Monday, September 13, 2010

Picking up girls with elementary English

Okay….where to start with this one? First of all, I must put out a slight warning. The video that follows is inappropriate for younger children in at least one part. I’m not sure if anyone with younger children is even reading my blog (from the comments it seems to be mostly my college friends) but I figure I should put up the warning just in case. I really don’t mean to scandalize anyone. With that out of the way…

About a year and a half ago, Japan made elementary English lessons mandatory for fifth and sixth graders and introduced new textbooks for them called Eigo Noto. We have been mocking the CD that comes with these books ever since. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things I actually like about Eigo Noto (although some will disagree with me), but the CD has some really weird intonations and accents at times. I like the idea of exposing the kids to different types of English and different accents, but this CD does less of that than exposing them to ridiculous sounding English.

Anyway, someone took the audio parts from the CDs, mixed them all around, and cut them together with visuals to make a video on how to pick up women. EVERYTHING that is said in this video (aside from the infomercial like opening and closing) is from the textbooks, although many are removed from context to allow for humorous reinterpretation. The video won first place at a Film Festival and is pretty well put together.  Again this is NOT what I am teaching my elementary school kids but an adult instruction video made from the same materials.  Enjoy.



I honestly don’t know how I’m going to get through some of these lessons now without bursting out laughing. And honestly, if there was a slightly edited version of this I would show it to my junior high boys and they might actually think English was worth studying!

1 comment:

  1. That's awesome. But you know, it's really no worse than the CDs that they tried to teach us Spanish and French with in high school here in the US. Apparently, to teach you a new language, most publishers think you need to sound like an idiot first.

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