English Practice

Hi everyone.
When we want to improve some of our skills we ought to work hard and do some practice everyday. But when it's regarding English, what to do? We know that we can read a lot of papers, web sites, magazines and it will just help us to improve our reading and increase our vocabulary, but surely it's not going to improve our listening nor speaking.
So I have sent this message with lots of links with great content to help us improve listening, reading, writing and speaking (to those who had taken heart).

Listening
voanews.com/specialenglish
This web site brings to you the news from USA and the reporters speak slowly. On the web site you have  either the audio (mp3 or real media) and the transcripts so you can read the text while they tell you the news. The announcers are from USA then it's a great way to get used with the American accent.

http://audiobooks.lapl.org/
Los Angeles Public Library. There's lots of audio books available for download. Head also to the links Music and Video. That's great stuff.

http://librivox.org/
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

http://www.audiobooks.org/
Audio books for free. Pick up your book and download it.

http://www.kpbs.org/radio/a_way_with_words
Two announcers from San Diego/US whom interviews the listeners and give answers to their doubts about the use of some words. Remember... they speak fast.

http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/esl/index.html
Ten lesson from the Canadian radio CBC. Each lesson has the sections introduction, before you listen, while you listen and after you listen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
BBC Learning English - various sections with help for English learners: news English, webcast, watch and listen, grammar and vocabulary. Everything with the audio and transcripts.

http://evaeaston.com/pr/home.html
American pronunciation lessons

Vocabulary
http://www.longman.com/ae/skills/americanroots/
Learn about the US cultural history, select the chapter in the combo box on the left and follow the links.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0PRWfjDUQ
Vocabulary lessons on youtube.com

http://en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. You can search for topics in order to learn new words, for instance, if you search for the word clothing you'll be redirected to an article explaining about wearing apparel and articles of clothing, if you search for human anatomy it will be shown to you an article explaining everything about the human body.

Grammar
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/
http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/index.htm

Dictionaries
http://tfd.com
The free dictionary. English to English dictionary with the pronunciation of the words and links to other sites as wikipedia.org, medical encyclopedia and on-line thesaurus.

http://m-w.com
Merriam-Webster English to English dictionary with the sound of the words

http://uol.com.br/babylon
Babylon on-line. English to Portuguese dictionary.

Communities
http://www.englishbaby.com/
Everyday one different lesson with audio and transcript, you can make your comments about the lesson and add people as friend. Use it to find a pen friend and have some chat on the web.

I would like to hear from you, how do you practice English? what web sites do you surf in order to improve your skills?
If you know any other link with good stuff let know.

See ya! (I hope LOL)

Thiago Diniz Macena Silvino
Google Talk: tdmsilvino@gmail.com / MSN: rhaige_diniz@hotmail.com / Yahoo: tdmsilvino@yahoo.com / Skype: tdmsilvino