Everyday Conversations

I COULDN'T HELP IT

Daryl: I am upset. Somebody told my boss I have a part-time job.
Smith: And he doesn't like that ?
Daryl: No, he doesn't. He thinks that I am too tired to work.
Smith: I am sorry. I have to admit I told him.
Daryl: You told him ? Why ?
Smith: I couldn't help it. He asked me point-blank.

Explanation :

• If you can't help the way you feel or behave, you cannot control it or stop it from happening. You can also say that you can't help yourself.
• If you say something point-blank, you say it very directly or rudely, without explaining or apologizing.

Improving Your Speaking & Listening Skills

LEARNING ENGLISH BY LISTENING

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AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker joins us from Los Angeles to talk about authentic listening materials.

RS: It's the subject of her latest textbook, called "Real Talk 1."

LIDA BAKER: "One of the trends in the field in the last few years has been to try to expose students to authentic language, which is language -- English the way people really talk."

AA: "So you got your tape recorder out and you walked around and eavesdropped or what did you do?"

LIDA BAKER: "That's one of the ways that we collected the authentic language samples. So, yeah, we would put a microphone on a table and we would ask people to talk about a certain topic. In-person recordings were one kind of authentic speech samples that we collected.

"The second kind was phone interviews and phone conversations. And we tried to make these as relevant to real life as we could. So we had, for example, we asked somebody to call up two different car rental agencies and find out about the price of renting a car. Now the student's task in that case is to listen to both phone recordings and decide if they were going to rent a car, which company would they go to.

"So that's an example of where not only the input, the recording itself, is authentic, but the task is also authentic, which is another aspect in this movement in our profession towards authentic language teaching. It's not only authentic language teaching, but it's authentic language use."

AA: "Let me ask you, obviously when people talk we don't always follow the rules of grammar and syntax and all that.

So how does it benefit students to learn from authentic materials rather than maybe a more traditional approach?"

LIDA BAKER: "By listening to the way people really talk, what students have to do is learn how to filter out the parts of the language that are not part of the message they are supposed to get, and tune in to the parts of the utterance that are part of the message. Does that make sense? So if I say 'ummm .... ummm ... well, let's see ...'"

AA: "I filter that out."

LIDA BAKER: "Yeah, as a native speaker you know that that's not part of the message that I'm trying to convey. We actively teach students how to filter that stuff out, because natural language has all kinds of junk in it, if you want to call it that -- we make grammatical errors when we talk, we hesitate, we repeat ourselves, we use fillers which are things like 'uh,' 'um,' 'you know,' 'kind of' and, of course, the famous 'like.' And like is a really interesting example of something that students have to learn how to either tune out or attend to depending on the meaning."

AA: "Let me ask you, at what level would you start using authentic materials -- beginner, intermediate, where would you start?"

LIDA BAKER: "Believe it or not, you can do it at any level -- you can do it with absolute beginners. But you have to take care to present the language in very small segments with beginners and you also have to create tasks that are at the student's level of ability. Now let me give you a really simple example of what I mean. Very low level students, you might ask them to listen for instance to ... let's say to a weather report.

"And things like weather reports are good because they're short. Now you can give them a list of words related to the weather: it's windy, it's raining, it's cloudy and so on. And you can have students listen to the weather report, which could be as short as ten or fifteen seconds and they have to put a check mark next to the adjectives that they hear. Now that's a really simple task that you can do with beginning students using an authentic recording."

Normal English

EU, CHINESE LEADERS TO DISCUSS CONTROVERSIAL TRADE ISSUES

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Leaders of China and the European Union are to open a summit Wednesday in Beijing. The EU's growing trade deficit with China and the safety of Chinese imports are issues that are likely to dominate the talks. Naomi Martig reports from VOA's Asia News Center in Hong Kong.

EU leaders gathering in Beijing are expected to bring up a variety of trade issues with China, many of which have created an increasingly complicated relationship between them.

