Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

I was at the World Cafe event last night, where social entrepreneur Ray Avery of Medicine Mondiale spoke. This guy managed to bring down the cost of cataract surgery from $5K per eye here in Auckland to $6 per eye in Africa. He also discovered some way of mixing waste products from chicken and kiwifruit farms and created protein extracts for kids. Amazing. Ray is working on a number of projects that will revolutionise the medical arena. Ray demonstrated to us that what is lacking is not money, but bright ideas and perseverence. His products were borne out of necessity.

We have such talent living here, and I’ve not heard of him prior to the event. I’m embarassed. More needs to be done to get these success stories out there. Well done Asia NZ Foundation and AkCity for organising this awesome event.

Our discussions afterwards focussed very much on cultural diversity in Auckland, and how leaders can harness cultural diversity.

At Euroasia, we believe one way we can better understand people who are different from us is to learn their language. As it happens, Euroasia is putting on some free taster lessons next week. Feel free to tell your friends.

Tuesday 7 July: French, Japanese, German
Thursday 9 July: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Italian
Time: 7.40-8.40pm
Venue: Euroasia, 10 Titoki Street, Parnell (next to Birthcare) – plenty of parking at Auckland Domain or along Titoki Street.
No prior knowledge necessary.

Register online for free lessons.

In the latest Euroasia newsletter we share some exciting news for existing clients.

More news:

• Offer extended- Participate in a refresher course for free
• Find out how to learn and remember vocabulary more effectively
• Spain signs working holiday agreement with NZ
• Banana Conference coming up next month

If you’ve tried a language in the past and are interested in another, maybe this is the time to give it a go! We are running free taster courses in a few weeks. Feel free to invite your friends. Mark these dates:

7.40-8.40pm, Tuesday 7 July: French, Japanese, German

7.40-8.40pm, Thursday 9 July: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Italian

More details within.

Please do get in touch if you have any thoughts or comments. You can reply to this email or call us anytime on 0800 EUROASIA.

Remember, winter is the best time to be learning a language!

Stay positive, and keep your mind active.

The team at Euroasia

One of the most difficult tasks for new language students is to figure out how to remember new vocabulary. It can be pretty challenging remembering new words in your native language, let alone new words in a foreign language. In this article, my friend Stephen Bayldon, veteran educator and ex-principal of a language school in Auckland, shares some of his views on how to remember what you learn. Here are some very useful tips for language learners.

His latest thoughts reproduced here:

I find memorising information long term a real challenge. This is certainly true for many of us learning a language. Often as fast as we can learn new words we forget the earlier ones! Or only the most common words which come up frequently enter our long term memory.

Of course practice makes perfect – repetition is the key; but who has time to go through thousands of flashcards regularly? Recently I read an article in Scientific American Mind magazine about an eccentric Polish professor named Piotr Wozniak who’s spend his life working on this problem. He now memorises thousands of facts every week.

Timing is the second key. If you practice too soon you waste your time. (You need time to work on reading, listening and speaking). Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Obvious but useless information! Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. But which are they? Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget ‘exponentially’ as shown in the picture. Of course there are individual differences. So how can we organise the cards perfectly? Manually it’s impossible, but Wozniak’s realised it could be done with interactive computer software.

I found his difficult to use (at least the free version). After some frustrating surfing I found one which is free and easy to download and to use: www.ichi2.net/anki

You can make your own ‘cards’. When a question comes up you click a tab, according to how difficult you found it to remember the answer. The programme then combines that information plus the number of previous repetitions. The next review date is scheduled accordingly – beautiful!

Of course there are other useful tips for learning vocabulary faster:

* Connect new information with something you already know about.You can put example sentences plus info on usage, collocation, pronunciation etc in your “anki” entries.

* Make the connection memorable – funny, personal, sexy, emotional…etc AND including different senses. Eg the Japanese for apple is ringo – so I picture an “Adam and Eve ” scene in which I bite into a sweet smelling, crunchy and delicious apple from my Japanese Eve, only for my teeth to hit a ring that goes around it…

* For more abstract words and topics, you can connect a lot of words together on one topic using mind maps; so they are organised in the same way as the human brain – eg use http://www.bubbl.us/ (free online tool). Then try to read, listen, write and talk to yourself and others about the topic.

* Read, read, read! Anything that you are interested in (see above). Find readers at a level where you know about 80% of the words; then guess the rest. There will be many words in your own language you don’t know. Good language learners are relaxed about uncertainty.

Economist: China vs US capital spend

The Economist this week reported China’s fixed-asset investment leapt by an astonishing 39% in the year to May, or by a record 49% in real terms.

This year China’s domestic investment in dollar terms is likely to exceed that in America (see chart).

There are concerns that a lot of the investment is directed by the Chinese government, and hence a lot of it would be wasted in pushing out overcapacity.

Investment amounted to 44% of GDP last year (compared with 18% in America), which many economists reckon was already too much. Worse still, as well as forcing state firms to invest, the government is directing state-owned banks to lend more, despite falling corporate profits.

The fastest expansion in spending has been in railways (up by 111% this year). As a developing country, China still lacks decent infrastructure; railways, in particular, have long been an economic bottleneck. Investment in roads, the power grid and water should also yield high long-term returns by allowing China to sustain rapid growth.

Further evidence that increasingly New Zealand will be engaging more with China as reliance on our traditional Western markets wane. The Americans will struggle with maintaining market dominance, and the developing economies will no doubt emerge stronger as a result of this recession.

