I read this a little earlier today and thought to myself what a load of....
接著我在這裡的定義看到方才的"片語"--a load of xxxxxx--。hogwash:
noun {U} INFORMAL
nonsense, or words which are intended to deceive:
- His answer was pure hogwash.
hogwash:
A load of BULLSHIT!!!
Oh, what a bunch of hogwash!
The caesura sign (頓號 or ?? in pinyin: dun4 hao4), nicknamed sesame dot, is the Chinese equivalent of serial comma. It is shaped like a teardrop with the narrow sharp end pointing top-left and round end pointing bottom-right: 、 (it may be depicted on your computer in another font). In Japanese, the Chinese caesura sign is used as comma (serial or not).
Karaoke combines two Japanese words: kara is short for karappo, which means empty, and oke is part of okestura, meaning orchestra. An empty orchestra, a mic and a singer - the major ingredients of karaoke.
Since its origination 20 years ago, Taiwan has also picked up on the karaoke craze. The Taiwanese have worked diligently over the past years, making karaoke their own.
Today, karaoke clubs and bars are one of the most popular forms of entertainment for the Taiwanese. It is difficult to travel through any city in Taiwan without being flashed down in the dark by bright neon lights luring passerbys Vegas-style.
 You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs. For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong. |
You Are a Link Blogger! |
 Your blog is more about cool links than thougtful posts. Better to be entertaining and breif than longwinded and boring! |
LONDON (Reuters) - Do chuggers bother you when you want to rock up to a restaurant with your cockapoo to hoover a supersized ruby murray?
Confused? Then you need to refer to the new Oxford Dictionary of English to understand a host of new words that appear for the first time in its latest edition.
Among the new entries are "potty-mouthed" (meaning using or characterized by bad language), "lush" (very good) and "scopophilia" (sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity).
Some words, such as "demographic" (a particular sector of a population) have become commonplace but only now make it into the dictionary. They are joined by those emerging from new technology like "phishing" (fraudulently sending emails purporting to be from reputable firms to get individuals to reveal personal details).
Many of the new words are simply formed by mixing two others together, such as charity and mugger making "chugger" (someone who approaches passers-by in the street asking for donations for a charity) and "labradoodle" (a cross between a Labrador retriever and a poodle)."To suit the pace of our lifestyle today there is a growing tendency to mix words together to make entirely new ones called blends," the dictionary researchers said.
They also said there were now 350 ways of insulting someone -- from "chucklehead" to "muppet" -- ten times more than there were complimentary expressions, while there were 50 words for good-looking women, there were only about 20 for men.And for those without a dictionary to hand, "rock up" means arrive, "cockapoo" is a mix between a cocker spaniel dog and a poodle, "hoover" means to eat omething quickly, and "ruby murray" is rhyming slang for a curry.
如果你正在為死背英語單字而傷腦筋的話，《華盛頓郵報》記者馬修斯九日一篇感嘆中文實在太難學的報導，也許可以讓你稍微平衡一些。這位記者以他個人多年來苦學漢語的親身體會，向讀者介紹了他的經驗與感想。他鼓勵那些想學漢語的美國學生，因應中國的崛起，學習漢語應該和阿拉伯語一樣，列為美國人選學外語的最高優先。
But let me -- just this once because I don't like recalling the pain -- tell you that learning Chinese is not going to be easy.
Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization. It is so humane and so productive that I share few of the fears that the rise of Chinese economic and military power inspires in some Americans.
But the Chinese, despite all their good points, have a very difficult and in some ways inefficient language. Those Americans ready to pursue the worthy goal of learning it should be ready for a long, hard march.
Unkind people are saying at this point: Mathews may have been too dumb or too lazy to master Chinese, but the Chinese themselves seem to be handling their language fine. That is true. It is one more indication of the drive and ambition of those 1.3 billion people that most of them have become fluent and literate in a spoken language that includes four tones and a written language based on ideographs that give few clues to pronunciation and sometimes drive typists mad.
But it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters instead of just the two dozen or so letters of the Western alphabet has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove. Chinese students and teachers have grown accustomed to relying on memorization, the way they learned to read. There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result, some scholars think.
