Ebaby! Blog

Almost every day I eat at the same Thai food cart a few blocks from the English, baby! office in downtown Portland. It’s called Thai Basil and they know me now and give me free spring rolls and tea.

As I wait for my food to be prepared, I often find myself staring at the menu between spacing out and sending text messages. The specials change daily on a white board next to the window, and for this reason, I always come back to the office with a black smudge on my forefinger.

I never realized how tricky it would be to figure out what foods you pluralize on a menu in English. But every day I erase the ’s’ on words like “pumpkins,” “brocolis,” and “shrimps.”

I’d mention it to the very nice woman who runs the cart (or her foxy granddaughter, but that’s another story), but I can’t figure out what the rule is for things like this. It seems arbitrary. I mean, “brocolis” is never correct, but “pumpkins” is a word if you’re talking about multiple pumpkins, but I seriously doubt there’s more than one pumpkin in their pumpkin curry. Then again, there probably isn’t more than a whole bell pepper in it either, but it is proper to say that a dish has “bell peppers” and not “bell pepper.”

If anyone can make any sense of out this and tell me what the rule is, I will relay it to Thai Basil.

Photos: Taken on my cell phone today, post erasure.

I’ve been sitting on this for a couple of days because I couldn’t decide what I think about it. Basically, a judge sentenced three Spanish-speaking men who were convicted of harassing and assaulting someone to come back in two years with a GED, a full-time job, and the ability to speak English, or he’ll send them to jail for two years.

Definitely amusing. The most compelling argument against this creative sentencing I’ve heard is that we don’t want language learning to seem like a punishment. But when I saw some people in orange vests picking up trash today, I thought, “That’s useful. Why shouldn’t convicted criminals always do useful things instead of sitting in jail, spending public money?”

And useful for society or useful for the criminal, it doesn’t really matter to me.  In fact, it would be kind of cool if you couldn’t leave jail until you learned a new language. We’d have all these ex-con translators instead of ex-con repeat offenders.

So I applaud the idea of sentencing someone to learn a language. I can only hope that I’ll be sentenced to learn Mandarin if I ever get busted for trespassing (my main hobby).

But in this case, the sentence might be a little light. Let’s think about what these guys did.

The four, ranging in age from 17 to 22, were in a group that police said accosted two men on a street in May. The two said they were asked if they had marijuana, told to empty their pockets, struck on the head, threatened with a gun and told to stay off the block.

I mean, that sounds pretty crazy. I’d like to think that some verb conjugations or some Ebaby! or some Shakespeare might set these guys straight, but I’m glad they’re going to be learning English in Pennsylvania and not on my street, you know?

As I was combing the site for funny nuggets to include in the latest edition of Best Comments, I noticed something interesting in the discussion of our lesson on drunk performers.

When I read that, I thought, “Oh wow, that’s funny. How embarrassing.” Then I felt real bad.

Hey, I didn’t know the singer died. Wow. I couldn’t find anything about this anywhere on the Internet so I asked Jewel, the only member of the Ebaby! team who knows Chinese, if she knew anything about the singer who drunkenly fell to his death from a stage.

There’s a whole Chinese Wikipedia page about the incident, but Jewel says that this bit from the singer’s page pretty much sums it up:

While filming a gameshow for Fuji Television in Japan on June 24, 1993, Wong Ka-Kui fell off a 3 meter platform head first, and was hospitalized immediately. He died after spending several days in coma due to internal bleeding of head injuries.

What a bummer. Jewel couldn’t find anything confirming that he was drunk, but since two members brought it up it seems to be widely believed.

Interestingly, another Chinese member was reminded of the recent “fall” of another celebrity by the same English lesson.

This one has an English Wikipedia page. Basically, a very famous actor named Edison Chen took his laptop in to get it fixed. One of the techs grabbed the hundreds of photos in the computer’s hard drive, which included nude shots of Chen and 14 female celebrities.

In the US, this is the kind of thing that launches you into super stardom (see Paris Hilton), but following the scandal, Chen announced he will leave show biz.

