Olympic gold medalists Zhao Hongbo and Shen Xue on English, baby!
Just when we thought interviewing the Chinese snowboarding team was as good as it could get for us during our visit to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics to help our members learn English, we got an incredible opportunity. A few days after winning the gold medal in pairs figure skating, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo met with English, baby! outside the skating practice facility in Vancouver.
This couple is one of the best stories of the Olympics. After skating together for more than 17 years, Zhao Hongbo proposed to Shen Xue on the ice in 2007. This year, the pair came out of retirement to try for Olympic gold, the only championship they had not yet claimed, and in Vancouver, their dreams came true.
After we got to know each other a bit, we asked Hongbo and Xue to do another lesson on the phrase “head over heels.” You can really see how warm these athletes are in this rare look at their personal side. This video was an immediate hit in China. It got more than 50,000 views in the first weekend on this Chinese video site without us promoting it at all!
As far as we know, this was the only English interview Zhao Hongbo and Shen Xue gave while in Canada. We are so honored to have been able to participate in a little bit of their gold medal moment.
So many Olympic sports come down to perfection. Can you do what you are attempting to do perfectly? In the luge, a few thousandths of a second can separate the competitors, and in half pipe snowboarding, one small wobble can cost you the gold.
And so it was with Liu Jiayu on Thursday night in the ladies’ half pipe finals, who just a few days before taught an English lesson on the term “goofy” for English, baby! Unlike the men’s half pipe, in which Shaun White just got so much higher than everyone else and was the undisputed victor, the ladies’ competition could have been won by any of the competitors going into the second run. Liu Jiayu–who entered the competition ranked 2nd–came into the final run in fourth place. She looked so good up until her final trick, when her board grazed the blue rim of the half pipe. She didn’t fall, but she wobbled, and instantly she and everyone watching knew, she would not advance past fourth.
So while she was explaining what it means to ride goofy earlier in the week (although she rides regular), Liu Jiayu actually ended up demonstrating the other meaning of goofy–you know, funny looking and silly. Because for a split second after she hit the rim of the half pipe on that final run, she looked a little goofy catching her balance. But at age 18, I have a feeling the world will be getting to know Liu Jiayu better over the next few years and that she will continue to demonstrate how uncharacteristic that goofy moment was.
If it weren’t for the cameras, you wouldn’t have known they were Olympic athletes. At the airport, the Chinese snowboarding team just looked like a bunch of kids arriving in Vancouver to head up to the mountain.
Two media outlets were there to capture the arrival of the greatest foreign threat to a sport dominated by Americans, CCTV–the NBC of China–and English, baby!
CCTV’s coverage aired that night. The story took the angle that the athletes’ first challenge in Canada was to use their English skills with the media.
The athletes acted like seasoned, secretive stars and didn’t give any in-depth responses to questions from the CCTV reporter. Luckily, we weren’t looking for anything in-depth from them, we were just hoping to have fun making a couple of English lessons. Take a look at our first video with Liu Jiayu(刘佳宇), Sun Zhifeng(孙志峰), and Cai Xuetong(蔡雪彤), a lesson on the phrase “drop in.”
The finals for women’s half pipe are just about to start and we are excited to see how Liu Jiayu and Sun Zhifeng, who made it through the preliminary rounds will do!
This week English, baby! is featuring a really fun English lesson with Shane Battier from the Houston Rockets. I came across this blog which determined that Shane is (or at least was, not sure what the current numbers are) the best at buzzer beating (specifically shot clock buzzers). So we asked him to teach “buzzer beater” and other last-second vocab.
After we approached Shane, we learned he knows a little Mandarin. He gets lessons every year before he goes to China for a couple of weeks to promote his Peak signature shoe. He was shy about sharing his full Mandarin vocabulary in the video, but he dropped a “ni hao” for his fans in China.
