字字字英文教室 時代雜誌解析 英文單字倍增課程 (歡迎免費試聽課程)

A Rose-Tinted "Information
Society"?

I’ve been teaching Time magazine nonstop for 8 years, and is getting wilder ever time I teach because of the richness of the world events the English language leads me and students to.
I constantly think of the way I learned English in school – those moments of rote memorization of words and rules, mechanical sentence patterns. We studied hard for tests but were rarely given the chance to use the language. Probably all language educations are like this – rigid and lifeless. Yet, it was the things outside the textbooks that fascinated me. I would read English newspapers and magazines because I wanted to know the stories behind those images. Yes, they were difficult, but they were interesting.
Little did I know what I was so doing until recently that my curiosity of things simply went go beyond language, and only at a very later stage did I realize that when we set our eyes on world events, language ability will follow. 

LITERATURE / HISTORY
When in China, Li Yiyun’s English level was like other college students. She came to the United States in 1996 to study immunology, and from there her English proficiency started to take off. 9 years later, in 2005, she published her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a collection short stories about the Chinese culture and Chinese expatriates in the West. The book won her many awards for first fiction – quite impressive for someone whose mother tongue is not English. The book also is a best seller because westerners are curious about China.
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PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY
It is always a mystery about a person’s gender orientation. I read that a new-born baby is attracted to whatever matter in the world. When the baby grows up, he (she) is educated to be attracted to the opposite sex. Other scientists seek to explain this taking a genetic approach. To me, those explanations make little sense. What matters is, humans are humans, and should be treated as such.
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MONEY / PSYCHOLOGY / PHILOSOPHY
The first rule in life is making money; the second is making more money. What is the third?
Money was a human invention and in the modern times it is the essence in life without which life would be plain. But does it make our life better once we have a lot? How should we position money?

LANGUAGE
 To what extent can a sign represent meaning? It’s not unusual that the meaning of a word remains elusive because of the changing of society and culture.
The article is very stimulating; it makes us think of meanings of words: should the meaning of a word be based on the definition in a dictionary, or how it is used? No one can say; it is an on-going struggle for any second-language learners.

MARKETING / ENTERTAINMENT / LANGUAGE LEARNING
For education, we have school. But one would be narrow-minded if he thinks school is the major source for knowledge. Actually, it might be the worst because it is rarely interesting to learn in school.
For learning English, years of experiences tells me that school, textbooks, or even Studio Classroom are not necessarily the major sources to improve English proficiency. Many a time, I found that people in the real world don’t talk like the way those texts presented in our education system, simply because those sources are a distance from reality. To learn English, or any second language, we need to enter the real world. For this, I suggest that you use DVDs.

BOOK REVIEW / LANGUAGE
The article is a book review of “A Man without Words.” It is about a man who never learned language until in his late 20s.
Humans are the only animal that knows how to use signs. Life must be boring if one does not, considering the case of Ildefonso, an illegal immigrant to the US. Ildefonso was born deaf and never learned how to use sign language. Somehow he got by without using words. He started to learn sign language when he met Susan Schaller. From then on his life has been very different.

Film Reviews
Reading a film review is an emotional experience. The writer watches a film, feels something, and expresses his (her) response to the film in words. The reader then picks up the feel reading it. A communication is thus accomplished. Language has to be the greatest privilege humans enjoy; animals do not have such tool to exact an abstract concept.
Here are two film reviews (from New York Times and Time Magazine) of Blue Gate Grossing, a Taiwanese teen movie. It is always interesting to see how foreigners see us because we are often too involved with ourselves, forgetting to see things from a different perspective. The writings are also beautiful and perceptive. They show once again that words can get deep into a text, digging out hidden treasures for us to enjoy.

WRITING

China is rising, but its internal unrest often remains invisible to the world outside. However, we can understand this through the article because the author was trying to make sense of the truth.
The author Hannah Beech started writing for Time magazine when she was still in her 20s. Her multicultural background contributes to her depth in writing: her father is American and mother Japanese. She speaks many languages and travels intensively. Her reports are mainly on underprivileged groups and she delivered their predicaments effectively through her writing. The article contains only 847 words, among which we see picture after picture playing out for us. We hear the sounds, we feel the situations.