English to Enjoy Life

English to Enjoy Life : Today, studying languages is as important as it is finishing high school, studying in college, and being educated in general. Even though it is not compulsory, everybody should understand how opportunities will show up in their lives more often just by being multilingual. Learning languages is affordable and will really make the difference in your professional life.

There is no denying that learning English, when you are not a native speaker is practically mandatory. This is not limited to our working lives. If we don’t speak English we might many times be left ‘out of the system’. English rules the Internet and technology world. Practically all languages loan English terms to talk about technology, they are becoming universal words. On the other hand, English students learn through technology. Information about subjects that you find interesting, especially regarding technology and science, may be published in English.

Learning the language will give you the tools to access such material, and it will also let you communicate with students and researchers in those fields. English is the most widespread languages and the mostly taught second tongue for non-natives. Learning in the context of native locals also helps the process. That is the reason why many people are currently taking English classes in Houston where not only are they taught by a native English speaker, but also they can continue to speak the language when the lesson is over.

Of course, if you already speak English, you cannot make due with only one language. According to a Czech proverb “You live a new life for every language you speak. If you only know one language, you live only once".

Learning a foreign language can help you better understand your own culture as well as other different ones. You will be surprised to find how much you and other cultures have in common, and how much you can differ. If you are interested in music, films, literature, TV programs or any other form of culture in general, a foreign language will give you a different overview. For instance, people who take Italian Classes in Boston can now appreciate the ancient history from another point of view. The Italian renaissance marked the close of the middle Ages in Europe. Renaissance in Italian means re-birth. During this period, people re-discovered learning and looked back to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome for their inspirations. The whole paradigm was changed. Learning Italian allows you to plunge into this world-changing period of time in history. Learn English to Enjoy Life.

7 Ways to Hear English Everywhere

           Two simple definitions

• to hear: to receive sound with the ears
• to listen: to try to hear

You are very good at languages. That's obvious, because you already speak one language very well - your own! And if you can learn and speak one language well, then you can certainly learn and speak one or more other languages.
But did you ever ask yourself: "How did I learn my own language?" In fact, you never really "learned" it at all - you just started speaking it. One day, when you were about two or three years old, you started speaking your language. A few words at first, not full sentences. But you spoke. And very soon you made progress without even thinking about it. It was like magic!
But it wasn't magic. It was the result of hearing. For two to three years before you spoke, you heard people speaking your language all day, and maybe all night. You heard people speaking your language. Maybe you listened to people, but more importantly you heard them. Then, as if by magic, you started to speak. All that hearing was necessary for you to start speaking. For two to three years words went IN to your head. Then words came OUT of your head! That is why hearing (and listening to) English as much as possible is so important to you now. The more English you put in, the more you'll get out!
So how can you hear a lot of English when you're not in an English-speaking country or family? Fortunately, there are many ways of hearing English in almost all countries of the world.

1. Listen to English Radio

You can receive English-language radio in most countries. Two international networks are the BBC World Service (from the UK) and Voice of America from (USA). Both of them have special programmes for learners of English. You can find information about times and frequencies for your country on their websites.

2. Watch English Television

TV is an excellent resource for hearing and listening to English. The pictures help you understand what is being said. If you don't have access to English-language TV, you may be able to watch TV on Internet.

3. Watch/Listen to English by Internet

It is now a lot easier to hear English by Internet. If you're reading this at your computer or mobile device, you can probably listen to some English-language radio news right now, without even moving! And of course you can find endless videos in English on YouTube and similar websites (although the English is not always easy to follow). Check out our page on links to radio by Internet.

4. Listen to Songs in English

Songs in English are everywhere, even on foreign-language radio and TV stations. Listen to them often. Buy some MP3s or CDs, or make recordings, and try to write the words for an entire song. But choose one that is not too difficult. That means it should be reasonably slow, and with real words sung clearly. Some pop songs are very unclear and are difficult even for native English-speakers to understand fully! Here are some easy songs for English learners.

5. Go to Cinemas with English-language Movies

Outside the English-speaking world, many large cities have cinemas that show films in English, usually with sub-titles. Make it a habit to go to these films. If you need to read the sub-titles, at least you'll be hearing English even if you don't understand it.

6. Use Video for English Listening Practice

You can use video to watch films from Internet or that you buy or borrow. If there are subtitles, you can cover them with paper (which you can remove if you really don't understand after listening several times). And sometimes you can use video to record programmes from television and then watch them several times to improve your understanding. EnglishClub has video just for learning English.

