Hippo Family Club

The Hippo Family Club (ヒッポファミリークラブ) is the brainchild of an organization known as the Institute for Language Experience, Experiment & Exchange, also known as LEX. It was created in 1981 by Yo Sakakibara [ja], who had been researching language acquisition for over 30 years prior to his death. The Hippo Family Club is a transnational network of community-based language clubs in which both children and adults engage in various activities with the purpose of acquiring multiple languages simultaneously. Yo Sakakibara later expanded the organization to the US, Korea, Japan and Mexico. In the United States, the organization is known as LEX America and the language clubs as LEX Language Project.