网友linmoonyo：SHOULD I SPEAK SLOWLY OR QUICKLY?  

John：The simple answer is that you should speak using your natural speed.  Speaking too quickly might make it more difficult for the interviewer to understand you, while intentionally slowing down your speed of speech might cause you to think too much and make more mistakes.

One thing to pay attention to, however, is that some students speed up their speech when they get nervous.  Try to avoid this by finding ways to relax in the interview.

Let me know anything is unclear.

网友torsion：向大家推荐一个练口语听力的好东东，美国情景喜剧《Friends》非常好！！
 
John: Friends is great, even if you've seen it five or six times! 

You can find it at most stores in Beijing that sell DVDs.  I'm not sure how readily available it is outside of Beijing.  In Chinese it's called either 老友记 or 六人行.

For those of you who don't know, Friends is an American sitcom (sitcom = "situation comedy"). 

网友snow_du：Just so so

John：Actually, you're not the only one who thinks so. As with any pop culture phenomenon, Friends has its detractors.  Here's an article that calls it "The most overrated comedy ever": http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/12/apontv.friends.ap/

My opinion--and I've watched a lot of sitcoms--is that Friends is a great show.  It may be overrated, it may not be the best show ever, but it certainly is entertaining.

If you search around online (try http://www.google.com/), you can find a lot more people who criticize the show.  If you're a fan, you might want to read some of these criticisms and see what you think.

John：First of all, I think "torsion" has a good point: the real value in watching a show like Friends is in finding an enjoyable way to study English.

As far as how to use it, there are several ways.  First of all, just watching it is a great way to improve your listening.  Try it with the subtitles off!  Another very effective way to improve your English using a television program is to imitate after the speakers.  You can either just imitate as you watch, doing your best to keep up, or use your remote control to pause the show and imitate sentence by sentence.  This is also most effective if done with the subtitles OFF.

New Concept is also a quality set of materials.  Attempting to memorize it by heart is an admirable goal, but realize that simply memorizing things is not the best way to become a good speaker of a language.  You also need to focus on improving your pronunciation through imitation. Perhaps you could memorize some of the passages and use the other passages as imitation materials (listen to the tapes!).