When my Blazers and their Spanish Armada was defeated by the Houston Rockets in the first round of the NBA playoffs, I started rooting for the Rockets to go all the way. Yao Ming is a great player who has never won a championship and how huge would it be for China if he won.

But did you know the Lakers have a Chinese player too? His name is Sun Yue. He hasn’t seen any post-season minutes, but he’s a rookie. Give him time!

In fact, in the final match up between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Orlando Magic, there are lots of foreign players. Pau Gasol is pretty famous for leading the Spanish Olympic team to a silver medal last summer in Beijing and he and Kobe make a great combination.

One of the Magic’s leading scorers in every game of playoffs has been Hedo Türkoglu of Turkey. Apparently, back home he’s known as “the Michael Jordan of Turkey” because he’s so versatile and unstoppable.

In game one of the finals day before yesterday, Didier Ilunga-Mbenga, a center for the Lakers from Congo made an appearance in the final minutes of the game. He hasn’t seen much playing time lately, but when Andrew Bynum was injured earlier in the season, I remember seeing him a lot. He always looks confident to me when he gets in the game, which says a lot about him. It’s hard to come off the bench for a couple of minutes here and there and not be nervous.

How do I know so much about the Lakers? Because I’ve been watching them all year, rooting for Sasha “The Machine” Vujacic from Slovenia! You’d think he’s a starter for how much attention he gets. All the announcers know his nick-name and some fans made a special series of popular videos just for him! He’s also one of only 5 or so NBA players with a signature shoe in China and also sort of my close personal friend (sort of).

Rounding out the international players in the finals are Mickael Pietrus from France and Marcin Gortat from Poland. Both of these guys see significant minutes for the Magic and Pietrus in particular was deadly against the Cavaliers with his three-pointers earlier in the playoffs.

I can’t decide who to root for because I’ve got Sasha on the one side, but the Lakers are the Blazers’ rival and I also want to support my friends in Turkey by rooting for Türkoglu and his magic. Which team do you support? I better make up mind soon–game 2 is tomorrow!

Last week, thousands of people gathered in Pioneer Square in Portland at a rally for the Trail Blazers, who qualified for the NBA Playoffs for the first time since 2003. Each player said a few words, and one of the most memorable speeches was from Rudy Fernandez, who shouted, “Let’s go to win the playoff!” The line appears in the first part of this video:

I immediately saw a lot of people twitter this line because it was so charming in its enthusiasm and less than perfect grammar. Though Nicolas Batum is the only foreign player in the starting lineup, Portland has two Spaniards on its bench. When Sergio Rodriguez connects with Rudy for an ally-oop, the sports commentators refer to it as “the Spanish Armada.”

In both Sergio and Rudy’s first playoff game last Saturday, the Blazers lost terribly to the Rockets. I heard Sergio on the radio afterward saying he hopes the team “runs more” in this game. His English was a little rough–he seemed confused about what it meant to be tight (good) as a team and loose (relaxed) in a game. But of all explanations I heard of what went wrong in that 30 point loss, I like Sergio’s the best. The team did need to run more. Maybe it’s that simple. We’ll find out in 10 minutes when the game starts. I’ll be watching the Spanish Armada in particular because I really like the spirit they bring to the team at this climax of the season.

Post game update: The Armada did it! The Blazers won a very close game, and Rudy scored the final points by making a pair of free throws. Who’s your favorite international player in the playoffs?

The iPhone has an app that makes the screen look like a cowbell and makes a ‘ding!’ sound whenever you tap it. It also has an app that makes the screen look like a glass of beer, which you can pour out. So you’d better believe it has apps to help you with all the different aspects of learning a language. In fact, the folks at onlinecollegedegree.org compiled 50 of them in a recent post.

Of course there are the simple translators you’d expect, but there are some definite standouts. Take the idiom dictionary. That’s got to come in handy. When I travel and speak to non-native speakers, they commonly say, “Please, don’t use any slang!” So if they’re around someone they don’t feel comfortable asking to alter their speech, they could just slyly plug anything that doesn’t make sense to them into this app as if they’re sending a text.

But definitely the one that sounds most interesting to me is the Translator with Voice. While a lot of online dictionaries have an audio component, I feel that this app is one step closer to realizing sci-fi fantasy I hope to see in my lifetime. When, oh when! will there be an app that automatically translates whatever you say? You know what I’m talking about, the universal translator. We definitely need to invent that before we invent deep space travel. iPhone developers, go!

Since Amanda is leaving English, baby! and her character is breaking up with Mason on the soap opera, I thought I’d put together a few highlights from their relationship, which was at the center of the soap opera plot when it began in late 2007, and has continued throughout it’s first 60 episodes. (It was also loosely based on my real life.)

Crush on a Friend

Before there was the soap opera, there was this lesson. I asked Mason and Amanda to improv a conversation on the topic, and the members demanded more.

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Mason’s Date

This was the first soap opera episode and the first in a long series of episodes in which Mason is oblivious to the fact that Amanda likes him.

