EnglishCentral, a Website for Sharpening Listening Skills

http://www.englishcentral.com/videos#!/index/all/all/trending/0

EnglishCentral is a website a former NHSH student Ching-wei (黃勁惟) recommended to those who want to improve their English listening skills. It contains videos on different topics at three levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each video offers four tasks:

1. Watch the video: Watching the video with English subtitles, you can click any word you don't know, which would be pronounced at the click, with its definistion shown. Then you either go back to the previous line or continue and watch on.

2. Learn the word:  While watching the video for the second time, key in the missing word in a line, and you will get immediate feedback.

3. Speak the video: The video pauses automatically after each line, and after clicking the microphone icon, you repeat the sentence. What you say is compared with the line in the video, and a comment is given. You can even hear your sentence if you want to.

4. Quiz vocabulary: The quizzes come in different formats: Spell out the word, choose the correct definition, or with definition shown, choose the correct word.

EnglishCentral is quite a useful and interesting English learning website. Some of the videos are conversations, and some short clips of a movie or a talk. The topics include Academic English, Business English, Career English, Media English, Social English, Travel English, and Young Learners.

Each user has 2 free lessons per month. You can also subscribe to it by paying US$15 per month. However, if you are content with just watching the videos without going further through steps 2-4, then you don't need to pay.