This Sunday, the fourth season of True Blood on HBO begins. This show has a lot of fans in the US and around the world, and it also has its own set of vocabulary that its international fans might have some trouble with.

Fortunately, one of the actresses from the show, Lindsay Pulsipher, who plays Crystal starting in season 3, is our latest celebrity English teacher. At a recent showing of her new film, The Oregonian, we asked her to talk about the term “shapeshifter” and, since her character likes to turn into a panther, the phrase “cat got your tongue” in an English lesson.

Lindsay was so kind and very happy to help us teach English. We’re excited to see her in True Blood this season and hopefully in more movies in the future. You can see a trailer for The Oregonian here, and a scene from True Blood with Lindsay in it here. Both are a little too intense to embed on an English education blog, but if you like supernatural and scary stuff, you will probably enjoy them!

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.