Sex and The City & Friends
 

The first Friends showed in TVB-Pearl Channel(www.tvb.com.hk) tonight. It is very funny. I like it. Sometimes I can not understand the jokes.

Sex and The City would be over soon. I learned more from the program. I need sex, but don't know to enjoy it. It give me a good lesson.

Re: Sex and The City & Friends
 

Another classic Cellar post.

Re: Sex and The City & Friends
 

That makes two of us Billy, though I personally understand the jokes better than I understand why people would sit and watch the show in the first place. (I'm not a fan, in case you haven't figured out! :cool: )

I personally would suggest you take anything you learned about sex from "Sex and the City" with a large grain of salt. But then, maybe I'm the one living in the disturbing alternate universe and those gals are the ones in the real world. (Tho I do like the readhead... I did watch it occasionally before I cancelled HBO.)

Be careful billy. American TV shows and movies can give you a distorted view of reality. What you see is not necessarily what we have.

Re: Re: Sex and The City & Friends
 

Oh, that's easy to explain. It's b/c you're old, Steve. You're just not made for these times.

I agree with Bruce and Steve on "Sex in the City." Billy, if you really want to learn to enjoy sex, there are some very good books out there that you might want to read. A lot of the sex that is portrayed on TV and in US cinema is grossly distorted.

Using them to learn oral English
 

I don't completely believe what they say. I have my capability to decide the wrong or good. I think the oral English is very cool. I learn to listen to it. Do you think it is a good way?

Thank you for your concerns. Indeed I know little to enjoy sex.

Listening to American radio and television is a good way to become more familiar with our language, but realize that what you will hear is often not 'correct' English, but is more informal (which is also important to learn!)

Oh, and you might want to refer to it as "spoken" English, rather than "oral" English — there is also a sexual connotation to the word oral.

Sex in the City is a great guide for learning to enjoy sex, Billy. The difficult part is getting Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall into the sack with you in the first place. I hear they're rather busy these days. Sigh...;)

America English
 

I am preparing for the TOEFL test. The Listening is the students' dailiy speaking like the program. I think it can help me to prepare for the test.

I know the movies and programs have sexual connotation. Many students only learn to say "Shit","Damn","Fuck you" from watching the USA movies. It is one reason that our government would not like import too many Armerica movies. I think I can learn the good things, not the dirty words.

Do you think which way it is better to use to learn Spoken English?

The best way to learn Spoken English is by speaking it with native English speakers ... that way you get to practice what you've learned from books, or heard on television and radio. Another good source of practice is to listen to interviews on television or radio ... I had a series of tapes that I had to listen to in an advanced college level German class that were very helpful.

Re: Re: Re: Sex and The City & Friends
 

True enough. Maybe I can find a porch somewhere to park my rocker.

You can park it at my place, but you have to promise to tell stories about the good ol' days, complete with ridiculous exaggerations.

I can not find one native speaker
 

I can not talk with native speaker because there are few native speaker. So I have to watch the English TV channel. I think the talk with native speaker is a best way because it is intercommunication process. I believe that I can learn good writing here with your help.

I don't know if anybody here is qualified to give you grammar lessons, but you seem to have a farily good grasp of our syntax. I wish I could learn Chinese. The idea that the language is composed of tens of thousands of characters is a little confusing, though. How do you accomodate shifts in language or new terms?

I have listened to Chinese speakers and I cannot make out any individual words. I don't know if spoken English sounds that way to a non-English speaker, but I am curious to find out. Do you have a broadband connection? If so, you could make a broadband call to an American ( or maybe an Australian would give you a better Ping ) - to practice spoken English.

English is difficult to learn
 

I have learned English for more than then years.In first I felt that English is easy to learn because it has only 26 letters, but I felt very difficult to lear after I learn more words.In sometimes I don't know how to say when I can speak it well in chinese. Now I just use English to think when I need it. It is very easy to say Chinese for me.One problem is that I can not feel what are the good English articles and I cannot read the word beauty.
I have no pc to use. I surf the Internet in my office or in Net Cafe. I know one USA professor who work in China.I call him to speak when he have free time.In work time I can meet foreign workmates, but we have no time to speak.I think to watching TV is a good way too.

I am glad to teach you if want to learn. I must tell you that the Chinese is more difficult to learn because we have more words to remember. The words are very different.

Dropping the articles -- most Chinese speakers of English seem to do that. It's easy to understand sentences without articles, especially if you know that the person speaking is likely to drop articles.

I can not listen long articles
 

I can not get the information and lose if I listen a long article. Sometimes I don't know how to express myself when I chat with foreign people. I offten have solecism in speaking English.

Well anyway I remember back in '94 those idiots who were running the SIGUCCS conference booked it in Ypsilanti, Michigan for the same weekend as the Penn State/Michigan foorball game. People ended up staying at three different hotels because rooms were so scare. Shuttle buses?? BAH! We had to walk. Walk, I tell you, and it was uphill both ways. Do you know in those days they actually had 9600 baud serial hookups in the email room? Yeah, and we thought it was hot stuff too. Anyway I was giving a paper that year... yeah, paper... you do know what paper is, don't you boy?? Any way of course it was the first session on Monday morning and I had to haul ass over from my hotel to the conference center. The paper was about gopher. It was one of the last papers presented on gopher, maybe the last ever. Hmm I'll have to look that up maybe I finally did something to get me an asterisk in the history books. Anyway--where was I--oh yeah I was giving a paper. It was the first session early on Monday morning. And it was jam packed too, everybody wanted to hear about gopher. That "world wide web" crap was still experimental, and nobody wanted to have pictures with their internet access anyway. TEXT was what people wanted, lots and lots of TEXT... efficient, and information-rich. Why, people love text. That's why to this day almost anybody you talk to would rather sit down and read a nice book instead of watching that damned television or playing those stupid video games. And gopher, why gopher had lots of text, sonny, and no pictures. By god, that was what people WANTED back then. What good's a damn picture anyway? Just slurps up your bandwidth and you only got 256 colors anyway. So anyway I'm talking about Gopher. And it was packed. Sure I was the only presenter talking about gopher, and there were maybe 12 or 15 talking about the WWW, but nobody went to hear them. Oh yeah, that's right, of course I'm remembering it right, you couldn't PAY somebody to use the web. And I tell you, I used overhead transparencies too. None of that Powerpoint shit back then, you actually had to do some work if you were gonna give a lecture. You actually had to develop some CONTENT, boy. Yeah that's right, CONTENT. So anyway, there I was at SIGUCCS in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You know it was a real pain getting over the the conference center because they scheduled it for the same weekend as the Penn State-Michigan game and I'll tell you you couldn't BUY a hotel room. Of course I was presenting on Monday morning, pretty early. It was about gopher, I bet you probably never even heard of gopher much less used it... I... I'm a bit sleepy, I'll tell you about it some other time...

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

SD,Thank you
 

You post is wonderful

I'll second that. Being a devoted fan, myself.. It's a sad thing I have to live with every day, knowing this will be the last (although extended) season.

But on a feminine note, boys... believe me, the stuff that happens on that show is your typical everyday girlie stuff. How else can you explain it's phenom status? More women are independent and single, than ever.. and trying to reconcile that with the fact that they have primal sexual urges, just like our more hairy counterparts. And constantly fighting the status quo that hangs over our heads, and sends our playfriends running at the first sign of affection... we don't always want SERIOUS relationships.

If Cosmo is the bible, than SATC is the female version of a good James Bond movie (Die another Day not withstanding). Study, learn and apply.

And the old cliche, is a lie. On a daily average, girls want it more than guys do.

Scary, isn't it?

:)