7. Get English-speaking Friends

Try to make friends with English-speaking people so that you can practise your English through conversation. Of course, this will improve your speaking as well as your listening. And if you don't have a lot of time to go out and meet people, at least you can chat a little by telephone.

Finally, don't worry if you don't understand everything you hear. Hearing comes first! Understanding comes next!

IELTS

(International English Language Testing System)

IELTS tests the complete range of English language skills that students usually encounter when studying or training in the medium of English. All candidates take the same Listening and Speaking Modules. There is an option of either Academic or General Training Reading and Writing Modules. Academic is suitable for candidates planning to undertake higher education study. General Training is suitable for candidates planning to undertake non-academic training or work experience, or for immigration purposes.

IELTS is accepted by most Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealand and increasingly American academic institutions for admissions purposes. The grade required depends on the particular institution. IELTS is also accepted by many professional and governmental o

Extra curricular activities

KMG COLLEGE HAS CONDUCTED LITERARY FEST ON 12/08/2017.OUR COLLEGE STUDENTS OF III BA AND II BA ENGLISH PARTICIPATED IN VARIOUS EVENTS AND WON THE PRIZES.


                  SKIT-II PRIZE
     S. Aamina Amreen

Oxford English Dictionary adds over 600 new expressions

The Oxford English Dictionary (Image: Wikipedia)

The Oxford English Dictionary has added over 600 new words, phrases and senses in its latest quarterly update.

"By the mid-20th century, 'woke' had been extended figuratively to refer to being 'aware' or 'well informed' in a political or cultural sense," the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) said in a statement.

The use of "woke" by supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement -- an international activist movement that campaigns against violence and racism toward black people -- and in particular the phrase "stay woke", are thought to have introduced the word to a broader audience, especially on social media, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

"Post-truth" was the Oxford's 2016 word of the year. It was defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".

Besides, over 50 new words and 30 new senses related to tennis were added. "Tennis mom" and "tennis dad", for example, are now used to describe parents who actively and enthusiastically support their child's participation in the sport.

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The dictionary has also got a new end. "Zyzzyva", a tropical weevil native to South America, is the new last in place of "zythum", a kind of malt beer brewed in ancient Egypt, which was the last alphabetic entry for a decade.

Meanwhile, the word "thing" now has a new sense defined as "a genuine or established phenomenon or practice used in questions conveying surprise or incredulity, such as 'how can that be a thing?'," said the OED, adding that the usage has been traced back to an early episode of television series "The West Wing".

In explanation of how a word qualifies for take-in, the OED said it "requires several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time."

Thousands of students in UP tune in to AIR to learn English

BIJNOR: Thousands of children studying in selected upper primary schools across Uttar Pradesh huddled together around radio sets on Monday morning to listen to All India Radio's show 'Aao Angrezi Sikhen' (let us learn English), an initiative of the state's education department and the public broadcaster to arrest the sinking standard of education in government schools.

The move aims to improve English of government school students, who lag behind their peers studying in public schools. Children of government schools in the northern hinterland also face difficulty in finding employment due to lack of knowledge of the language. Neighbouring Uttarakhand has already decided to shift the medium of instruction from Hindi to English in its schools.

Catching up with the changing trend, the Lucknow centre of AIR started the broadcast of the 15-minute programme from Monday. It will be aired on alternate days — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — between 10.45am to 11am for students of class 6 to 8.

This initiative will be monitored by school authorities, which will send a report on it to the state government.

About a Renaissance man

About a Renaissance man

Suparna Banerjee

The name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title ‘A Clockwork Orange’

For this writer, it seems, these are fantastic times. After the ‘father of fantasy’ J.R.R. Tolkein, whose 125th birth anniversary was commemorated in these columns recently, it is time to celebrate the birth centenary of Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), another doyen of 20th century ‘Brit Lit’, whose masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1962) is among the most celebrated specimens of dystopia, a form of fantastic fiction.

Although Burgess’ fame rests almost solely on this one dystopian novel, his creative output was both varied and prolific. In addition to around 30 novels, he wrote scripts for many films and television series. A professor of English and phonetics—whose real name was John (Anthony Burgess) Wilson—was also the author of many acclaimed non-fictional works, among them being a celebrated study of James Joyce (Here Comes Everybody), a translation of Oedipus the King, studies of the novel form, and a thinly-veiled biography of Shakespeare (Nothing Like the Sun).

