This has bee buggin’ me lately. Because of that scandal around the infamous self-proclaimed “teacher” and self-made mogul, Li Yan, having slammed his wife’s head into the ground giving her 4 welts the size of plums, I’ve looked into his “crazy” teaching method. One can easily type “Crazy English” in Baidu to get scores of short videos of him ranting in Chinese about the power and confidence his devotees will gain from shouting English, punctuated by a small amount of drilling simple sentences in a barking style. After watching several of these videos I came to the conclusion that his methods are sheer rubbish, and may do more harm than good. Furthermore, I’ve finally come to understand why Chinese people sometimes come up to me and blurt out phrases like, “HELLOHOWRYOUDOING!”

Li Yan’s method is a kind of military style drilling, which he does with a heavy dose of arrogant strutting and posturing. For each vowel sound he has an accompanying hand action, which is loosely related to the TPR (total physical response) method of teaching, though his motions don’t correlate directly with the vowels in the way that, say, making scissor cutting motions with one’s hand while saying “scissors” might help imprint the word “scissors.”

Li Yan will typically have a short sentence, like, “Hello, how are you doing,” and will drill the words individually loudly and in a staccato fashion approximating the sound of a guard dog if one approaches a “no trespassing, guard dog on duty” sign. The vast audience will bark back at him, in some sort of mass-movement-mesmerized-glee. After drilling one word moronically – “How! How! How! How! How!” – he will eventually string all the words together and bark them like an order to “drop your weapon!”

The student’s learning will eventually culminate in shouting out the simple phrase as loudly and quickly as they can. At best one could call this “pronunciation practice,” but it might equally be called “pronunciation handicapping.” English, like any language, has subtle cadences, and isn’t just a sequence of barks, or when they are combined, machine-gun barking. The pathetic result of Li Yan’s teaching is the unfortunate, probably well-meaning Chinese people who approach foreigners and greet us with an aggressive-sounding, “HELLOHOWRYOUDOING?!” They don’t understand why what they’ve learned so well takes us aback while we, stunned, determine how best to answer “hello” and “how are you doing” both at the same time. The logical response is, “HELLOVERYWELLTHANKYOUANDHOWRYOU?!” But that sounds like shit.

And that is about the crux of it. Li Yan is teaching unsuspecting Chinese (with a little gullibility and a pocket full of patriotic fervor) to speak English like shit. The motto of his “school” is, “Conquer English to Make China Stronger.” This pompous-ass attitude leaves people sounding like they’re trying to kill English as they speak it, while simultaneously they can barely utter more than their canned phrases they paid Li Yan so dearly for. What’s worse is after he teaches the barking, he tells them how to “slur” it “like an American,” and he always says “American” or “Mei guo ren” with more than a hint of derision. Slurred barking is to English was diarrhea is to shit, and the final product of Li Yan’s teaching is people sounding like they are trying to accost you and spit a cotton ball or two out of their mouth at the same time.

Among his other motivational clap-trap is that his followers will make more money if they learn English. He starts off one of his bombastic tirades with the sentiment, “The number one reason to learn English is to make money. So let’s learn English so we can make money!” The poor audience didn’t understand the real meaning: “Let’s learn English so I can make money! Ha, ha!”

One of his money-making strategies is to teach his disciples a few stock phrases, have a big celebration about their progress (even though it’s miniscule), and then charge them more money for the next helping.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that his wife-beating was despicable, as was his attestation that he never loved her and only married her as a prop to promote his business legacy, but he may also be single-handedly corrupting English language teaching with his bogus technique more appropriate for brainwashing drones or training parrots than teaching people to communicate intelligently in a second language.

Here are some of the major flaws with his teaching “method”.
1. It only focuses on pronunciation, and in a way that may do more damage than good by instilling bad habits (unless the students plan to migrate to the U.S. and join the military, in which case they will probably be able to follow all the drills.)
2. The students never express themselves in English. Hmm. As if the language were used for something other than just making sounds.
3. The staccato speak-and-repeat method is discredited because natural speech is not robotic. In real interaction with native speakers, they aren’t going to isolate each word with a padding of pauses on each side when they speak, not if they can help it. The preferred method is to speak slowly in a natural voice.
4. There is no element of comprehension involved. Yeah, not only do the students never use English to express themselves, they don’t use it to comprehend what anyone says either.

Lastly, check out the arrogance/ignorance of Li Yan in assuming his way is the only way (he’s said that), and that he can teach English better than native speakers. Imagine an American who created his own “Crazy Chinese” yelling method. Maybe he claps his hands or punches the air while he spits out Chinese monosyllables, then whips it all into a frenzy of shadow boxing and pilates. “NI NI NI NI NI NI” “HAO HAO HAO HAO” “NIHAONICHIFANLEMA!” I think he should incorporate some jumping into it. Jump and say, “HENHAO!” This guy has only been to Hong Kong for a short spell and dipped into Shenzhen on a whirlwind sex-tour of Asia, but he thinks he knows how to speak better Mandarin than the locals. He marries a Chinese woman to give himself legitimacy, and shuttles her around the States, propping her up on stages to make him seem like his Chinese is better than hers. He beats the crap out of her, to keep her in line. He mocks Chinese people’s ability to speak English and then brags about his Chinese. And he’s got a winning slogan, “Conquer Chinese to Make America Stronger.” F’ing ridiculous. No one would buy it. But it sells like baozi in China.

The world needs less Li Yans, and, apparently, more kids who are too shy to yell English at the tops of their lungs outside their dormitories. Confidence is good if it’s appropriate, but confidence and incompetence are a deadly combination (I can think of one fearless leader who embodies this dichotomy perfectly, whose English is actually probably worse than Li Yan's, come to think of it).

Crazy English is just a gimmick. It might help some to dislodge a tenacious globule of phlegm while they greet a foreigner, thus killing two birds with one stone, but perhaps sometimes it’s better to do separate tasks separately. Maybe, in the end, teaching English and getting filthy rich should be pursued separately, and the monomaniacal business moguls should leave the teaching of English to the the po' foreigners who know what their doing, give a shit about their students, and work for a salary for which they'd be considered poor in their own lands. At least the students and the world would be better off. The solution to the problem of the person of Li Yan is similar to the solution to so many other problems, and my personal favorite: a catapult.