Readable Blog

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If you happen to live in the USA or Canada, you can get free comic books tomorrow (Saturday, May 4), because it’s Free Comic Book Day! The free ones are a mix of typical American superhero comics and other, alternative comics. You can read a FAQ that explains the idea of Free Comic Book Day. To find a comic book store near you that’s participating, visit the Free Comic Book Day Locator. Salon has short reviews of each free comic (3 pages). Some are for adults; others are for children. So tomorrow is a great day to get acquainted with your local comic book store. Go on in and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

The Hugo Awards are given annually for outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy. Recently, many of the works that have been nominated are put online so that the voters can easily read them. They may not be online for a long time, so they’re worth reading now. Because they’re high-level, literary science fiction, some of the stories are very difficult to read. But here’s one you might like: “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt is a wonderful story for fans of classic American films. If you’re a movie-lover, try this story.

I haven’t had time to read any of the novellas or novelettes, but if you would like to recommend one that advanced English learners could read, please do.

I’m back from San Diego. I’m very busy with a class I’m teaching, but I hope I’ll be able to post more soon. In the meantime, here is one more place to make your own comics, Make Beliefs Comix. It’s specifically aimed at students “of all ages.”

On Thursday, I’m flying to San Diego to attend the statewide conference for CATESOL. My classmate and I are going to give a presentation about using Japanese comic books to teach English. It should be fun! I’m also going to attend lots of other presentations. I’ll probably be too busy to post here. However, I expect that I will come back with lots of new things to write about.

In the meantime, here is a long-time favorite self-study site: Interesting Things for ESL Students (also called “Many Things”). There is so much here that you could spend months using it. There are word games, quizzes, explanations, idioms, jokes, poems, songs, drills, and a lot more.

Let me know what your favorite pages at Many Things are. There are so many pages, I can’t try them all.

Have a good week! I’ll be back in just a few days.

StoryCorps is an interesting project to record ordinary Americans’ stories. There are booths in various parts of the USA, and people go in to talk about their family or personal histories. Of course, this means there are lots of different accents for you to listen to. There will probably also be a lot of slang and colloquialisms, so take your time finding an interesting story that’s understandable. It’s a good way to practice listening to ordinary, everyday English as spoken in the USA by a variety of Americans, including those who were born in other countries. You’ll also learn about people’s lives and American culture.

You can even subscribe to the free podcast, which can be downloaded onto your mp3 player or hard drive.

If you try listening to these stories, tell me about it. Does anything surprise you about the way people talk or what they say? Are they easy to understand? Which stories are the most interesting?

Here are three web-based comic strip makers:

• StripGenerator

has cool black and white graphics

• ToonDoo

is very cartoony

• Comeeko

lets you use your own photos

All three are free, though you need to register. You don’t have to draw anything, just click and drag! StripGenerator and ToonDoo let you choose from their graphics to tell your story. Comeeko lets you use photos from your digital camera.

This is a fun way to practice writing in English, and you can share your completed comic strips with your friends. Here’s a quick one I made at StripGenerator! You can post them in your blog, too. (Warning: Some of the other users’ comics are crude or stupid.)

Here’s a silly one I made just now at Comeeko, which has lots of special effects and other things you can add:

Learning Resources lets you read short news stories and listen to a recording of the story. If the article is too hard, you can click on “Abridged Story” and “Story Outline” to help you. Afterwards, you can check yourself by answering questions.

The news stories come from two TV stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Give it a try! It’s free to use.

Finding fun things to read in English is important. Trying to read textbooks all the time can make your head hurt and make you want to quit reading.

• The Webcomic List is a list of mostly free online comics. Some may be hard to read, but spend some time looking around for something fun understandable. Even simple things like comics are a good way to learn English speech patterns and vocabulary.
• Comics.com has many popular comic strips that are published in English-language newspapers. I know from reading Chinese comic strips that it can be hard to understand cultural humor sometimes. So, don’t be afraid to ask a friend or teacher to help explain the jokes.
• MangaNews has links to Japanese comic books that fans are translating in English. You can download the translations. (These translations are unofficial, and if a publishing company decides to print the book in English, the fans will stop translating the series.)

When I have more readers, I would like to ask everyone what you like to read (in any language). That way I can post things that you’ll enjoy reading in English, I hope.

One major theme of this blog is free resources that you can access online to help you study English. There are lots of good resources on the internet, but they can be hard to find sometimes. So I hope I can help you find resources that you’ll enjoy using.

Here are a few resources for listening that I have come across recently:

• Podiobooks.com is a website full of free audiobooks, which are books that have been read aloud and recorded. Some books are by amateur authors, but there are also famous books. You can listen to these books on an mp3 player.
• LibriVox also provides free audiobooks.
• The English Listening Language Lab Online is a wonderful site that lets you listen to short podcasts (sound recordings). The speakers come from all over the world and talk about lots of interesting topics. If you want to, you can check your listening skills by taking a quiz afterwards! I highly recommend this site.

If you like any of these sites, please leave a comment. Also, please comment if you have some other site you would like to recommend.

Don’t forget to recommend Readable to your friends if you think it’s useful! It’s a new project and I am really hoping to have lots of readers. Thanks for coming by!