This Sunday, the fourth season of True Blood on HBO begins. This show has a lot of fans in the US and around the world, and it also has its own set of vocabulary that its international fans might have some trouble with.

Fortunately, one of the actresses from the show, Lindsay Pulsipher, who plays Crystal starting in season 3, is our latest celebrity English teacher. At a recent showing of her new film, The Oregonian, we asked her to talk about the term “shapeshifter” and, since her character likes to turn into a panther, the phrase “cat got your tongue” in an English lesson.

Lindsay was so kind and very happy to help us teach English. We’re excited to see her in True Blood this season and hopefully in more movies in the future. You can see a trailer for The Oregonian here, and a scene from True Blood with Lindsay in it here. Both are a little too intense to embed on an English education blog, but if you like supernatural and scary stuff, you will probably enjoy them!

The Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat are competing in the NBA Finals right now, and there are four players involved who have appeared in Celebrity English Lessons on English, baby!

Mavs guard JJ Barea, the smallest guy on either team, has been unstoppable all through the Playoffs. His moves under the basket are incredible, and that was the topic of an English lesson we taped with him last season.

I was happy to see Juwan Howard scoring a couple of points in the first game of the series. As one of the oldest players on the Heat, he is there more for his leadership than his scoring. We talked about team work and his college career for a lesson earlier this season.

The Mavs also have Roddy Beaubois, who is recovering from an injury. We hope he can get healthy in time to show off the alley-oop skills he talked about in his English lesson before the Finals are over. Zydrunas Ilgauskas hasn’t appeared in a Finals game for the Heat so far, but it’s good that he’s getting a second chance to win a championship after losing on his last visit to the Finals with the Cavaliers, since his lesson was on second chances.

What team do you support in the Finals this year? Leave a comment or answer our poll question on Facebook.

Soccer is getting more popular in the US every year. Here in Portland, we have a Major League Soccer team for the first time: Timbers FC. The team is very popular, and whenever I tell fans that our latest celebrity English teacher is Futty Danso, they get really excited.

From his energy on the pitch, to the way he celebrates after scoring a goal, you can tell Futty is a great guy. Even though one of his teammates had just been carted away holding his ankle on the day we met with Futty at training, he was happy to talk to us. John Strong was there covering the training for 95.5 The Game, and he suggested we have Futty talk about the term “shape,” so that’s what we went with for our first lesson with him.

After we talked to him, Futty agreed to let me throw some balls at him to demonstrate different traps for another lesson.

If you’d like to learn more about Futty, take a look at this fascinating interview with him about his childhood and Gambian soccer.

Gregg Gillis, who makes music under the name Girl Talk, is a really smart guy. His music alone gives that away–it can’t be easy to mix parts of more than 300 songs into one very danceable album. Before Girl Talk became his job, he was an engineer, and you can hear how scientifically he speaks in these English lesson videos we recorded with him during his tour stop in Portland.

First, we talked about the phrase “out of the blue” and how his latest album, All Day, surprised everyone.

Then, we talked about the term “sample.”

It was so nice of Gregg to spend 15 minutes or so with us both in his dressing room and up on the stage. He really seemed to get the concept of our Celebrity English Lessons and said he had watched the one with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and liked it.

Interestingly, before this interview with Gregg took place, we had been planning to run a music English lesson about Girl Talk anyway. We recorded a conversation about him for the dialog. You can listen to me and Ella from the Ebaby! cast chatting about All Day below. And don’t forget, you can always download the album for free!

One of the most watched NBA games ever took place in November of 2007. Why would a game near the beginning of the season be watched by so many people? Most of the fans watching were in China. It was the first time Yao Ming and the Houston Rockets played against young star Yi Jianlian and the team that drafted him, the Milwaukee Bucks. More than 200 million people tuned in to what came to be known as the “Chinese Super Bowl.”

Though in the US, Yi’s fame is nowhere near that of Yao’s, he is a superstar in China and he’s still new to the NBA. His game has to improve if he’s going to take over where Yao leaves off, but his English is coming along nicely. When he first arrived in the US, he used an interpreter and spoke little English. But when we approached him–in English–for an interview at a recent Washington Wizards media session, he didn’t hesitate and confidently agreed. The result is our latest Celebrity English Lesson in which Yi teaches the phrase “put the ball on the floor.”

One thing we cut from this video is a part where I asked Yi if there were any basketball terms he had a hard time with when he first came here. The answer surprised me. He said he didn’t know what was meant by “cut to the basket.” Of course, this phrase means to run quickly toward the basket so that your teammate can pass you the ball and you can score. It’s not something I think of basketball slang exactly, so Yi’s comment may help us find more good basketball idioms we’ve been overlooking.

One of the best parts of watching NBA games on TV is seeing the shot of the players walking into the arena. They usually have on some fancy clothes and headphones and are walking with a lot of attitude. Even through they change into their warm ups and uniforms quickly, players like to really dress up to go to games.

