http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylcVyleo9aA&feature=related

現在的小孩學習外語的資源和方法很多， 口語的確比長一輩好，但是很多人的英語只能粗聽，一仔細聽與文盲無異。早些年我們都鼓勵學生背文章，從中學到好句子，在適合的時機變化使用，現在不時興背書，實在可惜。教口譯的老師還說看起來很無聊的聽寫練習是口譯教學最有效用的一種哩！

背書當然也要選好文章，羅素這一篇短文已經經典到一個不行了！聽本人唸更有感覺吧?!

October 1, 2012

Sample Writing No. 1

Bertrand Russell's "What I Have Lived For"

Text: http://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-prolog.html

The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and was the co-author of Principia Mathematica.