VIV'S ENGLISH NEWSLETTER

By Viv Quarry. Edition Number 13 The sixth of October 1999.

Study English in England with Cicero International - See Viv for information & discount.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Welcome!

A warm welcome to Rodrigo, who is a law student and is starting his English course this month.

Good luck!

I wish Felipe the best of luck in his new job with the air force.

Holidays!

Don't forget that there will be a few days off from your English course this month.

Viv won't be teaching on:

The 11th & 12th of October due the holiday for the patron saint of Brazil. Monday the 18th of October will also be a holiday for my students at Shell (Commercial Day). If you have classes at Viv's house and would like to have your class, just tell Viv. If not, it will also be a holiday.

Don't forget!

Viv has a wide range of films, documentaries and shows in Viv's video club, which can be borrowed free of charge for up to two weeks.

Viv's library has novels for all English levels which you can borrow for up to a month. He also has a wide range of English magazines and newspapers.

What's new?

If you have a computer at home and enjoy doing some of the CAL (Computer Assisted Learning) exercises during your classes, Viv can make copies of the programs for you. Just bring a blank diskette.

On the internet

Students having classes at Viv's flat will have noticed an increase in the number of songs used in class over the last two months. I have downloaded most of these songs from the internet without charge (apart from the cost on the telephone bill). If you are interested in experimenting with MP3 files, this is what you do:

First you need a player. The one which I use is called the Musicmatch Jukebox which I downloaded free from the site:

www.musicmatch.com  (no longer free, and no longer a very good player)

This program will play music files, but if you pay for the full version, you can record you own cds onto the computer.

Once you have the player, it's just a matter of downloading the music files. There are lots of sites which have MP3 music, but a good one to start with is Audiophilez at:

http://www.audiophilez.com/ (I don't know if this site still exists)

There are two things to remember before starting to look for songs on the internet.

1. Downloading the files can take up to two hours for a big file, so if you don't have unlimited access to the internet, forget it.

2. Because of the time taken, your telephone bill will go up. Basically, it's only worth it if you want just one song by an artist. If not, it's cheaper to buy the cd from the shops.

3. The music files take up a lot of space on your hard disk.

I have ten songs and they take up nearly fifty megabytes of space on my hard disk. So again, if haven't got much hard disk space, forget MP3s and buy the cd.

Your contributions This month's composition is by Raphael, a systems analyst preparing for the FCE exam.

Back