For more than a century the Chinese have been arguing among themselves over how to simplify the written language without cutting themselves off from one of the great literary mother lodes of the past 3,000 years. The invention of the digital computer and the Internet have eased the reproduction and transmission of written Chinese, but children in China, and non-Chinese high school and college students like I once was, have to pound the meaning of all those slants and dots and curves into their brains, and hope they stay there.
Take one small example. When I lived with my family in Beijing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my six-year-old son got to be a pretty good reader. There wasn't much television to distract him, and as a budding baseball and football fan he loved to decipher the sports pages of the International Herald Tribune. When Chinese saw him reading the newspaper in the dining hall of the hotel where we lived, they were amazed, since their equally bright children needed much more time before they could handle a Chinese newspaper.
You can imagine, then, what it was like for me at age 19 when I took my first Chinese lessons in college.
Learning the spoken language was not so bad. It had few annoyances like gender and tense and verb changes based on rank. My first Chinese professor was Rulan Chao Pian, who used a system invented by her father, the legendary UC Berkeley linguist Yuen R. Chao. She and her father shared a mischievous sense of humor, although I did not think it was so funny at first. One of her first exercises was a short story made of words that used only one Chinese sound, shi (sounds like 'sure'). It was totally incomprehensible -- just as the sentence "Sure sure sure sure, sure-sure, sure sure sure" would be in English -- unless you got all the tones right or could see the characters.
Once I absorbed this sobering introduction to the maddening subtleties of Chinese expression, Pian handed me her father's textbook. He had a unique way of romanizing Chinese word sounds so we could learn how to pronounce them properly. Some Chinese language textbooks assigned the numbers one to four to each of the four tones, and you would pronounce the word based on which number was next to it. Some books used little marks going up, down or otherwise to indicate the high, rising, low and falling tones. Chao decided to give a different spelling of the same sound to indicate different tones.
There is a common Chinese sound that most American newspapers spell "zhang" (pronounced sort of like "jong"), under the standard pinyin romanization system used in China. Chao spelled that sound four ways: jang if it were first tone, jarng if it were second tone, jaang for third tone and janq for fourth tone. Different words required different spelling changes. Good old "wu," thankfully spelled that way in nearly every system, was u for first tone, wu for second tone, wuu for third tone and wuh for fourth tone.
This expands to "Go and figure it out", and means: "The reasons for the fact just stated are unknown and possibly unknowable. You can waste your time thinking about what they might be, if you choose, but you're not likely to accomplish anything." (Kivi Shapiro)
a remark made to something said that is typical or falls under Murphy's Law.
"The ONE day I call in sick at work, and the fucking boss, who happens to leave work early... sees me at the strip joint...go figure!!!"
a phrase used by itself as an interjection to mean "How can one explain that?", or to express puzzlement over some seeming contradiction.
原名為【The Lovely Bones】的【蘇西的世界】，在美國上市就佔據紐約時報(New York Times)排行榜60周的小說，2002年也在美國亞馬遜(AMAZON)網站排行榜終年不墜，全美銷售已有三百萬冊。【蘇西的世界】作者在書中一開始就告訴讀者主角蘇西遇害的過程，隨後在她的天堂俯視人間，以全知全能的視界觀看家人與友人經歷此事之後產生的變化：父親悲痛無比亟欲獨力緝兇，情緒失調而離家墮落，妹妹弟弟的成長蛻變，以及家人之間關係的變化。【蘇西的世界】是發生在一個孤立無援、受暴力侵襲的家庭中的故事，從一個家庭的變動為起點，處理的是個人面對悲傷的適應經歷，而非整個社會療傷的影射，但放大來看，或許可以幫助人們為一時之間無法找到答案的難題找到慰藉。書中人物的悲歡離合似乎也象徵美國整個社會在動盪中調整、適應的範本。
接下來要小小聲講。
有「eMule」軟體的朋友，可從這裡下載「英文文本」和「全書的朗讀版」。
Audio檔案共十個，一個mp3檔案約一小時多。
因為英文文本檔案不大，我已將它上傳到這裡，沒有上述軟體但想要閱讀或好奇的人，可以看看。
Here's another colloquial phrase that's often heard "to get hold of," meaning to reach by telephone. "Have you gotten hold of the police yet?"
"I haven't gotten hold of my friends in Bastrop. I'm beginning to think they may be out of town."
普特英語聽力(簡體)