The safety of Chinese products is likely to be at the top of the agenda. In recent months, China has scrambled to clamp down on poor quality goods to try to build confidence in the "made in China" label. A string of safety scandals involving seafood, car tires, toothpaste and children's toys have led to bans and recalls overseas.

Earlier this year, a leading London toy store pulled two Chinese-made products from its shelves after paint on one type of toy was shown to contain high amounts of lead, which could cause brain damage or even death. The U.S. toy company Mattel has also recalled more than 18 million Chinese-made toys because of unsafe levels of lead.

On Monday in Beijing, European Union trade commissioner Peter Mandelson said that ensuring consumer trust and confidence in Chinese products must be China's priority if it wants to maintain the export growth rates of recent years.

"During the summer, some Chinese officials pointed out that less than one percent of China's exports to Europe had alleged health risks," he said. "But Europe imports half a billion euros worth of goods every day from China. So, even one percent is not acceptable."

His comments drew an icy response from China's top trade official, Vice Premier Wu Yi. She insists China's government has taken unprecedented steps to ensure product quality and food safety.

EU policy makers are also expected to press Chinese officials to increase market access for European goods, and to reform its currency exchange rate.

Last year, the EU's trade deficit with China was about $170 billion. This year, it is expected to approach $230 billion, a record level. EU officials blame the widening gap on what they call China's artificially low currency exchange rates, which they say give the country an unfair trading advantage.

Christer Ljungwall is an EU and China trade expert at Peking University. He says he does not expect the currency dispute to be resolved anytime soon.

"Any major jump in exchange rate policy would be, first of all, very unpredictable, and it would be very difficult to foresee the actual results of that," he said. "And from the Chinese perspective, again, it is not likely to happen."

China is reluctant to allow a rapid fluctuation of its currency, fearing it could cause unemployment and market instability.

After the US, China is the European Union's second-biggest trade partner, and its largest source of imports.

Spoken English

'UH HUH', 'UNH UNH' AND 'OOPS!'

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AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we talk with English teacher Nina Weinstein about some expressions in spoken American English that you might not find in a dictionary.

RS: But if you are a good listener, you'll hear them. They give people time to think while helping connect one thought to the next.

NINA WEINSTEIN: "One of the useful links, I think, is the expression 'let's see,' which means 'let me think.' Often my students will use a kind of word like that from their own language. And so they'll be speaking Japanese or Spanish or whatever with their linking word and THEN they'll continue the rest of the sentence in English. And so I give them 'let's see' as a way to bridge their thoughts and also give them time to think."

AA: "'Let's see' also has a meaning in itself, though, too, doesn't it? Where, for example, you're not sure which way you've decided on something so you'll say 'OK, let's see' -- let's see what happens. 'Let's see.'"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "I think you're right. I think it could indicate that you're not sure of the answer. It has a lot of meanings. And a lot of these have dual meanings, like the simple expression 'uh huh.' Uh huh can mean that we're listening to what the person is saying, so this is a way of keeping them talking. It can also mean yes, or it can be pronounced 'um hmm.'"

RS: "What about no?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "'Unh unh.' And my students often have a problem distinguishing between uh huh and unh unh."

AA: "Give us an example of how to use them correctly."

NINA WEINSTEIN: "'Do you want to go to the movie?' 'Uh huh.' Do you think that the movie will start after nine?' 'Unh unh.'"

RS: "You say your students have trouble distinguishing between the two?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "Right."

RS: "Now, do you reinforce them with facial expressions or shaking your head, or nodding your head [yes] or shaking your head no?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "I talk about the beat. If you listen to 'uh huh,' the accent is on the second syllable. If you listen to 'unh unh,' it's equal. So 'unh unh' is more staccato. And I tap my hand on the desk to kind of reinforce this. And then I usually asked them if they sing karaoke or something like that, so they get the idea of the beat. But I don't sing for them!"

AA: "Unh unh."

RS: "So you give them a couple of examples and they're tapping out on their desk whether it's yes or no?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "Exactly."

