My 1st vote to presidential election

Last Saturday, 22th Mar, 2008, was a big day in Taiwan-- the Presidential Election of Taiwan.
After 8 years ruling under the Democratic Progress Party, Taiwanese people are sick of the corruptive government.As we can see, there is a big gap of the vote btw these two candidates, Ma’s winning 2 million votes against Hsieh.
Actually not all the votes for KMT because they favored Ma, which means KMT does not completely satisfied those who vote for them. The truth is that the median voters are disappointed about the ruling party which is the DPP. Therefore, they choose the opposite team instead.
Frankly speaking, I have no special adverseness of Hsieh; on the contrary, his achievements in his official career in Kaohsiung were actually remarkably. It was because DPP's 8 years of governing extremely terrible, including wasting Taiwan's money on those stupid "cash-for-friendship games."
Through voting, Taiwanese request the previous ruling party to step down the political stage and make self-examination.I am not saying the new ruling party is much better than DPP, but like most of the other Taiwanese, we do not think the new president will be worse. All of us would like to give the new party a try, hoping Ma and Hsiao are leading us to an affluent and peaceful Taiwan.

Corpus & Concordancer

I had first known the existence of Corpus last year, and I was fascinated about the system. For all I knew then was that such marvelous system must cost a lot to acquire. But since Thursday Ms. Lai introduced us two concordancers which I found really useful, I am surprised to find them free on line. We should all seize the great opportunity to make the best use of them. They are some kind of search engine that help you to learn from native speakers’ language usage. For example, if we’d like distinguish the difference between the words “big” and “large”, just type the words onto the engine. Through searching the corpus, we learn the common and different usages such as both of them are used to describing the size of an object or large often go with “amount of.
I believe these websites will help greatly to our writing and language collocation, avoiding grammar mistake or any misuse of language.

Useful Concordancers
1. VLC CONCORDANCER
http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk
2. Online Concordancer by Tom Cobb
http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/

Comment on "Omniglot - the blogone "

Omniglot - the blog
The website Omniglot belongs to Simon Ager, a language learning lover. According to him, the foreign language he speaks the best is Mandarin Chinese, followed by Welsh, Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese (more or less in that order), and he is currently studying Czech. Moreover, the name of his blog, Omniglot, means “all languages.” In one of his article, Flashcards, he shared his experience of using flashcards in memorizing vocabularies. Actually I consider it is an efficient way; however, it takes time to do make the cards and takes patience to continue. After all, patience and perseverance are necessitated to learning English.

Comment on "The English Blog"

The English Blog

There are all kinds of English learning materials such as online service, software, podcast, websites or articles in this Blog.
I found one of the links to this blog, Picture Vocabulary, very interesting that has image and sound. For example, once you move your pointer over the picture, you can not only see the written word but also hear the sound of the word. It is a fun tool for beginner English learner or someone like to learn more about a category of something.

Another material I found was the “Talk about English,”a BBC online radio program. Listening to online radio is a very useful and economical way to learn English. We should all take advantage of the convenience of the Internet.

Online Dictionary

1. Cambridge Dictionaryhttp://dictionary.cambridge.org/
2. Merriam-webster (Dictionary, Thesaurus) http://www.merriam-webster.com/

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