He also wrote numerous articles and reviews for newspapers, including The Observer and The Guardian. And, In short, Burgess was an exemplar in the modern age of what in another era would have been called the ‘Renaissance Man’. Did this prolific writer who dominated the English literary circuit with his powerful public speeches and his flamboyant, almost arrogant persona, who bragged of his womanising powers—and who liked to be addressed as ‘Dr. Burgess’—secretly identify with Dr. Samuel Johnson, the dynamic 18th century scholar-critic whose dominance over the literary scene of his times is legendary, and whose burly appearance Burgess resembled?

            Possibly. Possibly, again, this self-conscious Byronic-Johnsonian persona was just that, a facade behind which the famous man of letters hid the vulnerable core of being John Wilson—whose loveless childhood and difficulties with the Catholic faith found reflection in his autobiography, as did his sense of failure as a musician and, his varied life experience as a struggling music arranger and as an army man and Education Officer in Britain, Spain, Borneo and Malay. Many critics have observed that his two-part autobiography—Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve had Your Time—constitutes his finest writing.

Film vs. book

Yet, in an interesting creator-creation drama, the name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title A Clockwork Orange, the novel whose fame turned to notoriety upon its filming in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick. The film, which seemed to glorify riotous violence and violent sex, was quickly banned in England. However, for thousands of viewers in England and outside, the film succeeded in misrepresenting the novel, which, in actuality, is a subtle probe into some of the deepest moral dilemmas of modern life.

A study of juvenile delinquency, the novel is set in a near future England dominated by extreme youth violence in an ambience of unrest and inequality. However, rather than simply condemning the cruel violence perpetrated on defenceless people by Alex, the teenage protagonist, and his gang, Burgess brings in issues of the moral legitimacy of a state-controlled programme of psychological rehabilitation that converts Alex into a meek conformist and a victim of violence in turn. Alex loses the essence of his being, thereby losing his taste not only for violence but also for classical music that was the only noble thing that energised him.

In the end, he is shown to overcome his conditioning and return to his violent ways, proving the ultimate inefficacy of any coerced programme of moral uplift.

This intended ending was later supplemented with an added final chapter, in which Alex eschews violence and cruelty by choice. This ultimate chapter was omitted in the American edition of the novel and, consequently, in Kubrick’s film, and this, perhaps, was partly to blame for the way Burgess’s intention in the novel was misunderstood.Here was a novel—reckoned by the Modern Library as among the 100 best English language novels written in the 20th century—that posed difficult moral-philosophical questions pertaining to the dynamics of state power and the individual’s liberty, the possibility of nurture overcoming nature, and, ultimately, to the nature of goodness itself. As Burgess later put it, “Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?” In other words, how is a modern society to negotiate the difficult interchange between individual will and society’s requirements? Does not a man cease to be a man if he ceases to choose?

This moral earnestness of the novel was, however, balanced by a play of lively wit, a near-perfect sense of the comic, and above all, the linguistic virtuosity displayed in a unique lingo—the “nadsat”—that was a blend of pure invention with elements of English slang and the Russian language. Indeed, wit, innovation, supple prose, and ‘high moral seriousness’ always exists seamlessly together in Burgess’ work—right from his Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes (1956-59), through the loosely autobiographical Inside Mr. Enderby, up to his later fiction, which includes the ambitious Earthly Powers (1980).

Anthony Burgess, the recipient of several honours, English and French, one feels, is to be remembered ultimately as a writer whose body of work consistently illustrates the Horacean adage that good literature combines both entertainment and moral gravitas—that searching social critiques need not be arid, or that erudition need not eschew wit at all.

The Failure of Misanthropy February

The Failure of Misanthropy

             February 6, 2017

Yahia  Lababidi

Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner’s slip he came across in Prague, which warned clients that “some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the material itself.” If the stains are us, what if we were to take this risk?

I look at the lengthening shadow of violence and intolerance spreading across the Middle East, Europe, and, now, the Divided States of America and wonder if Donald Trump might not be the moral crisis we needed to awaken us to the world’s suffering and our interconnectedness. 

How is it that we are told to Never Forget 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 lives taken, yet in the same breath we never remember the unjust “war” exacted in retribution and the hundreds of thousands of blameless, faceless Iraqi fatalities? There is no exchange rate for human suffering. All human life is sacred; all murder unholy. 

