In this Earth Mate Talk, Randy is asking Mike about how he started working with English Vitamin.
- Randy: : Hey Mike, how are you doing?
- Mike: I'm pretty good, how are you?
- R: Good. So how did you find out about English Vitamin and what do you do there?
- M: I found out about English Vitamin because I met Ruriko-san at her Japanese-English exchange group that she holds once every two weeks. I went there and we just started talking about her company, and I told her that I was a musician and I played in a band locally, and so we decided to work together. We were going to make some English lessons that used music to teach people about English. The first lesson that we made was about the word 'at', so I made a song, basically I just looked up all the different uses of the word 'at' in the English language, and I tried to make a song that used all those different meanings. And then from there we used the words of the song to make an English lesson.
- R: Ok.
- M: Yeah, and that's how I started working with Ruriko, and English Vitamin.
- R: So, do you have other musical aspirations, or is it mostly around education?
- M: Um, I guess I wasn't really expecting education to be a part of it until recently. I've been interested in music for a long time because, actually, my father works in music, he's a professional composer, and he writes music for commercials and a few independent movies also. And so, I've always been around music. And even though my current, my regular job is an engineer, I still do music in my spare time, and hopefully I might be able to do it, you know, more professionally.
- R: So I think English Vitamin's a great idea because it lets people take lessons with them on a portable basis, you know, wherever they go. How do you think music's going to play a part in propagating that a little bit more across the world?
- M: Well, I think music is something that anyone can relate to, people of many different cultures, and almost everybody, almost everyone has some type of music that they enjoy, so I think that you can use that fact to really help people learn about English, or you know, about other cultures or other languages because music is a common factor between everybody, and so we're really just trying to tap into that, use that to, you know, to teach people a little bit about English.
- R: Alright, it was very nice talking to you Mike, and thanks for your time.
- M: Thanks a lot, talk to you later.