English language has always been a passion for me in terms of its beauty, depth, sounds, accents and etc. I’ve also been privileged to read some wonderful works in English language and still want to go ahead in that direction very often. This passion burst out into a huge flame when I had a chance to hear the native speakers speaking the language so effortlessly and fluently imparting it a charm on it that left me dazed.With such a good quality of English with the so natural accents, pronounciations, modulations, I fell in love with the pure language again.

Of course in India, we seldom get to hear such wonderful English ( even if the speaker is only speaking small and simple sentences) and there is always an overdose of Indianized English – Hinglish, Tanglish and etc.. I know for sure that non-native speakers of English like Indians can never even come near the natives and that makes hearing such a language even more wonderfully attractive. Of course, Indians can talk and write correct and good English with our own distinct flavour, but still English at its purest is the very best.

P.S.: I was so charmed by hearing to the speaker that I didn’t even realize that the function in the auditorium was over and he was asking me to leave!

I was offered, and, I accepted a job at a technical high school (thereafter known as ‘Semi-conductor High school’). Teaching two hours every Thursday for 50k an hour. It would mean about a 45 minute trip, all-up just to get there.

“How long do they want me?” was my question. A polite shrug from my KET was the response. If the new guy coming in is too green, and if they like me… well it’s mine for as long as I please. Teaching in the countryside lends to a very workman like regime.

The type of insurgent, I’ve dealt with before, and with the promise of a KATUSA at my side, I began to turn over possible lesson plans in my mind.

Sent on a teachers’ workshop for two days. Unwilling I might add but not under protest. The first part was actually watching an open class and giving feedback.

Some people (the Native speakers) were easy to talk to, and some of whom I could make friends of, and some of them I took an instant dislike to.  The resort we all stayed at had no beds, just floor bedding. It’s traditional you know.  With all of these get-togethers there’s always drinking involved. Cut to 2am. Some one had too much to drink, had forgotten where his room was and was noisily trying to find his room, with a sober friend in tow. What an idiot this guy was. Handle your liquor better next time, bud.

Tired and increasingly irritable at my colleagues, I passed on learning an instrument, instead preferring to pass out on the floor to get a nap. I wasn’t the only one who showed bold-face disinterest.

I’ve been very fortunate to recently receive French Language training at the expense of  my employer.   As many of you know, because of the official bilingualism policy, fluency in French is crucial to career advancement within the public service sector. I happen to really like school, learning, and new challenges. I even have a slight aptitude for language acquisition so I am very pleased that I have been given this opportunity to improve my French.

Our instructor is very competent and knowledgeable about the rules of French grammar and the common mistakes that Anglophones tend to make. Similarly, my fellow class mates are also highly motivated. In fact, for some their livelihood literally depends on their success in this course. If they are unable to meet a certain level of fluency their jobs could potentially be in jeopardy.  I can only imagine the stress and pressure of that situation. Because I am on contract, I do not have this additional burden resting on my shoulders. Yet so far I am finding it mildly frustrating, which is leading me to question the pedagogy behind language classes in general.

Every language class I have ever taken from Spanish, to Korean, to French I have felt a similar degree of frustration. This is completely different from my experiences conversing with native speakers of a foreign language where I felt real connections were made.

In a classroom environment the focus tends to be on rules of grammar, exercises to practice these rules, scenarios to practice speaking, and then repetition. There is always a little “free flowing conversation” but this is in the minority.

I find it takes awhile for the brain (mine in particular) to get warmed up to thinking in another language. It takes me 30 minutes of conversation to make the switch and at that point I need to speak for a sustained period of time in order to benefit. A class room setting is very much a stop start process. In an hour and a half session about fifteen minutes of speaking (on a good day) is the most I can get up to in a class room setting, which is no where near optimal.

The same is true of reading and writing practice. These exercises tend to be fill in the blank or brief passages, or quick question and answers. That quite simply does not give the student enough time to immerse themselves in the new tongue. The student also has no personal stake in the process. It is not their questions, or sentences they are examining but those of the textbook.  If I am feeling frustrated in this environment, I can only imagine the suffering that those without an aptitude for language are undergoing.

Language classes should instead be about making real connections through the new language with your class mates, instructor, and native speakers outside of the class room. The rules of grammar cannot be ignored but they should be undertaken as a means to improve these connections through more effective communication.  It is the emphasis on real connections and real communication rather than breaking language down into abstractions of rules, conjugations, and artificial scenarios that is key to what I see as a necessary shift in the way languages are taught. We are social creatures and we learned our first language from our peer group so that we could communicate with them and make connections. Why do we treat second and third languages any differently?

It’s difficult to learn another language, and the classroom environment just won’t cut it. Tucsonans have the luxury of living close to Mexico, so anyone learning Spanish can practice outside of class and without traveling far away.

This doesn’t apply to French, however, at least in most parts of the United States. Not everyone can learn the language the right way-Traveling to France or other Francophone countries, so the classroom environment is one of the few outlets for anyone to practice French outside of France, and it’s a counterproductive outlet at that.

