I’m writing this on New Years Day, so “Happy New Year”! Now it’s time to look back on 2004 and see what’s in store for 2005…

Well the big plan for 2004 was to launch DVDs of all the Genki English themes. But what a flop! I figured a “virtual” version of my lessons would be great for the many Japanese teachers who just need a bit of a confidence boost, they simply pop on the DVD and everything is cool. Unfortunately what I didn’t figure on was that the teachers who aren’t confident about English also have a strong aversion to technology and the idea of of a DVD seemed to terrify just about everybody! So that was a total and utter miss! It looks like I need to keep the technology simple, which also rules out song downloads for the moment. : (

But at about the same time the “How are you?” song was picked up by Fuji Television for their new TV series. And that was a very big show that was a big surprise, and having the songs used by Koyuki was the icing on the cake. That brought a whole load of success and fame to the site, which luckily allowed me to spend less time on the road and to spend the first 5 months of the year perfecting the Phonics CD. That is something I’d had the idea for ages, but actually getting it done was a big task! U2 take a few years to make a new album, but for this CD I had to not only write and record the 10 songs, but I had to develop the whole format of “Genki Phonics”. But once that was released in June it was a huge success. Especially Japanese parents really, really took it to heart and were overjoyed with it, which was nice.

The success of that allowed me to spend nearly the whole Summer doing volunteer workshops for hundreds and hundreds of teachers at dozens of schools. During the Summer Vacation I was doing 6 hours of workshops everyday. And that was probably the most rewarding part of the year as I got to sit down with the teachers and actually listen to what problems they need help with. Most of the time it was just a case of pointing them to the right pages on the site, or the software on the CDs ( almost guaranteed to make a group of Japanese teachers smile), and it also led me into looking at new features for the site, and the new Classroom English CD.

Then in the Autumn time I spent a lot of time preparing new materials, and also doing more volunteer work, in October and November I did volunteer English lessons to over 3,000 kids!!

So overall a pretty good year. The bad point? Well the single biggest threat of the year has been SPAM!! This went from a mild annoyance last year to a stupidly huge problem this year. Not only having my personal email system overloaded ( at one point I had over 6,000 a day ), which cost money for extra bandwidth and knocked at least an hour from my work day every day, but also the Owners Club, Discussion Board and Order Systems were also regularly hit. If it wasn’t for spam you would have loads of extra songs, downloads and games on the site! But I guess we have to take the rough with the smooth. Since I started Genki English in 1999, all the work I’ve done on the site has been to bring you new features or make things easier to use. For most of this year that effort was spent plugging security holes!

But 2005 looks very promising. For starters there is the new Classroom English CD which will be out in a couple of weeks. The biggest problem that people had when I first started the site was a lack of game ideas, then it was the lack of a curriculum, now the biggest problem I hear about is the communication gap between non-Japanese and non-English speaking teachers. And hopefully this new CD will bridge this gap. It’s a 5 minute a day crash course in the English teachers will have to use in class and lesson planning. It’s been very heavily requested by teachers, so hopefully this will help as much as the rest of the materials on the site.

CD 5 ( and even CD 6!) are also well on the way, well at least they are all written in my head! The places where I’ve tested them this year have given me some great feedback, so all I have to do now is arrange and record them. That’s not quite as easy as it sounds, but now I have a great new music system on my laptop it certainly looks doable! Plus there is the next Phonics CD and also a CD for adults to learn English. And maybe those songs will spill over to the GenkiJapan.net site, where I’ve been toying with the idea of making songs for learners of Japanese.

So that’s what I’ll be working on in Europe over the next couple of months. And as I won’t be travelling around and will basically have a pretty boring life I won’t be updating the diary, but it will be back from March!

And once all the CDs are done I can start looking again at the big picture. Because after all the reason I do this is to help make all subjects all over the world fun for all kids to learn. The GenkiMaths site this year has worked out great, with some fantastic teachers from all over the World, but the best comments are from teachers in developing countries who say how their students have started paying attention in class because they used these ideas. Now that’s cool, and that’s what it’s all about. With all your support and by using the power of the internet, we are all making a huge difference for hundreds of thousands of kids.

In the UK at the moment there is a huge feeling that something special could happen in 2005. With the reaction people have been giving to the Asian Tsunami, and the UK being the president of the EU and G8, there is a real feeling here that the idea of eliminating poverty and promoting development around the world is a real possibility. And education is a huge part of that. The ideas you’ve been piloting in Japan and elsewhere for teaching English can easily be applied to any other subjects, and most teaching situations. And as they are simply ideas of games and songs, not actual things, they can easily be spread to any teachers in any country.

So 2005 could be exciting indeed, and I wish you all the best for the coming year!

Be genki,

Richard