I think he should just move to the US. C’mon, Edison, I’ll give you English lessons in exchange for dating tips. You’ll be a stateside star in no time.

It’s no big secret that rhymes help people remember things. Kids can learn using nursery rhymes, so why not ESL students too? Perhaps that’s what EnglishToday had in mind when they set out to produce a series of video limericks to help you learn English.

It’s a valiant attempt, but rhyming is harder than you think. Sure you’ve got “right, tight; lefty loosie” useful mnemonic devises, but rhymes aren’t usually that convenient. You commonly have to compromise meaning or word choice pretty heavily in order to get the job done.

This limerick about Maggie the Millipede is one of the best ones. I had to double check if it was already an existing limerick, but I think it’s original.

Some of the limerick videos are just this very, very British man talking into the camera in funny hats, which is pretty endearing. They did a good job of structuring these for YouTube. The meat of the video (the limerick), is at the beginning and there’s a bunch of silly stuff afterward in case you want to keep watching.

The only problem here is that the limerick is almost a tongue twister and is actually pretty tough to follow (Is “nobbled” a common word in the UK? I had to look it up. Spell check doesn’t even recognize it as a word.). This one about a three legged cat is pretty tough as far as English vocab goes as well. But the extras after the limerick are hilarious. I burst out laughing when clip art started landing on the cat’s back near the end.

Now, I have seen some funny translations in my travels. “Homos” for “hummus” and the like, but this takes the cake. This is just one of many groups of incredibly bizarre “vocabulary” words from a set of Chinese English learning blocks featured in this hilarious blog post.

It’s worth checking out just for the laughs, but it also raises a good point. As English becomes the global language, how will it change? The author of the post cleverly notes that as China’s 1.3 billion people learn English, it may become the case at some point that what they say goes since they’re the majority of the speakers. Chainsaw? Sorry, Yank, that’s a reactance.

According to this recent story from Indian news outlet NDTV, there are already more English speakers in India than in the US. Soon the tables will be turned and English slang will come from Asia instead of the US and I’ll be the one trying to keep up by reading ESL websites!

It appears that Do-Heon Kim, one of Korea’s best soccer players, has impressed the West Bromwich Albion Football Club during his trial with the team.  In just a few days he has received positive feedback from the coaching staff and vows to learn English to help his bid to become part of the team.
Speaking through a translator, he says he’ll start studying English twice a week.  We’d like to do our part to help him assimilate as well and look forward to the day we see him guessing our Slang of the Week.

We find Japan’s fantasy culture amazing.  From hostess clubs to themed love hotels, the country has countless opportunities to escape reality and disappear into worlds catered exactly to your dreams.

One of the latest stories to come from Tokyo is no exception.  In an effort to spice up their lives and receive emotional satisfaction, women are heading to Butlers Cafe, a coffee shop where English speaking men dressed as butlers will treat them like the princesses they wish to be - and throw in an English lesson or two.

We’re trying to get a couple applications for part-time gigs for Jason and Captain Jeff.

As you navigate English, baby!, it’s hard not to laugh at some of the mistakes people make while they learn English. Heck, I do it on a regular basis.

But it’s not nice to laugh at people learning a language! And what better place to learn about manners than a Japanese game show? 

Check out this video in which contestants are beaten if they laugh at a man struggling to learn English. I particularly like the white shoes and amount of yelling. Those are both things that need to be incorporated into language education more often.

Hat tip to Cheesegod

In an effort to welcome the world to their upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing, China’s government is pushing its citizens to learn English like never before.  Everyone, young and old, is being encouraged to improve their language skills.

China’s interest in learning English has amazed us here at Ebaby!  Both the government and the people believe it’s a key component of their economic future.  We agree 100%.

We just learned that Sega is making a game called English of the Dead where Japanese players must write English words to kill zombies. In English of the Dead the zombies’ words are in Japanese and players must translate them into English in order to win the battles. There’s also a listening mode where the zombies speak English. Very cool.

It’s great to see Sega mixing entertainment and education and this is an idea that needs to be taken worldwide. Every human on the planet has the right to have fun while learning English.