Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

Those of you who have seen James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar will know that Na’vi is the constructed language spoken by the fictional indigenous race (the Na’vi) on Pandora. Slates calls Na’vi the new Klingon. Aspiring Pandorans are flocking to learn Na’vi in droves.

The Na’vi language was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at USC with a doctorate in linguistics. Frommer has now launched a website to share the Na’vi language with everyone.

Frommer spent years working on the Na’vi language, eventually teaching it to all of the principal actors who have to speak it, and making recordings for them to listen to on their iPods.

Later, he worked on the set during shooting, coaching actors on pronunciation between takes, and even writing the occasional extra line when Cameron decided a scene needed tweaking.

Frommer recalls a moment during the filming of Avatar: “Jim Cameron and Sam Worthington came up to me and said, ‘We’ve decided that the character Jake is going to be recounting an incident he had where he was bitten in his big blue butt — so how do you say ‘big blue butt?’ … I had ‘big’ and I had ‘blue,’ but I didn’t have ‘butt.’ ”

At last count, there were 165,000 posts by 4,400 people on Frommer’s Learn Na’vi site —passionate Pandorans who spend time translating and discussing Na’vi words, encouraging novices who have never even studied a foreign language.

Whilst we do not wish to discourage the many aspiring Pandorans; instead of spending hours learning the invented language spoken on a fictional alien planet, why not sign up for some Spanish classes at your local language school? It’s a lot easier to get to Chile than to Pandora.

Classes in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese and Korean start 26 April. Fasttrack intensive courses start after Easter. Euroasia is taking enrolments now for courses in Auckland and Christchurch.

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