Ebaby! Blog

In case you haven’t heard, English, baby! is fielding an Olympic team this year. We’re a band of rag tag underdogs that’s sure to win some hearts, if not any metals.

We’ve begun to order stuff for our trip like the special Ebaby! stop watch and sweatbands pictured to your left. I’ll be modeling shorts for you here by the end of the week.

Check out our official Olympics page or the press release about our trip. Also, each member of the Ebaby! team is keeping a profile blog about the upcoming competition. So take a look at Captain Jeff’s, John’s or mine.

Coverage of the Olympics this year seems to be divided into two categories. There’s news about the athletes, which is, of course, generally up beat. And then there’s news about the Olympics overall and China, which has been largely skeptical and often negative.

But, as we’ve been planning our trip to the Olympics, I keep thinking about the games are still an international gathering representative of a lot of what English, baby! stands for. Luckily, Mariah Summers at the Portland Tribune agrees. She wrote an article that came out today about our trip. She did a great job of capturing the spirit of the trip and the nature of the website.

When she was interviewing John, she mentioned trying to find other Portland-based companies sending people to Beijing. I wonder how many American companies that aren’t traditional media outlets are going to the games. I’m sure our team would love to compare notes with them.

Although there’s been some press about how inhospitable to tourists Beijing will be during the Olympics, this video, in complete saccharine madness, argues otherwise.

Since we’re taking a trip to Beijing in about a month, it was cool to see all the sites in this video (Apparently all the singers are famous people too. Did you see Jackie Chan?). But I also laughed at several parts, just because the song is so long and there are so many huge smiles in it and there are, like, several beautiful women telling me their doors are always open…it just got kind of silly.

But when I looked at the comments, everyone was taking the video totally seriously!

When I pointed out what I thought was one of the funniest quotes to Jewel, our resident Mandarin speaker, she was able to explain why I thought the video was funny even though it’s not supposed to be. Here’s the line:

The flowing enchantment and charms are filled with youthful spirit and vitality.

Apparently, that’s relatively normal speech in China. While in recent decades the English style has become as concise as possible, Chinese writers (and weird promotional video makers) embrace flowery language.

This gives me even more reason to learn Mandarin. When I first started writing I was drawn to the flowery style. Now I like being economical with words, but it took some getting used to. Maybe I find my way back to the sinuous delights of language wrought with sonorous hues, or something like that.

But anyway, I suppose the tendency to be over the top with language might help explain this highly exuberant video. I can’t wait to get over there and see the enthusiasm first hand. I want to learn the “Beijing welcomes you” part and sing it to people when they ask how I like the city.

Our members are so smart. OK, they’re not smart all the time, like when we added the “report member” button to weed out spammers and everyone pressed it like crazy for no reason, but a lot of the forum posts are really intelligent.

Learning a language forces you to be creative. I remember when I got good enough at Spanish to speak fluidly but I didn’t have the vocab to be very straight forward. So I’d come up with interesting ways to get across what I was trying to say. I think that’s what’s going on in this comment on another soap opera episode about online dating in which Marni discovers her new boyfriend may not be as great as she thought.

Unless taxi-as-relationship is a common cliche in Viet Nam, that’s pretty original. Another member may have coined a clever phrase this week on our lesson about the phrase “ugly duckling”.

I can’t find that expression anywhere with Google and, although it may be an unintentional misspelling, I like “notty” for the double meaning of “not” and “naughty”.

For another member, “ugly duckling” is about more than looks.

Maybe she can meet up with this dejected countryman of hers, who doesn’t include a photo clear enough to determine if his sulking is justified.

As interesting as all that is, we’ll wrap things up with another common mistake on the site. A lot of times people mistake one of the English lessons for a member profile and comment on it like this:

So that wouldn’t be so strange…if it weren’t on our lesson about Alvin and the Chipmunks!

Until next time, stay beautiful like an animated rodent.

So last week on the soap opera, Mason and Amanda finally got together. We spent three months dragging out the idea that she liked him and he wouldn’t notice her. But apparently that just wasn’t long enough for one incredibly patient Chinese member.

Of course there were many comments saying “Oh! How romantic!” and stuff like that. But you know what? I have to agree with this wise opinion instead.

May I only pray that all the real life Amanda’s of my life and men like me find this blog. But if they don’t, a couple of comments on a lesson about spooning reminds us that we always have one special lady in our lives…

Well, I’m not quite there yet. Apparently I have a couple of other options from fans I won with the wedding video.

That last one is particularly encouraging since I just found out that I am, in fact, going to China. More details about that later. But I’m already planning how I’ll impress the ladies there. I’ll amaze them with my powers to make the mundane interesting. A couple of minds seem completely blown by my lesson on losing your phone.

Well, that about wraps it up for this edition of best comments, so I leave you with the will-you-be-my-friend comment of the week. This one is sort of an Ebaby! inside joke which will be especially funny to regular users.

If you don’t fill out your profile, your name is a black non-link on the site. A lot of these non-links don’t realize they are non-links who can’t be messaged and go around asking for people add them. This one apparently missed an opportunity by just a few minutes…

Like two trains passing in the night…

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!