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.

A lot of people around the world have a lot of expectations for Barack Obama. We even started a page to share these hopes. But one thing the world’s English-learning population may not expect to get from Obama’s presidency but almost certainly will is improvements in their grammar.

When I was choosing which candidate to vote for, one of the things I asked myself was, “Who would I rather hear on the radio every day for the next four years?” And while the American president is certianly covered less-often in foreign media, there are still plenty of quotes and soundbites to be found around the world, I’m sure.

But this hilarious satire column by Andy Borowitz got me thinking about how confusing the last eight must have been for people who are learning English. How many ESL students are out there mispronouning “nuclear” courtesy of George W. Bush?

And when, as a native speaker, I sometimes struggle to follow Sarah Palin’s sentence structure, I can’t help but wonder how many more gerunds would have been misused if she and John McCain had won (see the Palin quote at the end of Borowitz’s article for pretty realistic represtation of the Alaska Governor’s passion for misplaced -ings).

So, the world wanted Barack Obama to win the election by about a 60% percent margin. And even if you with the one-fifth of the world who liked John McCain better, you will likely Obama in part to thank when that Moroccan rug salesman haggles with you in complete sentences, or the business call from India is perfectly intelligible.

Below is the full text from the interview I did with Hutch Harris from the Thermals for Monday’s English lesson. It was the second time I’ve interviewed a band for an English lesson, and this time, there wasn’t a specific topic for vocab (like drinking last time). So I did my best to reach the perspective on American culture and vocab terms that Hutch could offer and I think it went pretty well.

But first, the Thermals’ tour dates.

12.04.08 Chop Suey Seattle, WA
12.05.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR 21
12.06.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR All Ages, early show
12.12.08 Primavera Club, Barcelona, ES
12.13.08 Primavera Club, Madrid, ES
12.14.08 KCLSU, London, UK
12.17.08 Ekko, Utrecht, NL
12.18.08 Vera, Gronigen, NL

Jason: Since your last album [The Body, the Blood, the Machine] was, in some ways, a comment on American politics and society, I just wanted to ask you about how you feel about Obama’s victory and if it’s affected your world view.

Hutch: Dude, I’m stoked. I’m so stoked. I was scared until the last minute, really. I didn’t even have a drink. I wasn’t going to get drunk at some Obama party and have it turned around and have McCain steal it or something. As soon as he took Ohio though, it really seemed like was gonna happen.

So yeah, it totally changes my world view because choosing Obama wasn’t choosing the lesser of two evils. It wasn’t like if we would have gotten John Kerry. And it would be quite different if we had McCain and Palin going in there right now. Everyone knows that. Not just did we get a great president, we also dodged a bullet with those other two. And the whole world was rooting for Obama. So obviously the world is going to be very different and it looks to be positive.

Jason: How do you think it affects the Christian/fascist state that you were imagining on your last album?

Hutch: The most disgusting thing right now are people who think that Obama is the antichrist. I mean this is serious. I hate even talking about it because it’s almost like we shouldn’t give these people any credibility at all. I don’t know. What’s wrong with people? Obama is a good Christian. People, I think are confused as to what the president actually does and what he has the power to do. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about the nuts. I try to think about that less. I turned myself off on thinking about religion and being wrapped up in it after that last record. But obviously you can’t. I just try not to obsess about it and let it get me down like it used to.

Jason: Totally. For a lot of our members, I’m guessing that “punk” and “garage rock” are going to be relatively new terms. So your first couple of albums were described as low-fi and more recently there’s been a lot of talk of the Thermals pop sensibilities and I wondered how your sound has evolved and what we can expect on the next record.

Hutch: It’s just what you said. It’s pop sensibilities for sure. I think as pop songs, these songs are written the best of all our songs. I think the structures are really solid. They’re really catchy. I’m really proud of the lyrics because again I feel like the lyrics have some gravity to them, but at the same time, they work really well on the surface, if you’re just thinking about it as a pop song or something you can sing along too. There is another layer without being too pretentious about it.

Jason: Do you think “lo-fi” was a term that applied to you at a point in time?

Hutch: We called it “no-fi” for the first record because the first record, you know, was just on cassette. “Lo-fi” would have been an over statement for that record. But we’ve been going through a natural progression since then where we don’t take huge leaps in fidelity, but we try to make each record sound better than the last one. For us to just put out records on a four-track cassette would just be ridiculous.

Jason: So you do a lot of touring internationally, and I wonder, what’s your favorite country to play in?