RS: "I want to go back to unh unh, uh huh and a third one, 'uh oh.'"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "Uh oh."

RS: "They sound very similar. We have three here and if you could go over them again for us, I think that would be very useful because they sound so similar, but they're used in such different contexts."

NINA WEINSTEIN: "Well, I think if we look at the rest of the sentence or listen to the rest of the sentence, that gives us a big clue. If someone asks a question and the answer is uh huh, then it has to be either yes or no, so that pretty much narrows it. If there's a situation -- for instance, if a person spills some coffee or something like that, and the person says 'uh oh,' I think there's a kind of feeling that the situation gives us that something bad has happened, and uh oh means 'oh no,' there's a problem, something bad has happened, there's trouble or something like that. So often the situation will give us the idea."

AA: "It's a synonym for 'oops,' right?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "It can be oops. We also say 'whoops.'"

AA: "What about a word like 'hey'?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "Hey is actually a conversational strategy and it's used to draw attention to what you're talking about: 'Hey, did you see the movie on Channel 3 last week?' So I can delete the hey and still have a good sentence, but hey adds a kind of attention focus to the sentence."

RS: "What would you suggest to do to teach these things? Is it just to listen a lot?"

NINA WEINSTEIN: "I think that often what I read in the literature is a kind of lumping together of all of these strategies. But just in what we've spoken about today, you can see that they're very complicated, or they can have multi-purposes, each one. So I think that we need to give students systematic practice in hearing them and in distinguishing when the differences can be confusing, such as uh huh/unh unh."

AA: Nina Weinstein is an English teacher in Southern California and author of the book "Whaddaya Say? Guided Practice in Relaxed Speech." She's put together a list of conversational strategies including the ones we talked about today, which we'll post on our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster.

RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Uh Huh Oh Yeh"/Paul Weller
---
Conversational Strategies

Vocabulary or techniques used in spoken English, but not in written:

• Uh huh shows the speaker you’re listening; can mean “yes”; can be pronounced “um hmm” (mouth closed)
• Unh unh means “no”; can be pronounced “mm mm” (mouth closed)
• Uh, um give the speaker time to think. (Don’t use these too much.)
• Hmm means “I’m thinking” or “That’s interesting.” Can be pronounced “Mmm.” (“Mmm” can also mean “I like it" – food, an idea, etc.)
• Uh oh means “Oh no, there’s trouble.”

You know establishes understanding between the speaker and listener ("The restaurant is on the street; you know, the one just before you get to the mall.") It also gives the speaker time to think.

• Huh? is informal for “what?” Can be pronounced “hmm?”
• Hey is a casual way to draw attention to what you’re saying. Often begins a sentence.
  

In other words can begin a sentence. Can be used to check that the listener understood the speaker (very useful for second language learners)

Oops or whoops is used when someone makes a mistake or drops something.

Let’s see means “let me think” or “I’m thinking.” Often begins a sentence.
Tsk tsk tsk expresses disapproval

Aha means “I’ve discovered something.” Usually said with a lot of emphasis.

Other conversational strategies include:

Irregular pacing. Natural English isn’t spoken at one speed; native speakers can speed up or slow down within a speech, sentence, or even a phrase.

Repetition of words. Words and phrases are often repeated spontaneously.

English Improvement

COMPOUNDING MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BLACK BIRD AND A BLACKBIRD

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AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away, but joining me from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain our topic on Wordmaster this week. It's a feature of the language called compounding.

LIDA BAKER: "Compounding is when we take two words in English and we put them together to make a brand-new word. For example, you can take the word race and the word car and you can put it together and you have a race car. But interestingly you can also combine those two words together in the opposite order, car plus race. And then you have ... "

AA: "Car race."

LIDA BAKER: "Car race, which is a kind of ... "

AA: "Race."

LIDA BAKER: "Isn't that interesting? So a race car is a kind of car and a car race is a kind of race. One of the rules, I guess, of the meaning of compounds in English is that the core meaning is the word on the right."

