John Lott's Website: Bizarre exercise video

6/20/2006

I can't tell whether this is Japanese or Chinese, but while this exercise/English language teaching video starts off benignly trying to teach useful English sayings, it quickly degenerates into painting the US as a violent crime ridden country where the most important phrases to learn are like "Take anything you want," "Spare me my life," and "I was robbed by two men."

8 Comments:

Anonymous said...: I think it's a Jap video...I don't know what the deal is, but it is not unusual to bizarro-world freaksville stuff emerge from the land of the rising sun.

Perhaps consuming LSD would offer some insight? ;-)

At least the chicks were cute...; 6/20/2006 11:16 AM
Rail Claimore said...: It's Japanese. I speak a little and even if I didn't, I'd be able to tell since only the Japanese could come up with something as wacky as this.

And the sad thing is that no matter how creative they get with teaching English, it never works well.; 6/20/2006 11:30 AM
Emilio said...: Its Japanese, I think. Not too sure but Chinese use vertical characters as opposed to horizontal writing of others. Perhaps the video is just a spoof? Even East Asians can have a sense of humor at times!; 6/20/2006 11:30 AM
John Lott said...: I spent 10 days in Japan some time ago and the way that English was used was always quite amusing. Lots of signs were in English, but they usually made no sense: "I feel Coke" or "I Taste Lark." On the back of hotel room doors where they would have information for guests, the write up was often unintentionally quite funny. I think that the word "of" was there favorite word or at least someone had convinced them that every third word should be "of."; 6/20/2006 12:36 PM
Darkside007 said...: Engrish is a fairly common phenomonon, and almost always hilarious.

I don't think it's a joke, but I have a feeling that someone took the lines from somewhere and looked them up after making the video. >_>; 6/20/2006 10:00 PM
Ryan Gill said...: It's definitely Japanese. And it's entirely unintentional if I guess correctly. Engrish is one of those peculiar facets of japanese culture that loves anything American. As a country they're pretty innocent on the grand scheme of things. Of many things to find annoying or insulting, I can't do anything but laugh about this one. It's cute and silly in a typically Japanese way.; 6/21/2006 9:51 AM
Scott said...: Here is another version of the same video, but in this one the dance is interspersed with a little skit of a woman being robbed by two men, then going to the police.

Note, the site contains ads and other content some may find offensive. The Hadji Girl video was number one there for a few days, though.; 6/27/2006 4:28 PM
John Lott said...: Dear Scott:

Thanks very much. I guess that the version I put up was the sanitized version.; 6/27/2006 4:39 PM