Weekend English Club

Hello 大家好！这一期我们来讲一下喜欢的电影题材~ Hello everyone and welcome to episode 30 of Weekend English Club. I hope you all had a nice week, and today I want to tell you a little bit about what kind of movies I like. There are so many different movies in the world that unfortunately we cannot watch them all, so it helps if at least you know what you like to watch and what you do not like to watch. I started watching movies when I was a child and back then I mostly watched animated movies such as Toy Story, Lion King, Shrek and just a lot of Disney movies in general. I really like old animated movies because everything had to be drawn by hand, but modern ones are also good. Japanese animated movies are very famous and I also like to watch them. Long ago all movies were in black and white without colors and that can also be an interesting experience. It makes you focus on different details compared to movies in color, and even now some directors make movies in black and white if they want to create a special type of movie. I really like Casablanca, a movie in black and white which is already more than 80 years old and also very famous. There are a lot of genres in the movie world like comedy, action, crime, horror, fantasy, romance and more. I never liked horror movies myself but I do like thriller movies, which are movies with exciting stories that can really make you feel tense and nervous about what will happen. Superhero movies are of course also very big, with famous examples like the Batman movies, Spiderman, Iron Man and so on. It is really easy to watch all these different movies nowadays with streaming services like Netflix, but when I was a child the internet was still new and you could not watch movies online. We always had to buy the DVD if we wanted to watch something and hope it was good, and some movies were really hard to find where I lived. Nowadays it is really easy to find movies to watch but I also feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes with all the choices we have. I still have a long list of movies I want to watch and I hope I have time for that soon. I like that every country has their own style of making movies, and watching movies from all around the world can be a good way to learn about different places. If you watched some good ones recently, maybe you can also tell me about them. * Unfortunately：不幸地，遗憾地 * Animated：动画片的 * Disney：迪士尼 * In general：通常，一般来说 * By hand：用手 * Directors：导演（复数） * Genres：流派，体裁（复数） * Comedy：喜剧，喜剧片 * Crime：犯罪，犯罪片 * Thriller movies：悬疑电影（复数） * Tense：令人紧张的；绷紧的 * Nervous：神经紧张的，担忧的 * Streaming services：流媒体服务 * Overwhelmed：（情感）难以禁受；使应接不暇 主播：Daniel 校对：nan_nan

Hello 大家周末好！这周荷兰的温度骤降，感觉一下子进入了深冬，你所在的城市的温度是怎样的呢？ 这一期我们来讲一下佛罗伦萨 - 一座著名的意大利城市，希望你能学到一些新知识！ Hello everyone and welcome to episode 29 of Weekend English Club. Today I want to talk about Florence, a beautiful city in northern Italy. I visited Florence more than a year ago and was really impressed with this beautiful old city, and I want to introduce it to you as well. Florence is known as Firenze in Italian and has a long and famous history. It became a very important European city around 500 years ago, when Italy was not yet one country. Florence back then was an independent city with its own government, ruled for a long time by a very powerful family, called the Medici family. They became very rich and powerful because they were some of the first bankers in Italy, and owning their own bank made them very rich. Because of this, they managed to become the most powerful family in the city and use their money to build beautiful buildings and order great works of art from some of the most famous artists of their time. The rich people of Florence became very interested in history, art and science and because of this, Florence became one of the most important cities in Europe for some time. Probably the most famous symbol of Florence is the cathedral in the middle of the city, a large building which was completed in the year 1436. It took more than a hundred years to build it, and the largest challenge was the dome they wanted to build on top of the cathedral. A dome is a large, round type of roof and it is very hard to build, especially before modern times. The problem was solved by an architect called Filippo Brunelleschi, who managed to finish the roof of the cathedral which many people did not think was possible. The front of the cathedral is decorated with an amazing amount of art and statues and seeing it yourself is a very unique experience. The first time I saw it I really had no words because it was such a beautiful thing to see. Florence has many buildings like this, such as the Uffizi palace which is now a very large museum filled with famous art. If you like Italian history and beautiful European buildings, Florence is really one of the best cities to visit. When you walk around the old city it feels like you go back in time and you can imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago. You can walk around the city for days and be amazed by the beauty of it, and because it is in Italy the food is of course also very good. I would love to visit Florence again some day and I hope you can do so too. But if you go, I think it is better to visit in the winter when it is not so busy since it is one of the most visited cities in Italy. When people ask me what the most beautiful city that I have visited is, I still say Florence and if you look up some photos of it online I am sure you will see why. * Florence：佛洛伦萨 * Introduce：介绍 * Not yet：还没有；尚未 * Banker：银行家 * For some time：一段时间 * Challenge：挑战 * Dome：穹顶，圆屋顶 * Modern：现代的 * Statues：雕像（复数） * Go back in time：回到从前；时光倒流 * Do so：这样做 主播：Daniel 校对：nan_nan