AA: "So what are some other examples?"

LIDA BAKER: "Well, there are all kinds of compounds in English. The most common ones are when we combine two nouns -- so race car, housekeeper. One of the things that's confusing about compounds is the spelling, because sometimes it's written as two words; for example, race car. Sometimes it's written as one word; for example, housekeeper. And sometimes it's written with a hyphen. I actually would have to check this myself, but I think the word baby-sitter is written with a hyphen.
"Now the point is, even native speakers of English don't always know how to spell compounds and they have to consult a dictionary. So I would give my students exactly the same advice.
"Now let's move away from the written language and talk about the spoken language. There is a unique feature of compounds which is that the first word is normally the one -- well, always the one that is stressed. So notice, for example, that we say RACE car, HOUSE keeper, BLACK bird, MAKE up, BABY sitter. You see how the first -- we've talked on this program about word stress before. In a compound the first word is the one that gets stressed, and that's one of the things that actually identities it as a compound. What if you have, for example -- well, where does the president of the United States live?"

AA: "In the White House."

LIDA BAKER: "In the WHITE House, and it's stressed on the first word. But I live in a white HOUSE. So there's a difference between a compound which is a unit that has a meaning of its own, like White House, which is the residence of the president of the United States, as opposed to a house that happens to be white. Another famous example of that is blackbird, which is a specific type of bird, and a black bird as opposed to a blue bird or a red bird, you see?

AA: "Uh-huh."

LIDA BAKER: "So what we have to do in the classroom -- first of all, explain to students what I just explained to you, and then do what we call ear training. I can propose a couple of activities that teachers can do that can help students to learn compounds. One of them is a simple matching activity where you have two columns. And what the students have to do is take a word from the first column and match it with a word in the second column and create the compound and then practice saying it correctly. So, a simple matching activity.
"But there's another activity that is really fun, and that is to take these -- you know how we were talking about the difference between 'White House' and 'white house' or 'blackbird' and 'black bird'? You take those phrases and you try to create -- this is kind of for advanced students -- but try to make one sentence that contains both of those. So as an example: 'I saw a white house on my way to the White House?' Can you hear the difference?"

AA: "Uh-huh."

LIDA BAKER: "Or I saw a black bird, but I'm not sure if it's a blackbird.' I've done this and it's a lot of fun. You see students, you know, they're pounding on the desk trying to figure out where the stressed word is and so on."

VIETNAMESE TEACHER'S DAY

Everybody!



I'm so happy! You all make me moved. I promiss myself that everything i do, i do it for me...hi hi ...for YOU.

Lời Ru Của Thầy

Mỗi nghề có một lời ru
Dở hay thầy cũng chọn ru khúc này
Lời ru của gió màu mây
Con sông của mẹ đường cày của cha


Bắt đầu cái tuổi lên ba
Thầy ru điệp khúc quê nhà cho em
Yêu rồi cũng nhớ yêu thêm
Tình yêu chẳng có bậc thềm cuối đâu!


Thầy không ru đủ nghìn câu
Biết con chữ cũng đứng sau cuộc đời
Tuổi thơ em có một thời
Ước mơ thì rộng như trời, ngàn năm


Như ru ánh lửa trong hồn
Cái hoa trong lá, cái mầm trong cây
Thầy ru hết cả mê say
Mong cho trọn ước mơ đầy của em.


Mẹ ru em ngủ tròn đêm
Thầy ru khi mặt trời lên mỗi ngày
Trong em hạt chữ xếp dày
Đừng quên mẹ vẫn lo gầy hạt cơm



Từ trong vòm mát ngôi trường
Xin lời ru được dẫn đường em đi
(Con đường thầy ngỡ đôi khi
Tuổi thơ lăn một vòng bi tới rồi!)