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Cuddling on the Couch

One the best Mason-is-oblivious lessons and probably our most sexually suggestive lesson ever. It’s also worth watching for hilarious Friends references.

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Foul Ball

Meanwhile, my character tried to hook up with Amanda. It didn’t go very well. This was the first of several episodes in which Amanda and I are fantastically awkward.

Triangulate

And Devan developed a crush on Mason, which made for tension between her and Amanda. I love lighthearted Mason is when he enters the scene.

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It’s Raining Men

Amanda couldn’t decide what to do. Was it worth it to try to wait for Mason? What if he never noticed her? Marni gives her advice, and Amanda wonders if maybe Jason would be a good option after all.

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Magic Moment

But just in time, they finally got together in a very unique, pre-scripted English, baby! lesson, which was filmed in Amanda’s actual living room.

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Trouble in Paradise

After some months of happiness, Mason and Amanda had a fight that was rooted in the drama that took place before they got together.

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Awful Flirty

During her fight with Mason, Amanda spent some time with Jason in order to make Mason jealous. Amanda is so good at acting flirty, that I actually got king of embarrassed here and had a hard time thinking of things to say.

Make Up

But before too long, Amanda and Mason realized they were being silly and made up on an afternoon walk. I wanted this scene to recall the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but in the take we wound up using, they didn’t lock arms.

My True Love Gave to Me

When the holidays rolled around, Amanda got Mason a great gift and he got her a not so great gift…and then surprised her with 7 more!

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Healed

Then, when Devan and Jason were both in bad health, Amanda prayed for them to get better. It worked, and she shocked everyone by announcing she would become a nun.

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Farewell

And in her last Ebaby! appearance, Amanda leaves Mason to become a nun. It’s a sad and awkward scene that’s difficult to watch. Just minutes after shooting this, Amanda left Ebaby! forever and Mason and everyone else were sad to see her go in real life too.

One night when we were in China, a friend of ours suggested to me and John that we make English lessons out of the government TV channel, CSPAN. We said, “Are you crazy? Government is boring! People want to learn English from lessons about music and movies and sports!”

We understood on some level that Obama was an excpetion to that rule. We understood that people around the world love Obama and find him very interesting. So we made no fewer than seven lessons about him (all linked in the discussion section of this one).

And our Obama lessons were successful and got lots of comments, but I just learned that a Japanese book and CD that helps you learn English through Obama’s speeches has sold 400,000 copies. Isn’t that amazing? I’d be jealous if we were an ESL publisher. Instead, I’ll just take this as good news that people are happy to spend a little money on creative ways to learn English. Maybe we should add an Obama feature to our Super Membership.

If you spend some time on English, baby! you start to notice some recurring types of characters among the users. We keep some of these archetypes in mind when we plan changes to the site and write lessons and we meet them in person when we travel. I just discovered a new documentary called Mad About English that does a wonderful job of capturing some different types of English students.

The film focuses on six Chinese people of different ages and occupations who are learning English. You can see them all in the preview and read a little bit about them on the film’s website.

What makes these people such good choices for subjects is that they are both archetypal and very unique. I bet almost every American who has traveled abroad has encountered someone who is very overeager to practice English, so the example of the older man who just randomly starts talking to strangers is familiar, but a particularly outrageous case. Same goes for the police officer with a New York accent. I can identify–I learned Spanish in the south of Spain, which would be kind of like coming to Texas to learn English.

Anyway, Mad About English seems to be gaining some momentum. According this article, it was the number one documentary in Singapore for 6 weeks and it just had its debut on the Discovery Channel.  It reminds me a lot of the videos we made in China in terms of content, but the look is very cinematic (as opposed to our more television-type style) and some of the shots are downright beautiful.

Have you ever made up your own slang word? Slang has to start somewhere, so if you and your friends start a new term, there’s a chance you’ll see it in a movie in a few years, or here on English, baby! We’ve been defining a slang term a week for years and it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of words anytime soon.

But slang terms usually just happen on their own. It’s hard to make one up on purpose. I remember when I was about five years old, my neighbor and I were playing in some mud and decided that we’d call the mud “habla,” a word we thought we made up. But when we told my mom, she informed us that “habla” is the Spanish for “speak.” It’s so hard to think of a word no one’s used before!

In a recent episode of the Sarah Silverman Program, she meets a guy who supposedly invented the term “boo-yah,” and is a celebrity because of it. So Sarah decides to invent her own word. But it’s harder than she thinks. She sings a song about it:

The video has a lot of other slang terms in it like “faceplant,” which is when you fall on your face, “TMI,” which means “too much formation,” and “psych,” which means “just kidding.” There’s also a policeman character who hates the idea of slang because he thinks it’s destroying society.

The word she ends up choosing, “ozay,” which is similar in meaning to “lame,” was actually a word that she and her friends used in high school.  In this behind-the-scenes video, Sarah talks about how she didn’t realize that “ozay” wasn’t used outside of her home town until she moved away.