Hello 大家好，经过两周的修养，我们回归了。因为主播在生病期间喝了很多茶，茶也对他恢复健康起到了很多的作用，所以我们这一期决定来讲一下茶叶。 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 28 of Weekend English Club. Last week I was sick and had a cold, so I was not able to work on an episode but I got better and want to talk about tea today. I like drinking tea when I am sick, but also when I am healthy. But what is tea actually, and where did it come from? Tea is a drink made by pouring boiling water over the leaves of a plant called Camellia Sinensis, but you do not have to remember that name. Most people just call it the tea plant. This plant originally came from an area around Yunnan in China. Aside from water, tea is the most popular drink in the whole world. Chinese people started using tea as a medicine thousands of years ago, and later it also became popular as an everyday drink. Before the Tang dynasty tea was mainly drunk in southern China, but later it also became popular in the rest of the country and also spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. These countries still drink a lot of tea as well, but it also became popular in the rest of the world. Westerners learned about tea around 500 years ago when they started trading with China. Dutch traders bought tea in China and Japan and brought it back to Europe, where it then became a popular drink in places like the Netherlands, Germany and France. Eventually tea also spread to the United Kingdom, where it became super popular as well. English people started adding milk and sugar to their tea, which they still do today. In Europe tea used to be very expensive and only for rich people, but around 200 years ago it became much cheaper and everyone could drink tea. There are many types of tea, such as white tea, yellow tea, green tea, oolong tea, black tea which is known as red tea in china, and pu'er tea. They are all very different and some of them are stronger than the others, but they can all have very interesting flavors. Of course now you also have many other drinks like ice tea and bubble tea, but in the past people only had normal tea. China still produces half of all the tea in the world and tea is still a very important part of many cultures around the world. It is good for your health, so do not forget to drink some tea regularly. * Pouring：倾泻；倒 * Boiling：沸腾的 * Originally：最初，原来 * Aside from：除了...之外 * Spread：传播；流传 * Vietnam：越南 * Eventually：最终；终于 * Bubble tea：珍珠奶茶 * Produce：生产，制造 * Half of：一半；...的一半 * Regularly：定期地，有规律地 主播：Daniel 校对：nan_nan

大家周末好呀！这周我们来聊点可爱轻松的话题 -- 米菲兔。相信很多人都听说或者见过米菲兔这个形象，但是大家知道米菲兔是来自荷兰的吗？ Hello everyone and welcome to episode 27 of Weekend English Club. Today I will talk about a very famous cartoon rabbit called Miffy. You might know Miffy, who looks like a small white rabbit but stands and dresses just like us. It was a Dutch artist called Dick Bruna who came up with her, and she actually has a Dutch name as well. Miffy is her English name, but in Dutch she is called Nijntje. Nijntje is short for konijntje, which means little rabbit in Dutch, but during this episode I will use her English name. The first book about Miffy was made in 1953 and more than 100 million Miffy books have been sold. There are even TV shows about Miffy and you can find Miffy toys and souvenirs in many places around the world. She is famous in the Netherlands, but also super popular in places like Japan. She is so popular there that many people think Miffy is from Japan, but she really is Dutch. Dick Bruna came up with Miffy when he was on vacation with his family in 1953 in the Netherlands. Their vacation house had a garden where a white rabbit lives and Dick Bruna came up with bedtime stories about the rabbit for his son. This is how he got the idea for Miffy, and soon he started to write books about her. Miffy also has an official birthday, which is on the 21st of June. Her stories are always happy, and her family also appears in them. The designs are simple but cute, and very popular with children. Miffy usually wears a blue, orange or green shirt and she also likes to carry a balloon sometimes. She also has friends like a couple of bears and pigs who she often goes to see and talk to. When I was a child I also watched the Miffy TV show and really liked it back then. If you want to watch it you can probably find it easily on the internet in all kinds of languages. If you like Miffy you can even visit a whole museum about her in the Netherlands, the Miffy museum. It has existed since 2016, and it is a whole world just about Miffy. You can visit Miffy there in her own house and learn more about different subjects related to her. A lot of Chinese and Japanese tourists go there, and maybe you can also go someday. The Miffy books have been translated into 50 different languages and she even has her own social media channels, so she is a very international little rabbit. * Cartoon：卡通 * Artist：艺术家；画家 * Come up with：想出 * Actually：实际上 * Be short for：是...的缩写/简称 * Souvenirs：纪念品，纪念物（复数） * Bedtime stories：睡前故事(复数） * Balloon：气球 * A couple of：两个或几个（事物） * All kinds of：各种各样的 * Social media：社交媒体 * Channels：频道；通道 主播：Daniel 校对：nan_nan