Hẳn là thầy cũng già thôi
Hóa thân vào mỗi cuộc đời các em
Thì dù phấn trắng bảng đen
Hành trang ấy đủ thầy đem theo mình



(Đoàn Vị Thượng)

Confusing Words

USED TO

When we use used to, we are talking about something which happened regularly or was true at an earlier stage in our lives but which is now over.

Thus, it can only be used in the past tense. If we want to talk about present habits or states, we simply use the present simple tense.

With the negative we often say never used to in preference to didn't use to or used not to - in an informal register. Study the following examples:

1. 'Do you remember? There used to be fields of clover where those houses are now.'
2. 'I never used to smoke, but now I smoke twenty a day.'
3. 'You used to play chess with your friends, but nowadays you play chess with your computer.'
4. 'I used to buy really expensive make-up, but that was when I was working full-time.'
   

To make questions, we use the normal auxiliary did. Note that used to cannot be used in question tag form. Note also the possible/probable replies to used to questions.
Study the following examples:

1. 'Did you use to go ice-skating when you were young?' 'No, I never did.'
2. 'Didn't you use to ring the school to say you were ill and then play poker with Sam?' 'I sometimes did, yeah!'
3. 'You used to do ballet in the church hall, didn't you?' 'Yes, I did. Every Saturday between the ages of nine and twelve.'

be used to + noun or -ing get used to + noun or -ing

If somebody gets or is used to something, he becomes or is fully familiar with it. It is no longer strange or awkward. It can refer to past, present or future experiences. Study the following:

1. 'These are very high heels, I know, but I'm sure you'll get used to (wearing) them.'
2. 'I wasn't used to living in such a small flat and I found it really hard at first.'
3. 'I'm used to all the noise now, but I'd always lived in the country before, you see, where it is very quiet.'
4. 'I never got used to shaking hands with people all the time when I lived there. It's just not the custom in our country.'
5. 'Are you getting used to the accent now? It's very different from standard English, isn't it?

In all of the above examples be or get used to can be replaced by be or become accustomed to which is very similar in meaning, if a little more formal.

Read through them again using these replacement verbs. So, just to recap and confirm:

1. 'When I lived in Mexico, I used to drink tequila at every opportunity.' (A regular habit then, but probably not now.)
2. 'I found it quite a strong drink at first, but I soon got used to it.' (It quickly became quite palatable.)
   

Confusing Words

WED & WEDDING

A wedding is a marriage ceremony which is held in church or a registry office and also includes the party or special meal which follows the ceremony. All of this usually happens on your wedding day.

There are a number of other wedding compounds that are associated with wedding day:

- The newlyweds had told everybody that they wanted no wedding presents as they were emigrating to Australia.

- The predominant colour at Sophie's wedding was creamy white. Her wedding dress was this colour and the icing on the three-tier wedding cake was this colour too.

- Is it true that in Britain you wear your wedding ring on the third finger of your left hand?

- A silver wedding is celebrated after 25 years of marriage and a golden wedding after 50 years.

If you wed someone, you marry them, but wed is not used very much nowadays as a verb as it is rather old-fashioned. It can sound quite effective however, because it is unusual. Sometimes it has a poetic ring to it:

- We got wed soon after the baby was born.

- I shall never wed as I like to be independent.

marriage / marry / get married

Marriage describes the relationship between husband and wife or the state of being married:

- They enjoyed a long and happy marriage.

- Most marriages these days do not last.

- The bride's parents did not approve of Victoria's marriage to George.

If you marry someone, that person becomes your husband or wife and we use the verb marry in preference to wed normally.

However, even more usual than marry is get married. This use of get with a past participle is a very common structure in contemporary English and is used across a range of common expressions. It has the same sort of force as reflexive verbs have in other languages. Thus in English we would say: Don't get lost! NOT Don't lose yourselves! Consider the following:

- I married the man next door / I got married to the man next door.

- They didn't get dressed until two o'clock in the afternoon.

- I didn't bother to get washed as I knew I would be working on the farm.

