"How To Peel A Banana Like A Monkey" (somedirection, 2009)

Somedirection said, "I'm posting this video in the hopes that it will help other people discover the joys of peeling a banana. I had never known about this method until recently" (July 8, 2009).

I can hardly wait to try it!

[42 words]

New Year's Customs and Traditions

Dr. Nellie Deutsch has prepared an interesting trivia quiz representing New Year's customs and traditions around the world that I'd like to share with you. You'll find answers and explanations on slides immediately following each quiz item.

After taking the quiz and reading the explanations, please feel free to ask follow-up questions, post notes on local customs and traditions, or share related resources in comments on this post.

Learning English Online: New Year Around the World

Uploaded by Dr. Nellie on WiZiQ Tutorials

[83 words]

"Can you use chopsticks?" (pab, Speechable)

Before

 

PB [direct from cell phone]

After

 (pab, Speechable)

See the whole photo collage here.

[15 words]

Even in Kumamoto - Occasionally!

Time to run barefoot in the yard!

[7 words]

"Listen to English - learn English: the podcast website ...

... for people learning English" (title and tagline). This website presents prepared texts accompanied by audio recordings (MP3s) about three times a month on various topics of interest. Colloquial expressions, cultural notes, customs and traditions, ...; you name it, and you may be able to find it!

Can you imagine 40 to 50 thousand people all listening to Peter Carter, of Birmingham, England (Author and Copyright, 2005.12.25), at the same time? Recent recordings show download histories numbering in the tens of thousands. Apparently plenty of English learners and teachers around the world are making this one of their favorite sites. The visitor map in the sidebar indicates that there have nearly 17,000 visitors already this month, and over a million site visitors since 2006 (Visitors [ClusterMaps], Listen to English sidebar, 2009.05.12).

The quality of the recordings that I've sampled is impeccable, and the delivery, deliberate. However, the sophisticated language Carter uses might challenge intermediate level learners, especially those who give the MP3s a go without pre-reading his scripts or reading along while listening.

[172 words]

Happy Halloween!

The following is a representation of a post from the Language Learner Development Project Blog (LLD Project Blog, Happy Halloween, 2008.10.31), a work licensed "under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License" (LLD Project Blog, License). I am reusing the copyright image in the original post with permission of the copyright owner. You can see the copyright notice if your hover your cursor over the photo below [in the actual Blogger post, not the Feedburner mail announcement], before clicking.

This is a quick, seasonal, website recommendation... for anyone ... interested in customs, history, and traditions: a History of Halloween minisite at history.com. I recommend the articles entitled Ancient History and Around the World, but there's much, much more on the site [including advertisements, games, and videos]. Just click on the link (above), or the picture (below), and go see for yourselves.

If you'd like to compare the Jack-0-Lantern in the photo above with his predecessors from last year, please check out either of last year's Halloween videos (Writing Studio Blog, Welcome Home Hallows, 2007.10.31).

[106 words excluding the block quotation]

Revised 2008.11.06
[+10 words]