可怜的tina
我买过原版的韦氏大辞典，不过感觉不好。这本词典读者群的定位是以英语为母语的人，所以该词典收词十分丰富，对词汇的释义也力求全面。对于非英语母语的人来说，其例证明显不够丰富，影响对词的理解。 麦克米兰没有用过，所以无法置评。但是，感觉其名气不如牛津，韦氏，朗文。所以不建议购买。 朗文高阶是用过的，强烈推荐。该词典最大的优势是实用，不像牛津那样死板。举个例子。SUBJEC，这个词我查牛津的释义看半天也没搞懂这个词在BE SUBJECT TO 中式什么意思。但是一查朗文，它就给出了两个释义，一个是BE SUBJECT TO LAW,受法律管辖，一个是BE SUBJECT TO decision之类，意思是受影响。 个人不喜欢所谓的网络释义，其精确性完全没有保证，作为母语非英语的人，很容易被误导。 汉英词典没用过，但是个人认为这种词典没有用。汉译英是不能那么词对词的死板硬套的，需要的是对句子意思总体的准确理解，然后整句的翻译。
啃鲍鱼的螺丝
you should read the original works of english and read more english newspapers like New York Times, China Daily, etc...... and of course, you can read the New Concept English and the like.
哈鲁咕噜
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yester day afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her.You've no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A Pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other's face. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a cark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tear s in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks or chides are tacky flowers.In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open tire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill be-fore nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pan-cake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Car – son has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one toot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature."How do I look, Mama?" Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she's there, almost hidden by the door."Come out into the yard," I say.Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind of him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She's a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflect-ed in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look at concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house tall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity, forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she'd made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own' and knew what style was.
