Ning.
People call you Ning in America, Ning in China,
and Nene in Japan.
I was born in China and spent my primary and secondary years
of education in Japan and moved to the US after college.
So about 10 years ago.
So you are a Chinese, Japanese American.
Yeah.
They call that Chipanese American somewhere.
I love it.
And what's your startup?
My startup is called Native Mind.
And it's a new paradigm in holistic language training.
Explain to us the concept of holistic language training.
It's as 360 immersion, where it teaches learners
how to think, act, behave, talk, and function just
as well as a native speaker in that language.
As you can hear, I have an accent.
And I'm not calling myself a perfect native speaker
of English.
But I can be myself in English language
just as well as I can be myself in Japanese and Chinese.
Which is what a lot of English learning programs, in a word,
cannot do.
Well you know, I feel just the same way.
I, just like you, learned English when I was a teenager.
I have an accent.
Sometimes I make mistakes.
They make people laugh sometimes, and sometimes not.
So I relate to that.
So Ning, imagine I came to your classroom.
How would I be learning English?
So it's a comprehensive method, but I
will give you a fun example.
You will be creating a voice over video of your choice.
We have content ranging from TED talks, YouTube videos,
TV shows, and even animes.
That's really cool, but why is it effective?
Well first of all, they're fun and relevant to you.
Second, you'll notice that creating a perfect voiceover
video is very difficult without soaking in the content.
So you will learn how to talk, how to pause, how to pronounce,
and how to even gesture just as a native speaker of English.
Ning, help us understand your persona.
My persona is my 14-year-old self.
Many years ago, my 14-year-old self was very, very angry
and frustrated at the state of Japanese English and language
system.
Because it was really not giving me any sense of ownership
in terms of learning.
It was boring.
It was gramatically focused.
It didn't really tell me where am I going.
The problem with that is, even then, I
knew that being fluent in English language
will open so many doors for me.
I just didn't want to be like every other woman in Japan.
Where I go to college, find a job,
get married, and raise kids and quit my career altogether.
Now if you look at the 14-year-old Ning,
she is choosing where and how to study English.
What is her top priority?
Well a 14-year-old Ning eventually
would want to express herself in terms
of her experience, her knowledge, her awesome ideas,
and her sense of humor in English,
so that she can be highly functional
and do all the stuff that opens doors for her.
She would want to be herself, right?
Yup.
But when you look at the market, all the players
are focusing on getting high TOEFL scores.
I took classes myself to get my English scores higher,
but that doesn't always translate.
Actually, most the time it doesn't
translate into being able to speak in the language.
That's a disconnect.
You know, having high scores will open doors for you.
But what happens after you walk through the door?
You still have to be the functioning, amazing self
you have always been in your first language.
And nobody else in the market is doing that for the learners.
So the goal is to be yourself in a foreign language.
That's a top priority, right?
Yeah, I believe so.