In a recent poll of NBA players by Sports Illustrated, Zaza Pachulia ranked among the most fashionable players in the league. The 7-foot Atlanta Hawks center, who originally hails from the Eastern European nation of Georgia, has good taste in general. He owns a very cool-looking bar in Atlanta called Buckhead Bottle Bar.

So since our Celebrity English Lesson series has covered a lot of basketball slang, we figured why not have Zaza teach an English lesson about fashion language? We met with him at his hotel room in Portland the afternoon before a game. He showed us what he planned to wear that night and talked about what it means to sport something. Since he didn’t know we would be coming up to his room when he picked out the outfit, we get a really authentic look into his suitcase!

Zaza also want to share some more advanced fashion slang with the English, baby! members, so he talked about the term “swag,” which he says is very popular in Atlanta. It’s amazing how much swag Zaza has while still being a really friendly, down-to-Earth guy.

Danny Granger is the latest NBA All-Star to help English, baby! share basketball slang with English learners all over the world. We met with him after an Indiana Pacers practice. Since the team played a couple of preseason games in China, I asked him about that and he said the fans were rowdy. I grew up in New Mexico where Danny went to college for 2 years and I saw him play there. The arena at the University of New Mexico is called the Pit and gets very loud. So if he says basketball games in China are rowdy, he is not joking around.

I also enjoyed watching Danny play in the World Championships last summer. It’s always interesting to see someone who is usually the star of his team play a more supporting role. That’s why the topic of Danny’s lesson is the difference between being a “role player” and a “franchise player.”

As he explains, a role player on a basketball team is someone who comes into the game for a limited period of time to do a specific thing such as block shots or play defense. But there’s another kind of role playing I thought Danny might be into. You see, Danny loves superheroes and he has built a Batcave into his house. What is a Batcave? Well, it’s where Batman hangs out and hides his cars. I can’t find a picture of Danny’s Batcave, but here is a good drawing of Batman’s by Paul Rivoche and you can see some quotes from Danny describing it on Ball Don’t Lie.

Image of Grangerman via Weekly World News.

President Barack Obama recently spoke at Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, very close to the English, baby! headquarters in Portland. We were fortunate enough to obtain a media pass for the event so we could share the President’s words with our international readers and help them learn some English along the way.

While watching the speech, I took notes about what might make a good English lesson. Some interesting phrases and terms he used were “gadget,” “lag behind” and “paid off,” but we decided on “hustle” for the lesson.

The message of the speech was about how important education is in the global competition of the technology business. You can see in the comments on the lesson that this message actually meant a lot to our audience of international students. While they may not be engineers, they all have something to hustle for too.

Neither our cameraman Scott, nor I had seen Obama in person before, so it was quite a thrill. Scott had to arrive very early to set up our gear and all of the media had clear security and be in the room long before the President. After waiting for a couple of hours, it was sort of a shock when Obama walked out on to the stage just 50 or so feet away. He started the speech with some jokes too!

Waiting was actually kind of fun though because we got to hang out with all the other media there. Everyone from our local newspaper, to major television networks like CBS were there. It was interesting to watch all of these outlets in action. As you can see, we were working right next to them in the media area.


We had our own little station, right behind the spot reserved for CNBC.

I was glad they let me keep the press pass as a souvenir, especially considering it is “PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT”!

The latest celebrity English teachers on English, baby! are none other than Layzie Bone and Flesh-n-Bone of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. When I saw the group was fully reunited and coming to Portland, I thought, “How cool would it be to get them to teach a lesson about being at a crossroads?” Thanks to our friend Cool Nutz who introduced us, that dream became a reality.

Unlike most of our English lesson interviews with famous musicians, which take place before the show, this interview occurred at about 1am, after a Bone Thugs concert. It was fun. The guys were loose and happy to chat. They liked the concept of English, baby! and didn’t want to stop at one lesson, so here is some bonus footage in which they teach some very high-level slang. This was an English lesson for me as well!

It is so cool that these guys spoke so slowly. They seemed really aware of the fact that they were helping people in other countries learn English with this interview. They were such nice people–and to think, the crossroads in the both of their lives involved going to prison! I hope Bone Thugs has lots of success with their new album.

Visit Bone Thugs’ website here.

To give someone a buzz means to call them on the phone. We know a lot of the students who use English, baby! to learn English would love to practice speaking English on the phone with an American. So we decided to start something we like to call the Ebaby! Buzz in which one of the actors from our Ebaby! cast, calls you on the phone!

For the first Buzz, we asked our Facebook fans to change their profile photo to the English, baby! logo. Jaider from Colombia was the first to do it, so I gave him a call! Listen in:

My favorite part was Jaider’s mom shouting for him to come to the phone. He explained that he was in the shower because he didn’t think I was really going to call. But Ebaby! Buzz is for real! Watch English, baby! and our Facebook and Twitter to find out how you can win one of the cast members giving you a buzz!