How to improve reading skills

Reading is important part of English. Through the Internet, we can access many helpful websites which provides listening, speaking and writing for free.
But there are not enough websites for reading which people can access easily.
I will introduce 3 helpful websites which will help you improve your reading skills.

1. Korea Herald (http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/)

 Korea Herald provides you with many articles for free. There are various categories of articles, so you can access various reading topics. You can also learn professional terms because it is article. The other benefit of this website is that we learn reading through news articles, you can store up knowledge of current events.

2. Story Online (http://www.storylineonline.net/)

Story Online is a website where a native speaker read stories. You can read stories through other websites, but those websites provide only script of stories. Story Online provides not only story of website but also a vedio. You can choose any story which you want to read. If you click a story, a vedio will pop up and a native speaker will read the story. It can help you improve reading skills and also help you improve listening skills.

3. Oh My Reading (http://www.ohmyreading.com/)

Oh My Reading provides free lectures of reading. Threre is a Korean teacher who teach reading skills, so you can learn reading through Korean. The teacher of this website explain lectures listner-friendly. If you go to the website and click "독해강의", you can choose any lecture you want to learn. There are various lectures so you can enjoy and can be interested in these lectures. Not only watching vedio lectures, you can download them. Also you can download reading text of lectures. You can watch vedio and text anytime and anywhere. All of these functions are free! 

Producer price growth slows in May

South Korea’s producer price growth decelerated in May mainly due to a slowdown in the global economy, the central bank said Monday.

The producer price index, a barometer of future consumer inflation, rose 1.9 percent on-year to 124.6 last month, compared with a 2.4 percent increase in April, according to the Bank of Korea.


Compared to the month before, prices fell 0.6 percent, the sharpest on-month contraction since 0.8 percent minus growth reported for October 2009.

The slower on-year gain last month was largely attributed to the lower manufacturing and service sector price gains caused by sluggish global economic growth.

“May’s producer numbers can be seen as a sign that overall prices are stabilizing,” a BOK official said.

Manufacturing prices rose 1.6 percent on-year from a 2.5 percent gain tallied in April, while service sector prices edged up 0.8 percent, down compared to 1 percent a month earlier.

Utility prices, including electricity and gas, also moved up 7.7 percent vis-a-vis 10.1 percent growth reached in April, while farm product prices jumped 5.3 percent, up from 0.2 percent in April.

From a month earlier, manufactured goods prices were down 0.7 percent, with farm and fisheries prices dropping 1.6 percent. The service sector also dipped 0.1 percent vis-a-vis April, helped by lower telecommunication and financial costs.

The latest data, meanwhile, is expected to exert positive influence on domestic consumer prices down the line, the central bank said.

In May, the country’s consumer price index rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier, unchanged from the 2.5 percent gain tallied in April.

This is much lower than last year’s figure that reached 4 percent, which is the upper limit of the central bank’s 2-4 percent target band. For 2012, Seoul expects consumer prices to rise 3.2 percent.

DUO VOCA

I studied 50 words this week. I will introduce the words that I studied.
"more over, take up"


"Could you move over a little?" "Oh, sorry. I didn't realize I was taking up so much space."
"Could you / move over / a little?" / "Oh, sorry. / I didn't realize / I was taking up / so much space."
할수 있니/ 좁혀 / 조금만 ? / 오 미안 / 나는 몰랐다 / 내가 차지했다고 / 그렇게 많은 공간을
"조금만 좁혀 앉아 주실수 있나요?" "오, 미안해요. 내가 그렇게 많은 공간을 차지했다고 생각하지 못하고있었어요."

move over 자리를 좁히다(사람이 앉을 수 있도록)
take up 차지하다

[Listening] English listening skills

You can learn the key points on how to improve your listening comprehension when listening to native speakers of the English language.

Teaching pronunciation

I also searched for how to teach pronunciation. Language instructors face several problems when teaching pronunciation, including time constraints and the difficulty of designing effective tasks. This hands-on workshop suggests practical solutions and outline seven concepts in teaching pronunciation. Participants will practice applying these concepts and utilizing presentation techniques.

Job interview skills

This Video tells you how to be the best candidate how to impress good interviewers and how to handle bad interviewers.
It also tells you how to perform well at assessment centres, which are being used increasingly by employers.

Architecture as a boundary between the common and the uncommon

Following is the fourth in a series of articles in which leading architects discuss their representative work. ― Ed.
For many people, architectural space holds numerous meanings and responses. A space born out of a certain form creates countless stories for pedestrians who walk past the buildings or who look at them from afar; the stories can be different for the builders, the owners and the users.

An architect is a person who gathers and predicts such stories and translates them into a form. Thus, architecture must be common and at the same time uncommon; i.e. it should satisfy traditional and general requirements as well as proposing a new idea through a newly developed common sense. In that regard, architecture is a work lying between the boundaries of the common and the uncommon. It should not be an urban creature that ignores the public benefit and economic logic. It cannot be an artwork that overemphasizes a form, or a work that over emphasizes purposefulness and function.

“D-cube City”

The D-Cube City project started from the process of injecting a new life force into the industrial zone in southwestern Seoul. As a large-scale, complex development, its feasibility and programs continued to change. Moreover, the public benefit could not be overlooked considering the project is such a large part of the urban context. One of the most crucial tasks was to balance the common benefit of the building owner and that of related government officials during the numerous reviewing and building permit processes of the urban planning and architecture project. From the urban scale to the interior coordination, and from the apartment housing of the most conservative design to the retail facility consisting of streamlined mass, D-Cube City was the embodiment of a 10-year architectural project.

The NHN Green Factory, the first ever office building in Korea for an internet portal service provider, was Naver’s first attempt to bring its online image to the offline world. We gave shape to the identity and image and also sought to satisfy the user convenience and operational efficiency. The result is a product of simplicity born out of diversity: The adjustable vertical louvers, applied with five color samples based on the company’s identity color green, present a varied elevation, and the collection of irregular fragments creates a simple and explicit single box-shaped mass. The adjustable vertical louvers made of perforated aluminum panels control the daylight as well as provide a view. The LED installation turns the cladding of the building into a digital art wall. Such an approach satisfies the needs of both the owner and the users, creating an office building that breaks away from the image of existing ones. The NHN Green Factory is a project that proposes an idea about what kind of form and space can exist in architecture on the border of the common and the uncommon while maintaining the daily life of a user and offering a unique experience that cannot be found in other office buildings.

Communication and integration play an important role in architecture. However excellent a concept may be, the world of architecture, unlike that of a fine art, doesn’t easily accept works that cannot communicate with an anonymous public. The design has to be based on universal validity for communication. Uncommon elements can have their persuasive power and force only when they satisfy common conditions, and then bring a new value to architecture. We are now living in the age of overabundance, and that can also be said of architecture. However, architecture that communicates with the common and seeks integration with the uncommon is sufficient to be an alternative proposal to the disorder and confusion in the age of superabundance.