Common Talk Weeklyshuang yu zhou kan
issue date

Let's talk the talk!
February 18, 2004
By Jack
Photo by Yao Fan


For a long time we at Common Talk have been thinking of a way to communicate with our readers instead of only through ink and paper, a way that we could sit down face to face with them in order to share and learn. After months’ of effort building and strengthening our team, we finally walked into this exciting picture at the beginning of 2004. Since then, held once every two weeks in the comfortable and spacious conference room at the Xiamen Daily Building, our “Common Talk Times English Salon” calls on dozens of enthusiastic fans of the newspaper and engages them in an interesting and enlightening get-together.

Each time we carefully select a common topic close to our daily life—from “school” to “work”, from “friends” to “fashion”, you will never get lost walking around them. We strongly believe life decides language. So it is only what’s happening in our everyday life that we mainly speak of. Moreover, we believe just as strongly, if not more strongly, in our slogan that “Language Affects Life”, which means that in spite of the things some of us may have taken for granted, what we are speaking of every day will cast an influence on the way that we think and the way we live. In that respect, during every English Salon we put forward a talk show by Jack (a Common Talk editor and self-proclaimed “the best English teacher in town”) and a native English speaker from Times. During the show we try to bring our audience more information as well as more opinions for them to talk about, hoping their horizons will be expanded and thus their life would be more inspired and fulfilled. Apart from that, we also cast controversial debates into the crowd and draw in an exciting yet elegant verbal “fight”. We believe in this way we can invite our audience to think and encourage them to develop ideas whilst enhancing their skills in spoken English. Just as Galileo Galilei mentioned in Education, “We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.” However, it takes just as much effort from our readers themselves to build such a forum. Without their massive support and encouragement, this English Salon would never have happened. We hereby sincerely thank you, our audience, and we feel that we are under a huge obligation to work even harder to bring you more successful shows.