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.

People often act like the only way to meet someone online is through a dating site. But in a lot of ways, the Internet is just like real life–if you do the things that interest you, you’re likely to meet people while doing them.

I bring this up not only because Valentine’s Day is just a few days away, but because we just learned that another international couple met on English, baby! and is going to be married. Last year around this time we brought you the story of a Turkish man and Ukranian woman who met while learning English on our site and decided to get married. They welcomed me at their wedding to make a video. I checked in with them on their first anniversary and I’m happy to say things are going quite well.

But now I’d like to introduce you to Doni (real name: Donato), an economics teacher who lives in Switzerland and Nelly (real name: Lamia), a travel agent who lives in Algeria. They first met while practicing their language skills in the English, baby! chat rooms in 2007 and plan to be married this November.

They got together in person for the first time last summer. Nelly tells the story:

We first met in Serbia when I went to spend my holidays on Jun 2008. It was the last three days of my vacation that he came. I was waiting him with my uncle in Belgrade airport. My heart was beating quickly because I was so impatient to see him. When he arrived and I saw him. I was too too happy. We spend an unforgettable three days in Dolovo countryside. There he saw my parents and I introduced him my relatives…we spend all the moments we have together.

Since then, she has visited him in Switzerland and he her in Algeria. They actually hadn’t heard about our Turkrainian couple and didn’t think they’d ever fall in love online. “I have never imagined that something like that can happen via the net,” says Lamia.

Aren’t they so cute? They’re both 26 years old. The above photo was taken in Switzerland. Here’s one from Algeria:

And one from Serbia:

One night when we were in China, a friend of ours suggested to me and John that we make English lessons out of the government TV channel, CSPAN. We said, “Are you crazy? Government is boring! People want to learn English from lessons about music and movies and sports!”

We understood on some level that Obama was an excpetion to that rule. We understood that people around the world love Obama and find him very interesting. So we made no fewer than seven lessons about him (all linked in the discussion section of this one).

And our Obama lessons were successful and got lots of comments, but I just learned that a Japanese book and CD that helps you learn English through Obama’s speeches has sold 400,000 copies. Isn’t that amazing? I’d be jealous if we were an ESL publisher. Instead, I’ll just take this as good news that people are happy to spend a little money on creative ways to learn English. Maybe we should add an Obama feature to our Super Membership.

I used to wonder why the same Christmas specials were shown on TV and the same Christmas songs played on the radio year after year. But now I understand.

We made a week’s worth of holiday lessons last year for English, baby! and did the same this year. But when I went back and looked at what we did last year, I realized a lot of it is still good! (Of course, check the site all next week because the new stuff is better, but still.)

It’s no surprise that people often go home for the holidays. The holidays are themselves a home in a way. We return to them every year and they’re largely the same. There’s a trick to creating holiday content that is timeless. I did it a couple of times last year, and made a couple of our lessons more dated. Have a look at last year’s holiday lessons and see which ones you can tell are a year old!

Jingle all the Day

I was particularly proud of my ability to work a photo of Twisted Sister into last year’s holiday music lesson. Did you know they have an actual holiday album?

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Broken Bulb

Of course, I had to include some holiday decoration flirtation on the soap opera last year. This is filmed on the roof of our office building.

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Christmas Movies

Since so many of the movies discussed in this lesson are classic, it hardly seems outdated. OK maybe the part about Queen Latifah.

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Fruitcake

This year’s slang is “ham.” I guess there’s something about the all the cheer this time of year that makes me think I can get away with puns.

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Hanukkah

Dang it. I should have done something Kwanza this year.

Have you ever made up your own slang word? Slang has to start somewhere, so if you and your friends start a new term, there’s a chance you’ll see it in a movie in a few years, or here on English, baby! We’ve been defining a slang term a week for years and it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of words anytime soon.

But slang terms usually just happen on their own. It’s hard to make one up on purpose. I remember when I was about five years old, my neighbor and I were playing in some mud and decided that we’d call the mud “habla,” a word we thought we made up. But when we told my mom, she informed us that “habla” is the Spanish for “speak.” It’s so hard to think of a word no one’s used before!

