A major Lithuanian newspaper, lrytas.lt, recently created a news story out of our English lesson with Lithuanian NBA star, Žydrūnas Ilgauskas. In the Google translation, you can see how the author pulled quotes from our interview and put them together in the newspaper style. The story has been getting good traffic–it has more than 70 comments.

The Celebrity English Lessons we feature periodically on English, baby! have gotten lots of media attention since the last time we posted an update like this (though we have been posting some as we go, like the various places that picked up our Sheryl Crow lesson).

An Australia-based basketball site, A Stern Warning, also covered our Ilguaskas lesson, as well our English lessons with Carmelo Anthony and Rip Hamilton. Cleveland.com, the website for the daily newspaper there, The Plain Dealer, picked up that pair of NBA lessons too and thetruthsports.com really got a kick out of our discussion with Carmelo about his nickname in China. Denver Stiffs, a local Nuggets blog, gave it some love as well.

XXL, the leading hip-hop magazine, posted our English lesson with Tech N9ne, as did The Boom Box, who also included E-40′s Ebaby! lesson.

Finally, if you’re going to interview Weird Al, you’d better hope it gets a friendly post from yankovic.org. Fortunately, ours did.

I’m sure we’ve missed some coverage of our lessons, so if you notice any we haven’t posted here, please leave a comment. Feel free to direct us to sites you like to read that might interested in posting our English lesson videos as well!

It’s funny that Al Yankovic’s new book for children is called When I Grow Up, because when I was a kid, I pretty much wanted to be Weird Al when I grew up. I remember the first time I saw the “Amish Paradise” video on TV. I thought I had lost my mind. I simply could not believe something so cool and hilarious could exist and be on TV.

Naturally, I was thrilled when Weird Al agreed to do an English lesson for English, baby! We cover two meanings of the phrase “grow up” in his lesson.

If you’ve listened to Weird Al’s music, you can tell he’s kind of a genius, so I knew he would be a great English teacher. There were so many good vocabulary words in this interview, that it was hard to choose which to highlight. In fact, I’m sure some ESL students will have to watch it a few times to get it. Luckily, the topic of jobs and careers is relatively easy to understand.

The same goes for Al’s book. It’s surprisingly straight-forward. His name appears on the cover as simply “Al Yankovic” and the book isn’t especially “weird” or experimental. The language is really creative. It might be a little advanced for some kids (or ESL students), but the tougher words, like “hydraulic torque wrench calibrator” have fun sounds so you can enjoy them even if you don’t know what they mean.

While if it didn’t have his name on it, you probably wouldn’t guess the book is by Weird Al, the voice is clearly his. It’s easy to picture him reading the book aloud. And in way, the story is a metaphor for his body of work. The book follows the imagination of a kid who runs through many possible careers, some outrageous (giraffe milker) and others more common (teacher), and never picks one. Al is the same way–his music covers every genre and he has also studied architecture, been a filmmaker and now a writer…and lucky for us, an English teacher!

Our latest celebrity English teacher is one of my favorite musicians: Sheryl Crow.

I went to Sheryl Crow’s concert to write about it for our local newspaper, The Oregonian. It was an incredible performance. She had so much energy that all 6,000 people there were standing and many were singing. Read my review if you’d like to hear more about it.

Backstage, Sheryl agreed to do an interview for English, baby! I tried to explain it to her beforehand as best I could, but she looked a little surprised when I mentioned her teaching English once we started recording! She was a great English teacher though. She’s very mellow and down to Earth. She seems like such a nice person.

The video was a hit with our members. Many of them are big fans of Sheryl Crow. When I teased them with one of her lyrics on our facebook page, a lot of them guessed correctly which artist I was talking about. But I was surprised to see some comments on the English lesson from members who hadn’t heard of Sheryl Crow before. I guess there are some corners of the world she hasn’t rocked yet!

I was happy to see that some Sheryl Crow’s longtime fans here in the US were into the video too, even though they’re high level or native English speakers and don’t need the English tip. My/be Angels, a Sheryl Crow fan site that has been around for more than 14 years, added us to their video page. Probably the most unexpected place to pick up the video so far was this Argentine Rolling Stones fan site. They picked it up because Sheryl talks about playing with Keith Richards in the interview.

We’ve got more famous English teachers lined up so stay tuned!

As part of our ongoing celebrity English lesson series, I recently got to interview Marcin Gortat of the Orlando Magic. He is the first Polish born player in the NBA and nicknamed “the Polish Hammer.” Actually, I’ve heard that he prefers “the Polish Machine,” but I just think the hammer is so much more unique and fitting. I hope he changes his mind.

Normally, I go into these interviews knowing what the lesson will be about. But in this case, I tried something different and asked Marcin to pick his favorite basketball slang on the spot just before we started shooting. He chose “beat a shot.” Watch it below or see the full lesson here. Or you can even read about it in Polish on Marcin’s official website.

That night after the interview, I went to the game and watched Marcin and the Magic fall to my Portland Trailblazers. Marcin had a great game though, and every time he dunked or blocked a shot I stood up and yelled “bring down the hammer!” Then I went back to cheering for the Blazers. I must have confused a lot people around me.

Americans who speak French love to hang out together. I’ve found myself out with a group who at some point realized they all spoke French and decided to speak it right then. Let me tell you, I wish I knew I French too, because they were having lots of fun!

So when after filming an English lesson with French star, Tété, I went to his only show in the US this fall, it was no surprise to find the front rows full of people singing along and whispering to one another in French. And by the end of the set, Tété, came down off the stage and sang along with them with no microphone. You can read more about the show in the review I wrote for the Oregonian newspaper here in Portland.

But unlike my night out with friends that took an unexpected turn for the French, Tété is an inclusive kind of guy. When we met him at the recording studio, he gave us a tour. We wished we could have hung out all day! And even though I don’t know what they mean, I get the words to “Fils de cham” stuck in my head all the time now.

Following Nicolas Batum and Sebastien Le Toux, this is the third French celebrity English lesson we’ve had on English, baby! in the last year, more than any other nationality. But you just wait…we’ve got a celebrity English teacher from outer space coming up soon!

For more info on Tété, visit his website.

Today is a very special day for English, baby! After years of lessons about musicians and movie stars, we have our first lesson featuring an actual star! (Note: Our encounter with Jared Leto in Beijing came close but he didn’t contribute any vocab or grammar to the video.) Check out today’s music lesson, Party Vocab with Municipal Waste.

Now, Municipal Waste aren’t huge stars, but I’m a big fan and they are starting to break into the mainstream here and there (they got a review in Spin and I’m pretty sure they’ve been on MTV). Plus, the English lesson they could contribute was a no brainer. Who better to teach our members how to shotgun a beer?

So all in all, Municipal Waste turned out to be the perfect place to start my quest to get more and more artists to actually appear on the site. Bless them for being the first one! Now I will use their lesson as the example when I ask other artists to be in our videos. It may be a while until we’re doing slang lessons from the red carpet at award shows and breaking celebrity news with exclusive interviews, but today marks a small step in that direction.

If you feel like celebrating, watch the video and get wasted!