English, baby! is kind of a crazy business. In our press release about reaching 1 million members, we mention almost a dozen features or services we provide, and since 95% of the people who use those services are outside the US, it can make our business seem even weirder to people here at home.

Barry Moltz, who hosts a popular small business radio show called Business Insanity Talk Radio took note of these facts and invited Ebaby! CEO John Hayden to be one of his guests for an episode called the “The Weird Business Show” alongside the entrepreneurs behind Fantasy Baseball Sherpa, ParkingSpots.com, a home staging company, a phone company for people who have had their phone disconnected and more (a clip of just John’s portion of the show is on our press page). It was a lot of fun to learn about other “weird” businesses.

The April issue of Successful Promotions not only features Miley Cryus on the cover, it also has a five page story on viral marketing dos and don’ts by Kenneth Hein, a managing editor at AdweekMedia. The article outlines lessons that can be learned from the elven efforts of OfficeMax, a Carl’s Jr. mobile campain launched at a Lakers game, as well as anecdotes about 7-Eleven, Burger King, Axe, and a company you might have heard of called English, baby!

Kenneth tells the tale of our bonus guerrilla marketing sucess at the Beijing Olympics (we thought we were just making videos for marking later–turned out we were marking on the ground as well). Take a look at the portion of the article that’s about us here and the whole thing here. We’re really happy to have been included with such good company in such a good story.

For the past few months, English baby! has been featuring celebrity English lessons in which a star explains how to use a bit of conversational English.

Our most recent lesson with Sasha Vujacic of the LA Lakers, was featured on The Los Angeles Times website and the website of The Oregonian, as well as lakers-fan.com. The interview was also mentioned on The Los Angeles Times site before it was posted.

Ebaby! celebrity lessons have also been covered by many other media outlets:

• Portland Trail Blazer Nicolas Batum’s lesson appeared on basketusa.com, 95.5 The Game, PDX Pipeline, and Yahoo! Sports.
• San Francisco 49er Vernon Davis’ lesson appeared in The Press Democrat and The Mercury News
• The Thermals lesson appeared on localCut.

Last week I interviewed Sasha Vujacic, the Los Angeles Lakers‘ Slovenian point guard, for an English lesson. But before we even got it edited and on our site (it will be up Friday), the interview was mentioned in the LA Times:

Sasha Vujacic finished off his day doing a stand up interview for a website called English Baby!.  It appears to be a place where folks can come to improve their spoken English.  I don’t know exactly what they talked about, but the interview finished with the dude on the mic and Sasha high fiving and yelling, “English Baby!”  That’s going to be the first thing I do to Sasha when I walk into the locker room tomorrow night.  I encourage other members of the media to do the same.

The high-five was something we came up with for the Culture Cruise and did a lot of at the Olympics, but I felt it never got the attention it deserved, so thanks, Brian Kamenetzky, for giving it a bump! But the best part of the LA Times post was the comments. A lot of people simply signed off on their comments with “English, baby!” but some got more excited about this new greeting than others.

English, BABY!

That’s my new catch phrase. I don’t care what anyone says.

Posted by: Xodus | March 18, 2009 at 03:18 PM

We’re not the only Lakers/English education connection:

as a former English teacher, i’m also down with the “English, BABY!” catch-phrase.

Posted by: leonardbast | March 18, 2009 at 04:53 PM

But this one is unsurpassed for enthusiasm:

Q: What’s 4+8?
A: English, baby!

Q: What’s for dinner?
A: English, baby!

Q: Who is 12th all time on the NBA’s all-time scoring list?
A: English, baby! (ok, that one’s actually correct)

The point is, this is my new answer to every question posed to me, at least until it becomes annoying enough that I get death threats.

English, baby!

Posted by: puddle | March 18, 2009 at 05:59 PM

It looks like my dream of starting an Internet meme may be on the horizon. Maybe I should call home, “Mom! I’m a lolcat!

It’s nice when making the site a better place to learn also makes it look cooler. We’ve got some new ESL teacher brain power on our team at Ebaby! these days, so we’ve changed the way our lessons look to help people learn more from them. We hope you’ll find this looks nicer than our old layout too (it could be quite a bit of words all on one page).

Now each part of the lesson (intro, dialog, grammar, quiz, discussion) has a tab you can click on to see it. Each tab focuses on developing a different skills like building vocabulary and improving listening comprehension or grammar.

This new layout will also help you customize your learning and, we hope, get more out of our lessons. We find that the tab system encourages students to listen to the dialog multiple times, for maximum comprehension. Teachers can also use this format to make a lesson in which each part builds on the one before it.

Now members with free accounts can:

* Review vocab before you start a lesson.

* Easily go to a particular part of a lesson.

* Take the quiz and listen to the audio (or watch the video) without the dialog on the same page.

* Scroll down to the forum quicker. We hope more of you will share your thoughts on each lesson!

* Take the quiz without reading the dialog or without reading the discussion.

But people who are serious about learning English, or teachers who want to share these lesson with their classes, can do even more as Super Members! They can take a special vocab quiz, save vocab terms to learn later, print the lessons, download mp3s, or even ask questions of a live English teacher.

Go take a look at today’s lesson and tell us what you think of the way the lessons look now! We’d love to hear from you.

I was recently quoted as a source on teaching abroad in a post on boomster.com by Pam Baker.  It brought back some old memories about the time I spent in Japan and how our company got started. Here’s the full email I sent her for the post.