In a recent episode of the Sarah Silverman Program, she meets a guy who supposedly invented the term “boo-yah,” and is a celebrity because of it. So Sarah decides to invent her own word. But it’s harder than she thinks. She sings a song about it:

The video has a lot of other slang terms in it like “faceplant,” which is when you fall on your face, “TMI,” which means “too much formation,” and “psych,” which means “just kidding.” There’s also a policeman character who hates the idea of slang because he thinks it’s destroying society.

The word she ends up choosing, “ozay,” which is similar in meaning to “lame,” was actually a word that she and her friends used in high school.  In this behind-the-scenes video, Sarah talks about how she didn’t realize that “ozay” wasn’t used outside of her home town until she moved away.

Have you and your friends ever invented a slang term or tried to? Think you can come up with one right now?

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to hear a high-level U.S. politician speak of our need as Americans to learn a second language. If you didn’t catch the clip of Obama’s speech that many people are talking about, watch it and see a man who understands how important it is for us to think beyond our borders and realize our world is much bigger than our one great nation. He gets it.

Immediately following his speech, a large group of people twisted his words and claimed that Obama thinks Americans should learn Spanish instead of immigrants living in our country learning English. They say how wrong he is and use it as political propaganda. He gets it again.

Today our country has walls on our borders, fingerprint machines in our airports, and people who still believe 9/11 was an attack by Iraq. The higher we build our fences, the further we distance ourselves from the other 6.3 billion people who share our planet. We’ve been fortunate to have a prosperous 200 or so years, but that won’t continue without joining the global party, something a number of other countries seem to understand so much better than we do.

Of course immigrants should learn English if they are living in the U.S. During my three years living in Japan I would have never assumed that people should be speaking my language. Obama is simply saying that the bigger issue here is that we should be learning languages ourselves.

While English, baby! won’t necessarily help Americans learn English, we hope it helps people see the importance of connecting with other cultures. Watching the millions of young people from around the world come to our site with their open minds and enthusiasm for a second, third or fourth language is inspiring. Their attitude is what will bring us together as a planet for a bright global future. They get it.

Have you ever read Lolita? Controversy aside, the language is gorgeous. Many of the passages could be classified as prose-poetry and there’s a Shakespearean allusion and plan on words on almost every page. But the most amazing part? Vladimir Nabokov only began learning English five years before he began the book. And English was his fourth language.

Some people just have a gift for language, I guess. Or do they? Two stories came out in local papers yesterday about kids who came to the US not knowing English and quickly rose to academic heights through sheer determination.

Ngoc Trang Nguyen came to Wichita, Kansas, from Viet Nam just in time to start to high school. Five of her first six classes were ESL classes and didn’t count toward graduation. Now, four years later, she is valedictorian of her graduating class.

All of her teachers say they’ve never seen anyone work so hard. And there was a very specific point at which Nyoc’s work started to pay off. She says, “Being in classes with all American students and being exposed to more English, I was able to pick up the pace faster.” It took her forever to learn the basics, but the rest came easily after that. I think that’s the lesson to learn from Nyoc’s story: trust things will get easier as you suffer through the beginning stages of a project.

Benjamin Gutiérrez didn’t know any English when he came to Hanover, Pennsylvania, from Perú four years ago. The sixth grader recently won a spelling bee with contestants from 34 schools.

He studied for the competition for months with his mother, who is also learning English. But it sounds like a big part of his success was a cramming on English pronunciation in the week leading up to to the contest. The article says, “Though [Ben's] family devoted a lot of time to helping him study in the three months before the bee, they knew that what Benjamin really needed was to hear the words dictated to him in native English pronunciation. James Jones, a volunteer tutor and friend of the family, began a marathon study session with Benjamin the week of the competition.”

I think this is particularly interesting because, unlike Spanish, in which every word is spelled exactly as it sounds (the very idea of a Spanish spelling bee is preposterous), English pronunciation isn’t necessarily the key to spelling, in fact, it can be misleading. I wonder what Ben’s trick is.

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?

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.