Hutch: I kind of think it’s got to be Germany. Even before we were getting successful here and in the UK and other countries, Germany and the Netherlands jumped on it right away and we had some of the most exciting shows in Germany. If we’re talking about all countries, it has to be the US. The best shows of our lives have been mostly in the US, either in Portland or Seattle or New York. But we have fun shows everywhere. It’s hard to pick one. We love touring Europe. Touring Europe is a lot more fun than touring the US. You’re treated much better. Hospitality…no matter what your level, you’re just cared for a lot more. And a lot of times it’s easier because the countries are so much smaller, the drives are a lot shorter. I mean in the west [of the US], driving like 9 hours a day with a show every day? That’s crazy.  We just did only UK shows for two weeks. It was beautiful, it was like two hour drives every day. But touring the UK is much more like touring the US. I’m talking about mainland Europe when I’m talking about them feeding you and putting you up, etc.

Jason: Have you picked up any German from your shows there?

Hutch: I know a little bit. I know some short words. It’s a really intense language. I was actually to a German band one time…Because most German bands we play with, they’re all singing in English. And of course they speak English. Their English is better than ours. It’s more grammatically correct. They say “months” instead of “munts.” They say “second” instead of “sekind.” But anyway, I was talking a German man and he was saying that the English language, the thing is you have so many more words to choose from than in German that you can be way more expressive.

Jason: And then the last thing I wanted to ask you, since I think it will be a new word for a lot of our members, is what are thermals and how did you pick that as your band name?

Hutch: The real definition of a thermal is hot air. Like if you’re hang gliding…or birds, will ride a thermal. That’s not why we picked it. But it’s associated with heat, so you say thermal underwear or long Johns. Which to me, that style, people wearing their thermals to rock shows, that’s a really Northwest thing. And we were totally into flannel when Nirvana was big. You’d have black cut off shorts and wear your thermals underneath with boots or whatever. That wasn’t me. I’m thinking more of girls, actually, but it was something I always thought was really cute. So we’re named after underwear. But it works to say that it’s just a lot of hot air.

I just finished putting up a lesson about the election results. Since the cast only meets once a month to record our improvised English lesson dialogs, it had to be taped in advance, and since we didn’t know how the election was going to go, we taped a few versions (although interestingly enough, the English vocab for each was roughly the same).

The first one we did was if McCain won the election. Mason and Marni did a great job of pretending–so great in fact that they kind of scared themselves. “That was really eerie,” Marni said afterward. Keep in mind, these are unedited sound files, and not up the usual Ebaby! standard of quality.

Then we did the one we wound up using, the version for an Obama victory. The acting was really good on this one too. Although it was taped in advance, I think it really captured the mood of the day after the election. People were shooting off fireworks and honking their car horns well into the night in Portland.

After we made the first two lessons, we realized there was a third possibility. Everyone remembers 2000, when the election was a toss-up for a full month. So we recorded another version to be used in the event of another such quagmire. Notice how Marni just randomly decides that it’s Ohio that’s delaying the results. I guess I would have had to edit that out if it were New Mexico.

Thank goodness I knew exactly which sound file I’d be editing today! The thought of going through another month of indecision made me weary.

Have you seen this magazine cover yet? It’s THE story in the US right now. The Obama campaign is very upset about it.

A recent video by Jibjab that takes the exact opposite approach. It shows Obama skipping through a magical forest full of animals and rainbows. It’s funny because his opponents accuse him of being both a villain aligned with terrorists and an unrealistic idealist. It’s funny to look at these two parodies together since they’re both based on actual claims by the media, yet such complete opposites.

As an added bonus, the video includes subtitles throughout the entire thing. It moves so fast that if you’re reading along, you’ll probably have to watch two or three times. Sounds like a good English lesson to me! In fact it fits perfectly with English, baby!’s style of making it fun to practice English. There’s even a new phrase to learn: “no cigar.” It means “no success” or “no luck” but sounds pretty funny coming from certain former president…

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.

We’ve been very interested to see what the international community thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. After years of watching global opinion of the U.S. slide, there seems to be a good amount of optimism for the future.

We ran our first U.S. Presidential election poll back in June of 2007 and saw that 55% of our members favored Hillary Clinton as the next president, with 22% favoring Obama, and 7% favoring Giuliani. The Clinton name is very recognizable around the world and it’s understandable that she would be the favorite among our members.

We posted our second U.S. Presidential election poll in February 2008 and the numbers flipped. We now see 55% of our members in favor of Obama, 35% for Clinton, and 7% for McCain. It seems as though there’s something about Obama’s message that’s resonating with the world.

I had the opportunity to see Obama speak in Portland the other day and was definitely impressed. Even got a nice handshake from the Illinois senator. Clinton is coming through town this weekend and I look forward to watching her as well.

We’re going to keep close tabs on our members’ opinions as the democratic race continues, and then follow the general election. It should be an interesting ride and with the world getting flatter, international opinion matters more than ever.

Check out the Ebaby! lesson about the election.