In a few months, the annual Tokyo Game Show will open.
Every year around this time, Editor-in-Chief Galaxy can't help but grill me on my English learning progress. The reason is that when I first joined the company, I boasted to him that I had exceptional language talent and could easily learn English without any tutoring classes, promising that interviewing at overseas game exhibitions like E3 would be a piece of cake for me.
As a result, five years have passed, E3 is gone, and my English level has roughly remained at the passing grade for the university CET-4 exam, or perhaps even declined. Seeing my colleague Teacher Marvin master an authentic American West Coast accent in recent months under the guidance of Teacher Haixing Guantou, who returned from studying abroad in the US, I realized I needed to step up my learning efforts, or I would become the laughing stock of the entire editorial department. So recently, besides sticking to Duolingo to check in and memorize words with the little green bird, learning English through short videos has become my main route for overtaking on a bend.
What? You ask why I rely on short videos to learn English? Because the popular English teachers you encounter on these platforms nowadays are likely to have this kind of style.
So, let's borrow the famous study committee member and old pervert Dean Chen's words—Foreign languages are good, foreign languages must be learned.
The female teacher appearing in the video, dressed somewhat scantily and teaching English sentences with a mix of 30% teasing and 70% cursing, goes by the Douyin ID "Lois Teaches English (Darkened Version)." She calls herself "Darkened" because Lois, a master's graduate from Beijing Language and Culture University who has served as a private English tutor for foreign company CEOs and a translator for the Syrian Embassy, experienced the absurd rise to fame of "Ten years of teaching unnoticed, one day Fxxking known by all."
Simply put: before her "darkening," Lois was a normal-dressing and decent English teacher in her early videos. Her English foundation was very solid; whether it was the speed of connected speech or the accuracy of word pronunciation, it matched the professional experience mentioned in her introduction. But whether she was doing natural phonics song speed challenges or correcting common dialect accents of Chinese people learning English syllable by syllable, although these early videos were full of useful content, they never made her particularly popular on the platform.
Until one day, perhaps inspired by some expert advice, Lois put on exquisite makeup, wore a form-fitting white shirt, and began teaching more colloquial English phrases in a format that was both eye-catching and down-to-earth.
The reason it catches the eye is that Lois's fashion choices in these videos have become significantly bolder. In addition to her regular seasonal outfit of a white shirt, she changes into various limited-edition seasonal skins based on the lesson content of each video, such as a black tight leather suit, a JK sailor uniform, or lace gloves with a catgirl mask. Combined with randomly adjusted body parameters, she effortlessly hooks Xiao Chunan and the LSPs (perverts) who came for English lessons, leaving them slack-TOO SCARED TO LISTEN.
And it's considered down-to-earth and colloquial because although the original Chinese sentences Lois teaches look normal at first glance, her translations are somewhat overly localized—to put it bluntly, every sentence is filled with American national curses like "Fxxking" and "Shit," turning a proper English class into authentic street gang slang instruction. If you find my description hard to understand, recall the classic dialogue in GTA V where the protagonist Franklin is controlled by his friend Lamar for over ten seconds with excessive use of the N-word; it's pretty much the same feeling.
Of course, to avoid being banned by the platform, Lois's English teaching still maintains a certain level of propriety. The reason she became popular through this method is the huge contrast between her sweet appearance and the hardcore teaching content, which many people found novel and interesting.
For instance, in her first video after the transformation, the sentence taught was "You're wrong." According to standard Google Translate, this should be "You're wrong," but among authentic Americans, you'd say something like "You Fxxking Bullshit," similar to the Chinese expletive "You're talking nonsense"—concise and packed with intimidation.
The reverse is also true. For instance, the common Hollywood profanity "Holy Fxxking Shit" is translated by her as "Wo Le Ge Dou" (an expression of surprise), and with her cute facial expressions, she instantly captivates pure male college students who dislike learning English but struggle to pass CET-4 and CET-6 exams.
In addition to these regular daily phrases, Lois, who has gradually become familiar with the "Adult English" track, also keeps up with current events and trending memes to launch abstract yet practical English tutorials loved by netizens. For example, "So Fxxking What" is the T0 (top tier) internet slang for "So what?" If you use it in online arguments, you not only avoid being mocked for merely repeating others but also appear very international.
In addition, perhaps because Lois always dresses maturely in her videos and says "Fxxk" frequently, the "Wa Xuedi" (Valorant students) who like to call out "Mom" naturally came running at the scent. Whenever Lois says "Good doggy" and "I am your mother" in English in her videos, the Wa Xuedi are always the first to jump into the comments section to respond—one can only say that when it comes to taming dogs, calling mom, and showing off repression, the Wa Xuedi are truly authoritative.
Of course, Zhou Xuedi did it too.
Over time, Lois became popular on video platforms with her constantly upgraded costumes and "No Fxxk, No English" teaching content. Of course, everyone knows that if you really use such learning outcomes to chat with foreigners, you'll probably get beaten up as soon as you open your mouth—so, just take these videos for fun; their practicality as English learning material is indeed low. Moreover, from my observations, this trend of teaching foreign profanity on short videos was not pioneered by Lois. Before her, many foreign bloggers and teaching institutions on Douyin had experience steering English teaching towards "adult-oriented" content.
For example, a black blogger with the ID "Da Baobeir Jiafei" started updating his "Jiafei Teaches English" series last October. Compared to Lois, who only uses "Fxxking" in single sentences to create contrast, this authentic big brother who grew up in American black communities spouts words in every sentence that could be included in an American English profanity collection.
He will tell you with very American pronunciation and wording habits that when greeting people, you should say "What's up nei ge," when complimenting a woman's looks, you should say "fine sexy motherfxxking lady," and when encouraging others, you should say "You go get that shit"—guaranteeing that after learning this, walking on the streets of the USA, you will definitely become the most authentic spirit guy on the West Coast. As for whether you'll get warned at gunpoint by white police officers on the street, that's another matter.
For another example, you can search on platforms for short videos that openly title themselves "Adult English," with covers featuring beautiful older sisters in nurse outfits holding whips. But when captains prepare for takeoff, ready to critically analyze the video content, they discover that the beauties on screen are indeed teaching "Adult English" in a certain sense—meaning English words that only adults care about, such as overtime, KPIs, and taxes. This allows knowledge to enter your brain in an unexpected way, truly tricking LSPs (perverts) into being treated like foreigners.
Besides this, I do recall coming across a type of video that combined suggestive content with English teaching. The general idea was to let viewers watch a close-up shot of the female protagonist acting suggestively, then suddenly freeze the frame on a specific body part to teach you how to pronounce it in English. However, such videos seem to have long been rectified by platforms, and now I can only find records of their existence in old internet news.
Compared to these, I think the works filmed by Lois are far from reaching the level of so-called "erotic English." After all, in this internet era where Everythinggj from playing piano and calligraphy to fashion and cooking relies on suggestive content to gain traffic, merely changing outfits and teaching a few simple foreign profanities to boost account exposure might not be considered particularly indecent.
Moreover, similar foreign language teaching methods are now being adopted by more and more accounts. Some don't feature real people, while others just want to change their approach to get closer to the audience; there's nothing fundamentally wrong with these. However, some accounts, seeing Lois gain traffic, have started copying her video style verbatim and adding even more obvious suggestive elements—this situation might be the most fatal blow to grassroots creators like Lois who rack their brains to come up with new ideas.
But then again, after watching a bunch of short video tutorials on English profanity these past few days, I feel my English communication skills have improved somewhat—after all, profanity is an important part of any language. As long as you aren't afraid of getting beaten up during conversations, they will eventually come in handy.