My English teacher Leign told us a hot phenomenon on Internet especially on Facebook that many person wrote their “Top xx things”. In recent days, I found some English learning sites for me and I want to write a list of these site. I recommend these to you. Just look at them and you may find it would be a huge treasure.

• 1st: ESL Podcast (http://www.eslpod.com)

You may heard about the word “Podcast”. Accoding to wikipedia, “Podcast“ means:

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital, audio, or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.

In Chinese, we translate it to “播客” which means a blog that has sound or video to broadcast. ESL Podcast is a site for “English as Second Language” learners. It provides podcasts and transcripts for many topics covering nearly every aspect of our daily life. You will hear a slow dialog at first, then explanation and after all comes with normal speed. Its material comes from our life, and thank Dr. Lucy Tse who writes the dialog with a lot of useful words.

I liked this podcast very much when I first listened to it and started to download them into my phone. I learned from this podcast by listening to it when I was on the bus or riding a bike, or sometimes did a dictation first, then compared it to the script. And with the words I learned, I tried to use them in my conversation with my English teachers and partners. By doing this persistently, I felt my English was proving magically. Hope this site help you too.

• 2nd: CRI English (http://english.cri.cn)

When I was in high school, my teacher told us to listen to BBC or VOA Special English everyday to improve our listening. But just listened to them in a short period of time, I gave up. This was not because I was lazy but the material was too far away from my life and I felt very boring. I googled and found the site – “CRI English”. “CRI” means Chinese Radio Internation, which is a official radio station reports news and life in China to the world.

You can listen to the boardcast “Round the clock” at mms://livexwb.cri.com.cn/clock. And I also perfer the “Webcast“. In this subject, we have news near us, interesting stories about people, and aha please visit and find the rest. Most of the stories have scripts, so you can listen to it and then compare. The most important thing is you will not feel boring but exciting to hear what is going on besides you, that is better than BBC or VOA in my opinion.

• 3rd: Quick and Dirty tips (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com)

I found this site only in a few days ago by searching “Grammar Girl”. “Grammar Girl” is a podcast program on this site talking about English grammar. I subscribed mail from this site and it sends me a short mail about grammar daily. To join this, click “Sign up for the grammar girl tip of the day”.

Besides “Grammar Girl”, it is a good practice to listen to other programs on this site. Every podcast has a script but the speaker uses native speed, so if you can’t catch up with him, you can read it while listening.

To the last two podcast, I wrote two programs to download them. Check it out at [cref 1752] and [cref 1747]

So this is all my recent discovery, if any good opinions or good sites, please leave me a comment!

Same as ESL podcast downloader, a simple tool to fetch all the podcast and descriptions from Grammer Girl. Use at your own risk!

When I first met ESL podcast, I found it was very useful for your listening and it expanded your vocabulary and your communicate skills. On the website, you can download all of the podcasts and read the scripts online by free. There are now 670-odd podcasts on the website, so it is a huge treasure for English learners.

I was wondering if I could create a tool and download them all at once including the audio index and the script and then convert them to a plain text form in order that I can listen to the podcast and read the script on my phone. To realize my idea, I wrote a small program by python under Linux.

Download it:

[download id=32]

How to steps:

1. Be sure you are using Linux or Unix system or Cygwin system.
2. Make sure you have installed Python 2.x
3. Copy the script to any folder you like.
4. Make sure you have right to create a sub-directory under this folder. My script will create a folder called “eslpod” to store the content.
5. Run this script.

You will see the script start to fetch the pages and download the podcasts. Downloaded files will store under “eslpod” folder and grouping by the tag. Under every tag, you could see the script with .html suffix and podcast with .mp3 suffix.

You can interrupt the downloading process by kill the process.

DISCLAIMER:* Use this script at your own risk.

• This program may fail if the site was changed.
• Respect the authors’ work and do not distribute without their permission.

And at last, be happy and confidence to study English!

April 21th, I got an email saying I was registered for ERC 2009 and the conference would be hold at April 23th. I remembered I haven’t registered any conference yet. Is that a fake one? I searched the web just to find that there was really a conference here in Chengdu. I was confused but I guess it could be a mistake or I forget I’ve registered. Though it may be fake, it’s not bad see if it is real. By the way, that day was my birthday! If it was true, I would have meals for free. A big gift!

Conference was held at Shangri-La hotel, a five start hotel, by Sun and ministry of education from 23th to 24th. I got up early at 7:30AM then got to there at 8:30AM. I got my pass at the front desk and it is already true!

Conference started at 9:00AM. Topic this year was about cloud computing for education and education applications from Russian and Indian, also some topic about CERNET. By the way, Sun’s topic always includs Open and Innovation.

I noticed I can easily catch up with native English speaker now. In the past, I would easily feel tired when listening and translating English in my heart. My English was improving!

There was a 15-minutes tea break, during which I went to see Sun’s new technology this year.

It was a surprise that ZhaigangHe was introducing Sun’s virtuallaztion technology. By talking to him, I finally know that he registered for me. He was now a spreader of Sun’s technology in UESTC.

Sun’s new server.

We had lunch at next door. I was a buffet dinner, both Chinese food and Western food.

In my opinion, the launch was just at average level. Five start hotel’s food is not much better than others.

At the afternoon, Indian professors talked about Sun’s technology used in India. It really hard to understand what they said. They always spoke ‘c’ like ‘g’, ‘p’ like ‘b’, so ‘computer’ changed to ‘gombuter’. That’s terrible for me, I could hardly fall asleep.

The second day, the topic focused on cloud computer and innovation. To my big surprise, after the meeting, everyone of us was gave a very BIG gift - a suitcase!

Though Sun is heavily hitted by ecnomic crysis and is bought by Orcale, it didn’t shrink the gift. This gives me a impression that Sun is not dead, this fresh life will come soon!

Have you ever tried downloading things from Internet using mobile phone? I guess you probably have experienced fetching some pictures and text, or something bigger like short movies or musics.

On Friday morning, when I was listening to ERC conference which was held by Sun at Shangri-La in Chengdu, I felt a little boring when a professor talking about eduction in Russian because I didn’t quite catch him. Russian English and Indian English is a little hard to understand.

I have nothing to do, so I take out my phone to play. I searched WiFi singal and found hotspot of Shangri-La. April 23th was my birthday and also the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I found the download link and started to download using UCWEB which can do multi-threaded downloading. The download speed grew up to and keep stable at almost 200kb/s. At this speed, one times faster than I had in my dormitory, I could get Ubuntu cdimage in only one hour.

How much enegery it cost? I opened the Nokia Engery Profiler and it showed me the real-time current and power consumption of the phone. In average, the phone ate up about 400mA or equally 1.3Watt. So my battery could keep up at least 3 hours downloading. That is to say, I could download 2GB of data from the air before my battery run out. But I’m a little afriad of the battery, it was getting a little warmer.

Downloading by a phone is quite “green”. Compare to a normal computer, it uses 0.1KWh every hour and my phone only uses 1% of the energy. So it could be the most energy-saving downloading method I ever seen. I’m wondering if there is some Bittorrent or Emule software I can use on the phone, so I could do my best to saving the earth! Besides, without a WiFi, I could do nothing.