And boy, does Shane have fans in China. This Chinese news clip, from which I pulled the shot of the t-shirt above, shows the welcome he got while getting off a plane. The Chinese aren’t just big fans smart basketball and stellar defense, Shane’s profile is boosted by frequent airing of TV commercials he stars in (you can see most of them on Battier’s MogoTXT site). This blog post even has a quote from an NBA player who spent some time in China and got really tired of seeing Shane on TV!
I think it’s great that Shane is so well-known in China. He’s such a well-rounded an unselfish player, he makes a great ambassador for the US and basketball. He has a reputation for being a smart guy, and, in fact, he saved me when we were taping this interview. I started talking to him and then completely blanked out. I had to wait in the media room for a while because the team was late to their shoot around that day and I let my mind get sleepy! Anyway, when he saw I had blanked out, Shane said, “buzzer beater, man,” and reminded me what we were supposed to be talking about. It was clear he had thought about the definition of the term in advance. No wonder his is the best celebrity English lesson we’ve done so far!
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.
But in the interest of time, we left out a lot of good stuff from the interview, like Sasha talking about his new shoe deal in China and growing up in (the now former) Yugoslavia.
Jason: So you have a shoe deal coming up in China, is that right?
Sasha: Yes, I do. I’m very excited about it. We reached an agreement and I’m going to have my own signature shoe. The company is called Peak and I can’t wait to wear them in the games. It’s going to be fun.
Jason: Did you help design the shoes yourself and pick what they’re going to look like?
Sasha: Yes, I did. I wanted not only to help design it, but to make it feel as comfortable as they can be and as stable as they can be for basketball players to play with them. I think it’s gonna be a good shoe.
Jason: Have you ever been to China?
Sasha: Yes, I went there for Basketball Without Borders to promote basketball in Asia with Yao and Scottie Pippen. It was fun. It was an amazing experience.
Jason: What’s your strategy for learning languages?
Sasha: Well, the thing is, I was very young when my country kind of split apart. So as a young kid, I spoke two languages already. And then going to Italy, it was very new for me. I didn’t know anything but, “Good morning.” In five years there I realized that all my friends and everybody I was playing with or hanging out with, they spoke just Italian and English was optional. At times, when they wanted to, they spoke it, but most of the time it was Italian. Lucky for me, I knew a little bit of English when I came to Italia and spending a lot of time there, I learned Italian.
Jason: And then when you came here, how hard was it for you to learn English?
Sasha: I knew English since I was probably eleven or ten. In school we always had English as a second language. I started in school very young. Our country is very small so in order to have a second language or third language, you have to go with English or Italian or whatever you think you’re going to do later on in life and in school we always English as a second language.
Jason: So when you first got here, did you do any speaking Italian with Kobe?
Sasha: Yes, I did since day one. He speaks really good Italian and we kind of clicked from day one. Coming to America, I didn’t expect that anybody would speak Italian and then learning about the Lakers, learning about Kobe, I had the opportunity to find out that he speaks really good Italian and we kind of clicked from day one.
Jason: Did you know what “the Machine” meant right away? Were you familiar with the English slang calling someone a machine?
Sasha: Yes, of course. This is my fifth year in the states and five years in Los Angeles, you learn a lot from slang to…anything. I thought it was fun in the beginning, but everybody liked it and I’ve got to just represent it.
Jason: Do you ever feel like it’s a lot of pressure to be “the Machine”?
Sasha: No, I think it’s good. I think it’s good if people recognize you as the Machine and I just gotta play up to that level and I’m waiting for opportunities to shine in the upcoming game.
Jason: Do any of your teammates call you the Machine?
Sasha: Last year, when all this started, it was kind of funny because some of the trainers brought up a YouTube video by people that made something about myself and it was just funny. It was interior joke in the locker room and inside the practice facility and it was going on forever.
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.
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!
This week English, baby! is featuring a really fun 
The April issue of Successful Promotions not only features 
Sasha Vujacic’s lesson on “the machine”
Jason: Have you ever been to China?