Maybe we ask ourselves what is Aleppo?, and why should we care? In turn, we find ourselves confronted with gun violence at home, police brutality, the open wound of race relations, or the plaintive cry – as old as the creation of a nation – of Indigenous Americans at Standing Rock. Or physically and psychologically damaged war veterans, homelessness, up rootedness, refugees, all terrorists in the shape of our shadows, all side-effects of the pandemic of indifference. 

A prescription for our current malaise and how we might begin to heal can be found in these words by American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck: How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others. But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

We forgive to live. As an Arab American bridge-of-a-man by the name of Gibran reminds us: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?” It bears repeating during this time of Islam phobic panic, when a thirteenth-century mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, is a best-selling poet in America. Rumi was a Muslim and also a refugee who lived in a turbulent time, not too dissimilar from our own. What glimmer of light, what lesson might we glean from this mysterious coincidence? 

How is it that we readily accept that we are governed by physical laws yet believe that we can afford to turn our backs on age-old spiritual laws – Love, Compassion, Sacrifice, Mercy, Trust – without paying too high a price? The price of a New Chance – past the murderous folly in the Middle East and self-defeating arrogance of the US – is nothing less than surrendering our old, failed, broken ways.

Perhaps President Trump will Make America Great, Again, unwittingly, by bringing about a Reevaluation of Values. The peaceful, powerful Women’s March on Washington, DC, dwarfing in number those who attended his inauguration and echoing throughout the US as well as the world, seems to suggest that it might be safe to hope for change, again. Heartening, too, to witness impassioned rallies in airports throughout the country welcoming immigrants and protesting Trump’s unconstitutional executive order or “Muslim Ban.” Provoked by his administration’s disregard for science and denial of climate change, we can look forward to an upcoming scientists’ March (the Face book group created to support this event had more than 300,000 likes, last I checked). 

For my part, as immigrant and writer, I think of my art as a sort of peace offering as well as a form of literary activism. Recently, I had the good fortune to play both roles (peacemaker and activist) by being part of an important new anthology, Truth to power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear (Cutthroat, 2017) alongside many fine writers such as Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Wendell Berry, Patricia Spears Jones, Alfred Corn, Sam Hamill, and many others. In Truth to Power, writers from diverse cultures / ethnic backgrounds respond in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to pressing social issues raised by the campaign and election of Trump, including immigration, women’s rights, African American rights, and environmental issues. 

Being a dual citizen of the US and Egypt, at this particular historical moment I see all too clearly how culturally diminished and spiritually impoverished we become when we close our doors to the world and our hearts to others. I hope that my aphorisms, below, might serve as a reminder of our larger allegiances to one another. 

The right to free speech ends where hate speech begins. The bigot’s crime is twofold: not knowing others well enough to love them, and not knowing themselves enough to recognize their own hatred. We are responsible for our enemies. Compassion is to realize the role we play in their creation. Our morality is determined by the level of immorality that we can afford to live with. Unheeded pricks of conscience might return as harpoons of circumstance. We can lend ideas our breath, but Ideals require our entire lives. As with all battles, how we fight determines who we become. Every time we betray our conscience, we strangle an angel. Yet, it’s not certain we are allotted an infinite supply of winged pardons. Where there are demons, there is something precious worth fighting for. You can’t bury pain and not expect it to grow roots. How attentive the forces of darkness are, how they rush to answer our ill-conceived wishes. As you progress to the Light, notice how jealous shadows also redouble their efforts. How vast the future that it can serve as a bottomless repository of all fears, hopes, and dreams. Strange, how one hate enables another; how they are like unconscious allies, darkly united in blocking out the Light. Buoyancy of the human spirit in the face of turbulence is the source of the miraculous. 

In serving words, faithfully, we also serve one another. Like incantations, certain word combinations can set a sentence or soul in motion. In the deep end, every stroke counts. Our salvation lies on the other side of our gravest danger. To sense we are always at a great turning point is a sign of spiritual vitality. There is a point in unlearning, where we cannot proceed any further – without Transformation. Heaven save us from tragic seriousness; teach us to play, divinely. Perhaps crisis is self-induced disaster – a last-ditch effort we gift ourselves to, finally, transform. Best not flirt with disaster, lest it decide to commit. We’re here to pass around the ball of Light while keeping our fingerprints off it. The only failures are misanthropes. Mistrust a person seeking power without a sense of humor – it usually translates into a lack of mercy. A lesson to bullies, big and small: controlling others is a spiritual impossibility; those who try must exist in a state of existential insecurity. Mercy is to cover the nakedness of others and stand beside them – naked, yourself.