Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

In recessionary times, it’s even more important to keep improving and to consider learning a second language. Now is the time to be upskilling to future proof yourself. The ability to speak a second language puts your business or your job prospects one step ahead of the competition. You are also demonstrating to future employers that you have what it takes to stick to something. Employers realise that people who embark on language learning have some key characteristics that are highly valued in such times: commitment and dedication being some key ones.  Part of what makes knowing a language a great skill to have is simply because it’s not that easy for someone to acquire fluency. If it was, it would quickly lose it’s value and won’t be treasured as much.  Some of you would already have mastering a second language set as a 2010 New Year resolution.

How do you ensure you achieve your 2010 New Year resolution? Your goals have to be SMART. The reasons people give for not learning a language include lack of time, the cost involved and the difficulty of the subject area. The good news is you can craft a SMART plan to overcome the obstacles mentioned, to achieve your goal of speaking a foreign language by the end of 2010.

1) Specific

What does “speaking a foreign language” mean? Should your goal be to know enough French in order to survive in a remote town in France without relying on interpreters?

We have a specific learning outcomes for people who enrol for courses at Euroasia. For example, at the end of the Level 1 French course with Euroasia, you should know enough to “get by” in French: you will be able to cope with the most common everyday situations by asking and answering simple questions, and you will be able to understand people when they speak to you about the situations covered.

2) Measurable

How do you know you’re on track with your goal? You need some objective measure of your progress. This is the main reason why self-help language courses don’t work. This is because learning a language is not like studying history. You need constant feedback from experienced teachers who know how to provide constructive suggestions and correct you when you make mistakes. CDs and software programs can’t do that as well as humans. You need to be regularly “tested” either formally or informally so that you know you’re making progress. Language schools follow lesson plans that introduce progression over time. As long as you keep on top of the coursework, you will keep improving.

3) Attainable

Your goals have to be realistic. Sometimes we get calls from people who need to master a language within a matter of weeks because of an impending transfer offshore, or because they have to meet the future-in-laws who don’t speak any English. Learning a language, like everything else, takes time. There are certainly people out there who promise the world, and will tell you that you do not have to put in the hard yards and yet will emerge fluent within a short timeframe, simply by spending an hour a week listening to CDs or playing some games on your laptop or iphone. This is obviously appealing, in the same way that expensive infomercial weight-loss programmes are. The real secret to learning a language (and weight loss, saving money etc) is having a realistic plan and keeping to it. At Euroasia, we follow a language learning programme that allows people to realistically gain fluency over time.  If we did have magic pills that make clients instantly fluent in Spanish, we would be selling them at a thousand-a-pop and not bother investing so much money in establishing and running a school.

4) Relevant

Why are you wanting to learn a foreign language? If you’re just wanting to learn Italian for fun so that you can order a beer and have a simple chat with hot locals  as you roam around Rome, then your goal should be to complete Level 1 or Level 2 with Euroasia.  A Level 1 course can be completed within 2 weeks, 5 weeks or 10 weeks, depending on how intense you want it to be.  If on the other hand, you wish to conduct business negotiations with your suppliers in China, then a Level 1 course is not sufficient, and realistically it would take a year or two to get a point where you can engage in everyday conversation, comparing your life in New Zealand with other people’s lives overseas; discussing matters of interest, including politics and economics. The more solid your reason for learning a language, the longer the staying power. Visualise your end-goal. When the going gets tough, keep reminding yourself of how it feels to be able to ultimately converse freely with locals. What would also help is if you have career-oriented language goals such as planning to gain a foreign language qualification. If your goal is to pass a formal certification exam like DELE (Spanish), DELF (French) or HSK (Chinese), then you are also more likely to have stronger motivation.

5) Time-bound

What’s your plan in order to achieve your goal? Where do you want to be in 3 months? 6 months? An ineffective resolution is “I will be rich someday”. An effective resolution is “I will save $20K by December 2010″.  You then break this down further into quarterly and monthly targets. In the same way, you would set targets for yourself in learning a language. You may wish to complete the Euroasia Gold Package (4 courses) by the end of 2010.

We wish you all the best in setting SMART goals for 2010!

The UK will be held back as it seeks to emerge from recession unless it boosts the number of language graduates, campaigners say. From BBC this week:

The National Centre for Languages (Cilt) points to a worrying decline in the take-up of modern languages.

Cilt chief executive Kathryn Board said: “English is one of the great global languages but it will only take us so far. Our engagement with the non-English speaking world will remain superficial and one-sided unless we develop our capacity in other languages.”

Recent research from Cardiff Business School suggests improving languages could add an extra £21bn to the UK economy and that export businesses that use language skills boost their sales by 45%.

That’s not surprising,  simply because foreign-language capable staff make a big difference in terms of engagement with clients. At the moment, many Kiwi firms use amateur translators (friends and family or Google Translate) to process enquiries and then respond to clients. This is tedious and messages can get lost in translation. Worse still, many NZ companies do not even bother translating documents in dealing with foreign language speaking customers.  The expectation is that the buyer will deal with us in English.

Much has been said of New Zealand’s increasing trade engagement with China, especially since the signing of the FTA last year. But the reality is much of our trade with China involves NZ importing Chinese-made goods.  In terms of our exports to China, I wonder how much we really sell once we strip out the contribution of Fonterra (dairy products), Fletcher and Carter Holt (wood products). Partly our dismal performance in terms of exports offshore is due to our inability to service foreign-language speaking customers.

