Stephen Fry on modern language use

This is what he has to say about being too conservative about changes in language use. The video is cool and very useful for language learners as well with its animated transcriptions. The only thing I don't like about it is him saying the word issue with 'sj':)

Just a bit of funk bass with sun

Currently, I am totally working my butt off developing and editing a language school's e-learning site (more on that later after the go-live). So, every once in a while I need to release the tension and jump around the room a bit. This video is perfect for that. Good song, great singer, sunshine, dancing, lots of partying people and one of the funkiest bass runs in pop history. Enjoy!

At the dentist

Over the past few weeks I have been visiting the dentist's surgery way too often. A filling here, a bit of scaling there, but most of the 'smaller repairs' were neither too dangerous nor too painful. That was until three days ago when I had my impacted wisdom tooth removed. Now, that was a completely different matter: sheer agony during the two-hour surgery and a slow, painful recovery ever since. Fortunately, I feel better now and I have just found this Eddie Izzard video on youtube. It superbly describes my overall experience and general feeling about dentists and dentistry. Good job, I have only found it now, three days after the surgery. Now, Eddie has had me in stitches. Had I found the video earlier, I might have laughed out my stitches.

A new way to look at success

Sometimes you find yourself trying hard but somehow not making much headway. Or you believe that you are making good progress but later realize that you have been going round in circles. Usually it is with jobs but can be in all other arenas of life as well. Others seem to have it a lot easier or perhaps they get along better because they deserve it more? If you have ever felt this way then this video will feel like a balm for the bruises. The speaker, Alain de Botton, encourages us to find the meaning of "success" for ourselves. No big secrets are revealed but I like the very rational yet humane way he gets his point across to the audience. There is also a bit of clever humour in some of his ironic remarks.






Do this simple exercise to practice the vocabulary of the speech.

Watch videos with subtitles - Einstein the parrot

There are tons of video sharing sites on the web. Some of them are even designed for language learning and sometimes they provide subtitles too. I have tried and become slightly disappointed with most of them for one reason or the other. Some have bad quality videos, some have only 'funny' vids with people falling flat on their faces, on others the subtitles don't really match the actual script and so on. The best that I have found so far - is Ted . (many thanks to Learn English Online for the info)

Ted has more than 450 videos of talks and performances in many different topics. Both the sound and the picture quality are excellent and ALL videos come with at least an English subtitle that matches the video script as closely as possible. Some of them have subtitles in several other languages as well.
If you take the plunge I suggest that you pick from one of these categories first:

Most favorited all time
Rated jaw-dropping (meaning that you will be so amazed that your jaw will 'drop')
... funny

You can select the category from the left side bar next to the videos. Once you have made your choice and have started to watch your first video try to resist the temptation to click on the subtitle box. Keep that for later so you can check how much of it you can understand without the subtitles. The video I have chosen as a sample is 'Talking and Squaking with Einstein and Stephanie White'.