Gifts

Hello. Welcome back to the computer lab. Here are some videos and exercises you might find interesting.

First, here are some videos about the etiquette of gift giving in various parts of the world.

Click this to watch a video about gifts in China.


Click this to watch an American woman talk about how to give and receive a gift.

Here's a news report about holiday gift giving  in United States.

Here's a very long video (18 min.) about Giving gifts in United States.

Here are some  idioms related to gifts: Idioms (click here)


Here's a good Explanation of the past unreal conditional.  There are some exercises down below  as well. Click here.

Here's a video about present and past unreal conditionals. There's not a lot of information,  but the music and the travel pictures are very nice:

Remember adjective clauses?  We studied them way back at the beginning of the semester. Here is  a video that talks about when to use commas  and when not to use commas. It might be a good review for you. Warning: it's very long (10 min.).

There are a lot more good  webpages for learning English  on the CCSF student wiki. And, of course, you can find videos on YouTube about just about anything. Have fun!


Finally, would you like to try some easy computer programming? You can make a "Boggle" game  in Microsoft Excel. Instructions are here: Click here

Past perfect, contemporary art, and Johnny Cash

Hello class. These are some things I thought you might find interesting.  Please feel free to make a comment about anything hereby clicking the comment button below.
 
Here is a nice video that shows examples of the past perfect tense used in songs.

Last week I mentioned that I really like podcasts and I think they can be very helpful when you are learning a language.  Here is a video that explains what a podcast is and how you can use them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY9fwkHbLwE
 
Here is a video showing an  auction of contemporary art. Some of the paintings are by artists whose works we saw this morning. Can you guess how much those paintings sell for?

 Real English is a good website for learning English. They do interviews of people on the street and make English lessons out of them. Here is a video of people using the unreal conditional, also called the second conditional, which we studied last week.
Unreal conditional video

I couldn't find a lesson there  on the past perfect.  It's probably there somewhere, though. Unfortunately, the site is not very well organized.

Here's a simple exercise  in using the past perfect together with the simple past tense: http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/simpas-pasper/exercises

Here's Johnny Cash singing Ghost Riders in the Sky:

Here's a silly cartoon that is related to the song:
http://x92.xanga.com/93ef55e6c0c31266044423/b212186094.bmp


You can find a lot more good websites for ESL  on this page:
https://sites.google.com/a/mail.ccsf.edu/esl/