Ebaby! Blog

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.