If you’re like me, you would be thinking why the heck would people stand in line to pay $500 to some scammers in return for automatic approval of New Zealand residency.

Apparently, the story is that some guy has been going around the country selling visa stamps like how people peddle club memberships.

You stand in line with $500 cash in hand. You pay $500 and they stamp your passport, and voila, you’re now Maori, and hence granted automatic permanent residency.  It’s open to all applicants, as long as you have 500 bucks cash to fork out.

Hundreds of people turned up at a marae in Mangere last night. And a thousand the night prior at Manurewa. The people scammed are mostly desperate Islanders eager to get residency.

It’s shameful that often the most vulnerable members of society get scammed. Usually the most vulnerable ones are also the most guillible. You might be thinking this only happens to dumb people.  But just because you went to university and hold a respectable job doesn’t mean you’re immune to scams.  I came across another story recently, where a Kiwi businesswoman gave away $680,000 in 10 weeks  to some fraudster who claimed to be an American-born geologist who lived in New Zealand but was overseas on business. They met on some internet dating site, and he professed his love. He managed to get her to send progressively larger amounts before the scam unravelled. Obviously she’s not dumb if she has $680K cash to send overseas.

The point is we need to have some level of empathy with what people are going through.  In the meantime, I’ll be warning desperate immigrants that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

No matter how good we are at foreign languages, the fact remains that a lot of the time we will be communicating with non-native speakers of English – in English! We may find ourselves using English with non-native speakers in business meetings, either at home or overseas, writing emails or publicity materials intended for them, or simply working and living alongside them. But how much thought do we give to our use of English? Are we using our own language as clearly and succinctly as we can? And if we are not, what impact does that have on our business or professional lives, or even our personal lives?

Some difficult issues that perhaps too many native English speakers don’t pay much attention too. At Euroasia, we’ve been contemplating these issues, and Peter has been working on some exciting initiatives in this area.

Vancouver

Economist Intelligence Unit just announced their list of most liveable cities in the world.  Vancouver came out tops. The City of Sails was ranked the 12th best city to live in. Wellington is ranked 23rd. This is a poor showing for Auckland compared to the April 09 announcement by Mercer that Auckland is the 4th most liveable city in the world. According to Wikipedia, the EIU and Mercer surveys are the most authoritative surveys of liveable cities.

When Mercer announced the list of most liveable cities for 2009, the Aussie paper Daily Telegraph headline was “Auckland beats out Sydney in Worldwide Quality of Living Survey“. If there is one thing the Aussies hate more than losing, it’s getting beaten by the Kiwis.  Anyway, the latest survey from EIU released this week will surely make the Aussies happy.  Their 3 major cities, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth all rank within the top 10 list.

These most liveable city surveys look at factors like stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, infrastructure etc in deciding the rankings.

I think most people choose to emigrate to New Zealand because of one or both of these reasons:

1) Clean and green environment, generally safe ie. great quality of life

2) Children’s education

Auckland

As more and more people get burned out living in the larger European and Asian cities, I’m sure the appeal of New Zealand will only increase. Most migrants end up in Auckland, largely because it’s a good compromise. Auckland may be the big smoke in a South Pacific context, but not really if compared to the major European and Asian cities.  1.4m is approximately the population of an average Shanghai suburb.

Living in Auckland is about getting the best of both worlds.  Easy access to some of the most beautiful spots in the world, reasonable climate, and generally good quality of life. These reasons will surely keep people coming.

Immigration policy should focus on facilitating easy access for skilled migrants. We also need to define skills pretty widely. Smart people may not have university degrees. In fact the majority of the self-made billionaires on the Fortune Magazine Rich List don’t either. Current immigration policy makes it difficult for people who may not be well qualified but could add a lot of value to New Zealand to be granted residency.

EIU’s list of most liveable cities in the world 2009:

Auckland ranked 12th

“One needs to work with what you’ve got and advocate strongly for what you need, but if all your energy is taken up in advocating for what you need, you might not get the best done with what you have.”

This was the response of Dr Lester Levy to a question on whether he was worried by the fact he’s taking over as Chairman of the troubled Waitemata District Health Board.  According to the NZ Herald, Dr Levy takes over tomorrow from Kay McKelvie, who, when she resigned in February, said the Ministry of Health had returned to its practice of not giving Waitemata its fair share of taxpayers’ money. She predicted a $35 million deficit would arise from under-funding for population growth and for buying complex health-care for Waitemata patients from the Auckland health board.

OK, most people would find this job too tough, but not Dr Levy. He’s putting his money where his mouth is, by taking up a pretty challenging job. I’m sure it will take all that he can muster in terms of leadership ability. For the last few years, Dr Levy has been adjunct professor of leadership at Auckland University’s business school.

I’ve had the privelege of attending a number of his leadership sessions, and I must say this guy is pretty good. Very inspiring speaker, and great story teller, and in so doing transforms leadership theory into practical insights.

He will now have to muster everything he knows and has been teaching about leadership, putting it in practice. All eyes will be on him, and somehow I suspect it’s the seemingly insurmountable challenges that have driven him to say yes to this job that no one wants.  He probably gets paid a lot more doing relatively safer jobs, speaking at the odd event, providing consulting services and holding directorships at organisations that undergo less public scrutiny. But true leaders don’t stop at that. They can’t help themselves but strive for more. It’s when complacency sets in that you stop becoming great. As Jim Collins puts it, “good is the enemy of great”.

Hence regardless of whether Dr Levy succeeds at turning the health board around, he has demonstrated what it really means to be a leader.