Hi everyone!

My name is Mike. I'm excited to be a part of English Vitamin! I met Ruriko through a Japanese-English language exchange group, which she started as a way of meeting more friends in the Silicon Valley area. I told her in an email that I worked at a NASA research center and that I was a part time musician, and I wanted to join her conversation group. After meeting Ruriko I actually ended up writing some music, which was used in a few English Vitamin lessons. Everything kind of picked up from there, I started working more and more with Ruriko and now I'm officially part of the company. It's great to be working with English Vitamin because for me, this is an opportunity to combine most of my interests together in a way which I've never done before. We're putting music, technology, and education together to help people learn English, which will help them prosper in their lives and let them connect with people all around the world. It's amazing!

Back when I was in college, I thought that there was one ideal thing that I should be doing which would be the perfect career for me. The only problem was that I could never figure out what this one thing was! It's great to be in a position where you do have a choice about what you want to do in your life, because many people in the world don't have that kind of choice available to them, but with freedom of choice comes the difficulty of knowing what to do with yourself. I've gone through a few stages in my life where I tried doing different types of things. I studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in college and grad school, and held a variety of jobs - I worked in a NASA research lab, as a web programmer but while I was working at all these jobs I always felt that there was something out there that I would feel more attached to, something that I could really work hard at and believe in.

Since I was a kid, making music has always been something I enjoyed, and I've tried to make time for it regardless of what else I was doing. Writing songs was an escape from the regularity of everyday life. In college I started a band with a few friends, and we performed at dorms and different places around the campus. That band broke up when everyone graduated, then I started another when I was in grad school on the west coast. It was kind of funny to think that we were these almost 30-year old guys still behaving like teenagers, hanging out in people's garages and playing music all the time, but it was (and still is!) a lot of fun to make songs and perform them for people. We are called 'Great Teacher' (named after the manga Great Teacher Onizuka) and we perform every few weeks in the San Francisco area. We've even played in Tokyo once, and hopefully we will again soon!

While music is very rewarding for me, there have been times when it's made me frustrated. Sometimes if I'm trying really hard to write a song, the words just don't come out, and it's easy to get frustrated by this kind of writer's block. But what I've come to realize recently is that it's important to focus on the original motivation, which made me want to create music in the first place. It's not just the music itself that I enjoy; it's the potential to connect with people and make their lives better. To me, a song or any piece of creative work is only as good as the good feelings it can bring to others. The opportunity to use my music in English Vitamin lessons is great because it can really help people learn and bring people together. One thing I'm really hoping to do here at English Vitamin is to help create a sense of community for people who are trying to learn English. Language is about communication and connection, and you can hold on to that the fundamental desire to communicate with other people, then nothing can stop you from learning English!

I'm very excited to be working with English Vitamin, I think that we have a lot of cool ideas to implement and I think we can help a lot of people out there who are struggling to learn 'real' English. It's one thing to know the material in a textbook, but an entirely different thing to be able to jump right into a real English-speaking environment and be able to understand and be understood. I know how difficult it is to learn a new language: I've been trying to learn Japanese for a while, and it has really been a challenge. One of the most difficult things for me has been just finding the time and energy that you need to seriously study a language. With a full-time job, your free time is very precious, and it's hard to motivate yourself to study or practice when you get home in the evening and you're exhausted from a long day of work. One of English Vitamin's great ideas is creating lessons that you can listen to at any time, in the little blocks of time you find here and there where you otherwise would have been doing nothing - on the train, in the car, or just taking a short break from whatever you do during the day.

Well, that's all from me - see you later and good luck in everything you do. Ganbatte ne!