The reason English is so dominant globally as the language of trade  is partly because traders have always learnt the language of the paying customers.  Our arrogant attitude in assuming everyone speaks English has been tolerated when NZ firms are the customers (which is most of the time looking at our current account deficit). If on the other hand, we are selling to overseas customers, the onus is on us to speak the language of the customer. Failure to do so could result in us losing the deal to those who can. The scary (or exciting?) thing for New Zealand is that we are becoming far less dependent on our traditional English-speaking markets and more dependent on other foreign-language speaking markets.

The English are getting very worried because of the dramatic decline in the number of students taking up foreign languages at school. In 1997, 71% of England’s GCSE pupils (roughly NCEA Level 1 or School Certificate in NZ) took a foreign language, last year the rate was down to 44%. The equivalent rate in NZ is about 14% (8400 taking international languages out of approx 60K Year 11 students).

Cilt’s director of communications Teresa Tinsley said: “We are going to be held back as a nation as we seek to emerge from the economic downturn or recession.

“Companies are looking to recruit people with language skills and if they can’t find them amongst our home-grown graduates they will obviously bring in people from other countries to fill these gaps.

“We really need to buck up our ideas or we are going to be stuck in a mono-lingual world when everybody else is taking global opportunities.”

If the English believe they will be “held back” as a nation because “only” 44% of their kids learn a foreign language at high school, what about NZ where only 14% of our Form 5 kids do? There is simply no way we can be a serious player in world trade when we cannot even communicate at the most basic level with our customers. We are not even at first base.

Apparently just a third of students going into secondary school are numerate. As rightly pointed out by University of Auckland maths lecturer Peter Hughes in today’s Herald, the problem we have is that “it had become acceptable to admit failure at high school mathematics as simply not being good at the subject”.

In fact, in my experience, some people wear this as a badge of pride. Some people say that they are bad at maths, but it’s ok, they will just do law, or social science or other disciplines that do not require maths.  I don’t believe that we should put science and maths on a pedestal as objects (subjects?) of worship at the expense of a well-rounded education. For example, learning foreign languages would most certainly enhance your quality of life. But the fact  remains that living well requires numeracy skills.

Students entering secondary school should be able to answer the questions here, according to Hughes. I just took this test and had to sweat a little to figure out the answers. This test reminds me of the one I took the last time I applied for a job. I reckon a lot of people out there won’t be able to do this within 5 minutes.

Use your brain (and not a calculator) to tackle these sums and see if your numeracy sizes up.

1: 69.9 x 60.08 is closest to:
A 4000
B 4200
C 4400
D 4600

2: The cost of 0.267kg of cheese is $7.95. Which calculation is needed to find the cost of 1kg of cheese?
A 7.95 ÷ 0.267
B 0.267 + 7.95
C 0.267 x 7.95
D 7.95 – 0.267

3: 79.8 ÷ 0.092 is closest to:
A 80
B 800
C 8000
D 80,000

4: Which has the largest answer? (Don’t do any calculations)
A 218 x 217
B 216 x 218
C 217 x 219
D 216 x 217

5: The percentage profit of $500,909 on sales of $1,998,976 is nearest to:
A 10%
B 15%
C 20%
D 25%

Scroll down for answers

V

V

V

V

V

1B, 2A, 3B, 4C, 5D

How did you do?

Cactus Kate, a well known (and some say controversial) blogger, posted a blog entry today entitled How About Some of that $400 million For This?

Hot on the news that Maori language is deemed PC enough to support to the tune of $400 million, I was alerted to International Languages Week from Sunday 16th August to Saturday 22nd August. Here is the blurb from organisers who contacted me.

Yes, that would be me.

International Languages Week 2009 will take place from Sunday 16 August to Saturday 22 August 2009. The week is an opportunity for all New Zealanders to celebrate cultural and language diversity and to encourage the learning of international languages in New Zealand. Language teachers from around the country will be organising school-based activities and celebrations from the Far North to the Deep South.

This is a great initiative that Euroasia is very supportive of (for obvious reasons).  The problem is teachers around the country are working hard at this but get no recognition because the international languages sector do not have government-funded multi-million dollar budgets to publicise the benefits of learning foreign languages.

Learning Maori does not make New Zealand internationally competitive. Unless you plan on being a Maori trougher, it does not make you any more money.

Learning international languages allows New Zealanders to travel and make pot loads of money.

So I am all for it and perhaps now is the time to re-distribute the $400 mill wasted on Maori into activities such as this one.

Cactus Kate has a very strong position on learning international languages vs Maori. There is clearly a problem when the Chairman of the Maori Language Commission says the $400m spent annually on Maori language is inefficient. Personally I would be happy to see Maori language promoted together with – not at the expense of- international languages. At a time when New Zealand is becoming more culturally diverse and needing to engage more with the world, we are seeing fewer high schools compared to 5 years ago offering the key languages spoken by our major trading partners and local communities. This is a sad indictment of the situation we’re in.

As a start, wouldn’t it be awesome if all New Zealanders decided to use a greeting in a different language each day over the course of next week:

Monday 17 August – Ni hao!
Tuesday 18 August – Bonjour!
Wednesday 19 August – Guten Tag!
Thursday 20 August – Konnichiwa!
Friday 21 August – Buenos días!

More info:

• The official International Languages Week website.
• The Google Discussion group on ILW
• The Facebook  ILW group

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.

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.