Show 150 Saturday 30 September

Watch today’s show at YouTube or grouper.

Today is the 150th show!

Thank you so much to everyone for watching. Thank you to everyone who has sent messages and left comments. I haven’t gotten around to replying to most of them – but I really appreciate all the support and the constructive criticism.

Today I decided to lip-sync to a video clip from the Fuji TV show Zuiikin English.

My lip-syncing is completely out of time – hopefully this adds to the charm : )

I didn’t actually do it while listening to the music… my boyfriend was holding the camera and was embarrased enough about the whole thing as it was – he might have refused if I bought music along!

I think the original clip is hilarious, so I thought it would be a bit of fun.

But I also think that this is a pretty good idea for teaching English. I think if you spend 5 minutes watching a ridiculous video clip of some women doing silly aerobics moves while chanting English you’re much more likely to remember the phrases than if you were to spend the same 5 minutes doing exercises from a textbook.

Of course it would be more useful if they were teaching more relevant phrases. How likely is it that anyone will ever need to say: “spare me my life?”

By the way, this video that I’m lip-syncing to is kind of a review lesson – which makes it seem even stranger. When I first watched it I thought “WTF?! did they just choose completely random sentences?”. But actually they are part of short skits and when you see the longer programs it makes more sense. But still… they definately could’ve chosen more useful phrases to teach.