I taught in Japan right out of college and the experience led me to start a company that now helps a million people learn English.  Unlike many people who find a package deal that provides housing and a visa, I arrived in Tokyo in 1997 with the plan of teaching English until I found a job in business. I was able to switch teaching jobs several times over  six months until I got one I really liked and that paid well.

Shortly after, I began working for Hitachi, but I never forgot how eager all my students were to learn English and know more about American culture. In 2001 I returned to the US and co-founded English, baby! (englishbaby.com), which is now used by 1 million people to learn English through popular culture.

Teaching abroad can be very rewarding, but it can become a dead end after a while. I think it’s good to keep your flexibility so that you can make sure you have the best experience possible, and to always be thinking about how that experience can help you at whatever you do next. When we hire people to write lessons for our site, one of the main qualifications we consider is if the candidate has taught abroad and what they gained from their experience.

A recent article in the Taipei Times by Nigel Daly helped me get some perspective on a concept very central to English, baby!. Our central idea has always been to provide a compliment to classroom learning, a place to practice the English skills you learn while having fun. That always made sense to me–the person on the abroad trip who dates a local always learns the language faster–but after a small window into the Taiwanese model of English eduction, it seems more necessary than ever.

English exams to get into schools or jobs are big deals in Asian countries so it’s no surprise that their education system is geared toward them. But according to Daly, some Taiwanese schools are so focused on the tests, the teachers speak Chinese to help the students understand what English they need to memorize! The result is a lot people passing the test whose memorized knowledge is about as useful in an actual English conversation as ancient Greek.

So, Daly argues, we must think “glocally.” “Glocal,” of course, is a portmanteau “global” and “local” and the global side of English and the doors it opens internationally are easy to see. It’s the local side that is both necessary to really the language and hard to come by. Daly supports a restructuring of the educational system in Taiwan. In the mean time, there’s the Internet.

I was surprised to learn from this Reuters piece that South Korea not only has the most students learning English in the US, but also is experiencing the largest Web boom for English eduction. In fact, private English instruction in Korea is a $13 billion dollar a year industry.

Any user of our site will notice there are many countries more represented than South Korea. It sounds like Koreans favor Skype-style real-time voice lessons so that would explain why their physical presence in the US hasn’t translated to such an overwhelming presence on our site.

Although I see the appeal of Skype lessons, I actually prefer the social network style English, baby! uses. It’s more casual and further from a classroom environment. Nonetheless, the size of the Korean market and their interest in real-time voice lessons is certainly something to think about. In any case, I think it’s great to see more and more people who aren’t able to study in another country use the Web to fulfill the local end of the glocal equation.

Image: Oddly enough, “glocal” seems to be a buzzword among church folk as well.

America is tired of marketing. It’s hard to get people to take free things or fliers because they’re tired of all the clutter. Not so in China.

While in Beijing, we were giving away little rubber wrist bands with the company logo, and instead of being annoyed like they are in the US, people were grateful, and a crowd gathered to take them from us. When we begin to run out, people actually offered to buy them from us.

The English, baby! team went to Beijing to make videos for our site. But we inadvertently learned that China is a guerrilla marketer’s dream.

In addition to the wrist band incident, any time we began filming, a huge crowd would gather, even if we were just interviewing people with a microphone. I was constantly stopped and asked for photos just because I had a blue bike and blue t-shirt and blue eyes. The beginning of one of these clusters is documented above.

The strangest thing was that we didn’t see anyone else doing any guerrilla marketing, yet we weren’t even trying and people were being so receptive. It was and interesting surprise and very fun and refreshing. Although I admit that I had a strange feeling that I was a sham and had simply been mistaken for someone else–that someone would run up and shout, “He’s not Phelps!” and the crowd would turn on me. But that never happened. If you see a photo of me with a Chinese person on a random MySpace or hi5 page, let me know!

Looks like covering the Olympics from Beijing is turning out to be a challenging task, even for some of the biggest networks in the world. NBC, who spent $894 million for the rights to televise the games and will employ 2,900 people to make it happen, will be broadcasting some of its coverage from studios in New York.

Olympic fans have no reason to worry, however. All of Ebaby! TV’s coverage will be broadcast directly from the streets of Beijing and will show a rare look at the Olympics and the many interesting people involved.

Stay tuned for some of the most unique Olympic coverage you’ve ever seen.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to hear a high-level U.S. politician speak of our need as Americans to learn a second language. If you didn’t catch the clip of Obama’s speech that many people are talking about, watch it and see a man who understands how important it is for us to think beyond our borders and realize our world is much bigger than our one great nation. He gets it.

Immediately following his speech, a large group of people twisted his words and claimed that Obama thinks Americans should learn Spanish instead of immigrants living in our country learning English. They say how wrong he is and use it as political propaganda. He gets it again.

Today our country has walls on our borders, fingerprint machines in our airports, and people who still believe 9/11 was an attack by Iraq. The higher we build our fences, the further we distance ourselves from the other 6.3 billion people who share our planet. We’ve been fortunate to have a prosperous 200 or so years, but that won’t continue without joining the global party, something a number of other countries seem to understand so much better than we do.

Of course immigrants should learn English if they are living in the U.S. During my three years living in Japan I would have never assumed that people should be speaking my language. Obama is simply saying that the bigger issue here is that we should be learning languages ourselves.

While English, baby! won’t necessarily help Americans learn English, we hope it helps people see the importance of connecting with other cultures. Watching the millions of young people from around the world come to our site with their open minds and enthusiasm for a second, third or fourth language is inspiring. Their attitude is what will bring us together as a planet for a bright global future. They get it.