English with Obama

In Japan there is a huge market for English training. Most want to learn English, most have tried it for years already - with very little success. I had a good laugh recently when I saw one of the social ads on Facebook advertising an English learning method with the label "developed in Japan". C`mon guys, "Made in Japan" is a quality label for many goods. But English training isn`t cars or electronics or healthy food or fashion, it`s something that Japan has hardly any competency in. Everyone learns English for 8-10 years and the only people who speak decent English worthy the name, are those who spent time abroad. I reasonably judge Japanese English teaching methods to be some of the most inefficient on the planet. Yes, English is difficult to learn for Japanese, but so is Japanese for me and I`d be ashamed if after 8-10 years of Japanese classes I wasn`t pretty, pretty fluent in it.
Now the latest craze in the English training market is "Learning English with Obama". The booksstores` foreign language section heavily advertise books and CD ROMs that teach you English through Obama speeches. So what they did was pretty much burning Barack Obama`s campaign speeches and of course the inauguration speech on CD, print fancy looking booklets with the text in written, an English-Japanese vocab section and a pretty Obama picture on the cover and sell it in countless educationally valuable volumes. My favourite is probably the "inauguration speeches over time". It brings the office freshman`s thoughts of Obama and another couple of former US presidents closer to the Japanese learners` community, back to the Gettysburg Address. I am SO looking forward to seeing what kind of English skills this new method will result in... But at least the Japanese are as always fashionable with the Obama mania.