Today I was asked by one of the big American cable companies (I don’t think I can tell you which one, but you’ve certainly heard of them) to pop along to their Tokyo offices for a chat. I wasn’t quite sure why, but popped along anyway. It turns out they were wanting to ask me about giving a language education slant to their channel. Which quite surprised me as they’re one of the top TV companies in the world!

But anyway, it would be great if companies like this got into the education scene. One of the main reasons that Genki English works so well is that compared to the chalk and talk of most lessons, just adding in the right songs, games and pictures (ones that the kids have chosen, not the teachers of course!) makes it a no brainer for kids to concentrate more on their English lessons. If you had a big media company with armies of professional artists, animators, musicians and researchers just imagine what you could do! Everybody would be fluent and we could all retire.

Unfortunately the education market is usually considered too small for big budget stuff and in the general market you’re not just competing with boring textbooks, you’re competing with everything out there from movies to video games to sports to the latest toys.

But like I mentioned the other week, TV is usually credited with getting kids in Scandinavia fluent by middle school. If you could do something like that here it would be fantastic. I guess you’d either have to remove the local language competition by either something like parental control where they only allow TV for 30 minutes a day unless it’s in English, or just by making the most stunningly brilliant kids channel ever that also happens to be (re)designed to really teach something. Now that would be cool to get involved with!