Have you and your friends ever invented a slang term or tried to? Think you can come up with one right now?

A lot of people around the world have a lot of expectations for Barack Obama. We even started a page to share these hopes. But one thing the world’s English-learning population may not expect to get from Obama’s presidency but almost certainly will is improvements in their grammar.

When I was choosing which candidate to vote for, one of the things I asked myself was, “Who would I rather hear on the radio every day for the next four years?” And while the American president is certianly covered less-often in foreign media, there are still plenty of quotes and soundbites to be found around the world, I’m sure.

But this hilarious satire column by Andy Borowitz got me thinking about how confusing the last eight must have been for people who are learning English. How many ESL students are out there mispronouning “nuclear” courtesy of George W. Bush?

And when, as a native speaker, I sometimes struggle to follow Sarah Palin’s sentence structure, I can’t help but wonder how many more gerunds would have been misused if she and John McCain had won (see the Palin quote at the end of Borowitz’s article for pretty realistic represtation of the Alaska Governor’s passion for misplaced -ings).

So, the world wanted Barack Obama to win the election by about a 60% percent margin. And even if you with the one-fifth of the world who liked John McCain better, you will likely Obama in part to thank when that Moroccan rug salesman haggles with you in complete sentences, or the business call from India is perfectly intelligible.

In the US, the holiday in honor of all things scary, Halloween, is Friday. Most people dress up in costumes and go to parties or take their children around the neighborhood trick or treating. But a Canadian woman named Ines Markeljevic organized a world-wide simultaneous performance of the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video that took place last Saturday.

Markeljevic’s goal was to have 200,000 people participate in Thrill the World. She may have over estimated a little–the final number was 4,177 people. But that was still enough to break the world record. Interestingly, the record was previously held by a prison in the Philippines which got 1,500 inmates to do the dance all at once. Crime rates within the prison plummeted as a result.

In an interview with the LA Times, Markeljevic jokes that the prison was feeling the “same global ‘Thriller’ consciousness.” It must have been an interesting feeling for the people involved to know that all over the world, other people were doing the same dance at the exact same time. And then they got to watch the videos later.

The idea that you can break a world record in 77 cities at once is a very cool use of the Internet and another global tool: pop culture. I love watching people all over the world interact daily on English, baby! but at present, it’s hard for them to dance together. But if doing the “Thriller” dance can bring peace to a prison, surely it can only do good for the world. And since this year the only non-English speaking country to Thrill the World was Germany, it seems a common language helps foster common moves, so we’ll continue to do our part.

Videos:

The Cebu, Philippines, Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center does “Thriller.” How do you think they picked the guy to play the girl?

The Berlin chapter of Thrill the World dances last weekend. To see all the videos, click here.

Part Ines Markeljevic’s tutorial on the step.

The Cebu, Philippines, Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center doing Soulja Boy. Why don’t American prisons do this?

We’ve been keeping track of the global opinion of the US Presidential election for well over a year now, but the international angle has seen a lot of attention recently.

The US uses a system called the Electoral College to determine the winner of a presidential election. Basically, each state is worth a certain number of points based on how many people live there, and the candidate with the most points wins the election.

On their website, The Economist has converted the entire world into an electoral college system. The experiment is on-going but at the time of posting, the only countries supporting John McCain were Macedonia and Georgia. Last week I saw Slovakia turn red and then go back to blue.

This manner of scoring exaggerates the roughly 80%-20% split we have found in our polls. I would be interested to know what is making certain eastern European countries lean toward McCain since I can’t think of anything that would have that effect. Perhaps they like his policy on Russia? It seems both candidates support protecting Russia’s neighbors.

CNN recently released a video with short segments from more than a dozen countries about what they think about the election following the vice presidential debate between McCain’s running mate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska and Obama’s partner, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Except for Russia itself, none of these countries is in eastern Europe, so the questions raised by the global electoral college remain unanswered. But each of the responses are interesting and some of them are very funny. Below is a summary of each report and the video.

* South Korean moms don’t know much about Palin’s policies, but they like that she’s a mom.
* Iraqis are generally too busy with daily life to worry about the US election.
* Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf recently called Palin “gorgeous” which embarrassed some Pakistanis and made others like her.
* The Japanese are primarily concerned with the fact that Palin’s glasses were made by a Japanese designer.
* Both Candidates support Israel, so Israel is happy.
* It was a holiday in Germany the day of the debate, so no one really watched it.
* Kenya loves Obama because his father was Kenyan.
* China seems well-informed and has varied opinions on the election.
* Spain has been mentioned in two debates now as an example of an ally whose leaders McCain refuses to meet with. Naturally, the Spanish lean toward Obama.
* Russia has ridiculed Palin’s claim that living near Russia in Alaska gives her foreign policy experience.
* Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh seems to have taken Palin under his wing, so some Indians like her.
* Nigeria isn’t really following the election but likes Obama because he’s black.
* England is more worried about the US economy than its election.

Image: Sarah Palin surrounded by Vikings, another key global demographic.