- Remember, it's a big dark wood. Be careful not to get lost.

- We had known each other for fifteen years before we got engaged.

- I never get invited to Sarah's parties.

- We got married on 10 June, but by the beginning of the autumn both of us knew that the marriage would not last and that sooner or later we would have to get a divorce / get divorced.

Interestingly, although we can say they married and they divorced as an alternative to they got married and they got divorced, we cannot say: they engaged. Here, only they got engaged is possible.

Improving Your Listening Skills

UN STANDS BEHIND DIPLOMAT

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U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked special advisor Ibrahim Gambari to convey strong disappointment to Burmese authorities on the government's decision to expel the highest-ranking U.N. official in the nation. Gambari is due to meet with Burmese authorities Saturday when he returns to Burma to push for reconciliation between the government and opponents. From VOA's New York Bureau, correspondent Barbara Schoetzau has the story.

Burma is expelling the U.N. regional coordinator, Charles Petrie, for an October 24 statement linking poverty in Burma to 45 years of military rule.

In a released statement that day, United Nations Day, Petrie said demonstrations against rising fuel prices that quickly turned into anti-government protests were indications of how badly Burma's economy and humanitarian situation had deteriorated.

U.N. spokesperson Michele Montas says Burma's ministry of foreign affairs wrote the United Nations that Mr. Petrie has been in Burma for a long time and should move on. She said the U.N. stands fully behind Petrie.

Ibrahim Gambari Montas says Secretary General Ban and Gambari met Friday at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey, where the U.N. chief gave the special envoy instructions for his visit to Burma.

"The Secretary General is disappointed by the message from Myanmar stating that it would not want the resident coordinator, Mr. Charles Petrie, to continue to in Myanmar. The Secretary General has full confidence in the United Nations' country team and its leadership and appreciates their contribution to the social, economic and humanitarian conditions for the people of Myanmar. The Secretary General has instructed the special advisor, Mr. Ibrahim Gambari, to convey his views directly to the authorities when he visits the country," she said.

As head of the U.N. Development Program in Burma, Petrie is the highest-ranking U.N. official in the country. Montas says there is no such thing as a fixed term for a regional coordinator. She says the United Nations Development Program will continue its work in Burma regardless of whether Petrie leaves or stays.

Speaking Practice

UNIT 8: LOVING AND DATING

- Dating practices vary from culture to culture: ways of dating are different from country to country.
- People date for a period of time to see if they are compatible.
- There are three typical kinds of date: going out on group dates with a number of friends, going on blind dates (going out with a person that you've never met), and going with your only partner.
- Be careful when dating because people sometimes don't show their true colors on the first, second, or fifteenth date.
- It's difficult to get to know someone through email or online.

QUESTIONS:

Why do you date?
Where do you want to have dates?
Why do you choose such places?
What should you do at the first date?

Functions Of English

WELL-OFF & BETTER-OFF

well-off

Well-off relates mainly to money matters. If you are well-off, you may not be rich exactly, but you have enough money to live well and comfortably:

By central European standards they are quite well-off They have their own flat and drive new cars.

well-off for

However, if you say you are well-off for something, this means that there are many of them:

We’re well-off for coffee shops in this town. There’s one at every corner in the High Street.

better-off

The comparative form of this adjective is better-off which is used to talk about the varying degrees of wealth different people have:

We’re not as well-off as the Jones’s. They’re definitely better-off than we are. Just look at the way they dress!

To be better-off, as you suggest, Mariano, also has another meaning of being in a better situation and is used mainly in conditional patterns as follows:

If you’ve got heavy bags to carry, you’d be better-off taking a taxi.It says on the sign that the motorway ahead is blocked. You’ll be better-off if you leave the motorway at this junction which is coming up now.

the better-off

The better-off is sometimes used as a noun to describe a category of people, cf the rich / the poor:

The rich and the poor live side-by-side in this part of town.The better-off should pay a higher rate of income tax, while those who are worst-off should pay no tax at all.