Ebaby! Blog

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.