English. It’s called “HBR IdeaCast” where HBR stands for “Harvard Business Review” — general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. In case someone doesn”t know Harvard Business School (HBS) is a renowned business school in the United States. It is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University. The format of the show is very vivid. Every episode features breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management. So if you have been looking for something interesting and useful go and subscribe to the show.
My Favourite Podcasts for Learning English
After consuming enormous amount of high quality English audio I decided to share links to my favorite podcasts. This are the ones I found the most useful. Go on and try listen to them. Here you go:
1) eslpod.com (Thanks to Jeff and Lucy)
2) china232.com (Thanks to Andrew and Addison)
3) betteratenglish.com (Thanks to Lori and Michael)
4) businessenglishpod.com (There are a lot of people working on it. Thanks to you all)