I’ve always learned more by doing, so I was really excited to work on a big project with one of the native French speakers in my Advanced Speaking class. She gladly corrected my mistakes, answered all my questions, and gave me one of the rarest opportunities in this part of the US- To continuously have one-on-one French practice with a fluent speaker who genuinely wants to help. I learned more from her in a few hours than I have in my entire French career from high school to college. It’s just not that useful to talk with others in class, even though we all do it for the participation points. I suppose it’s a confidence booster, and that helps when it’s finally necessary to speak French, but in the end, Americans aren’t taught languages well, and it’s because they have a lack of opportunity to practice more than just Spanish.

Sadly, there’s really no light at the end of the tunnel in this situation. Not everyone can afford to study abroad in a foreign country in order to be fluent in a language. The only way to really learn something is to approach a native speaker that happens to be in the area. I was really lucky that my classmate was willing to take me under her wing, and she said that all the native speakers want to do the same for Americans who are determined to learn French. They truly want to teach the students who struggle because they, too have been in a similar position, and most of them had to learn English without the assistance of others. Unfortunately, a lot of my classmates are intimidated by the native speakers, but I learned today that they have no reason to feel that way.

On that note, I wish there was a solution to this problem, but as I’ve said in earlier posts, it’s impossible to master another language in the US when the surrounding countries know English really well.

I’d like to say that everyone should have a tutor for the full language experience, but how practical is that?

Saya meyakini bahwa segala sesuatu itu ada ilmu atau caranya. Everything is easy when we know how. Selama kita belum menemukan cara atau ilmunya, semuanya terasa sulit. Kalau dipikir-pikir, kita ini belajar bahasa inggris sudah sejak jaman masih SMP, atau jaman sekarang ini mungkin malah sudah dikenalkan sejak SD. Namun demikian kalau pada kenyataannya sampai sekarang  ini kita masih juga belum mampu berbahasa inggris atau belum mampu ngomong bahasa inggris dengan cas cis cus, ya tidak usah frustasi. Jawabannya mungkin kita belum ketemu dengan “ilmu yang tepat”. Menurut saya ada baiknya kita belajar bahasa inggris dengan metode yang lain seperti metode AJ. Hoge ini.

Bagi kita yang sampai sekarang masih susah untuk mampu berbahasa inggris dengan baik, sebetulnya tidak usah terlalu khawatir karena kasus ini juga dialami oleh bangsa-bangsa lain seperti kita ini. Mau tahu apa kata mereka yang sudah bertahun-tahun belajar bahasa inggris namun tetap saja belum mampu berbahasa inggris ? Berikut petikannya :

……”My name is Angelina and I’m a student from Paraguay. I had studied English grammar many years, but I couldn’t speak”…….

……“Humberto is from Venezuela. He moved to Canada a few years ago. He studied English in Venezuela for many years– mostly grammar. In fact, Humberto learned English with his eyes- by reading textbooks, by studying grammar books, by remembering word lists. He thought his English was good. But when he came to Canada he was surprised and shocked– he couldn’t understand anyone! He joined an English school in Canada. He went to school everyday. What did they teach him? More textbooks, more grammar books, more word lists! After 12 months of school, Humberto was angry and frustrated. The school cost over $10,000 for one year– but he still could not speak English “ …..

…..“Hyun, a student from Korea, said: Im a very serious student. When studying English in Korea, I memorized 50,000 English words for a big test. Fifty Thousand! . My problem was– I couldn’t USE them. I could pass an English test. But I could not understand native speakers“…….

…..”Nid was tired. She had been studying English for 8 years, but her speaking was still terrible. She was going to an English school. Every night, she went to class. Every night, she studied a textbook. She studied grammar rules. She had been doing this for 8 years– but no success”…

Mau tahu ulasan lebih detil tentang apa yang salah dengan mereka ini sehingga mereka tetap saja tidak mampu berbahasa inggris dengan baik dan bagaimana solusi yang ditawarkannya ?. Temukan jawaban lengkapnya di  http://effortlessenglish.com/ ATAU http://effortlessenglishclub.com/ Metode baru (alternative) ini dikembangkan oleh A.J Hoge – seorang Master Guru Bahasa Inggris di San Fransisco – USA. Believe me, he will teach you how to study– to speak English faster, more easily, and automatically without thinking. Selamat belajar dan mencoba. Semoga Sukses.

CATATAN : Bagi yang tidak sabar nunggu balasan email dari AJ Hoge, boleh Klik Disini (Komplit plit …plit …. man… !!!)

Sometimes one wonders what goes through a young child’s mind.  I have often wondered that when it comes to Giovanna and her limited ability to communicate.  I began to wonder even more over the weekend as I watched her interact with people and music in her native tongue.

A friend of mine works with a great ministry in the twin cities and has access to many many native Chinese speakers.  Finding one that likes to work with children who have not mastered either their native tongue or their adopted language can be challenging, but God is always working.  My friend has been attending Bible Study with a Chinese Believer who seems to have taken a liking to Giovanna and gave us a praise and worship CD in Chinese. 

Giovanna began listening to this CD over the weekend.  The effect that it has had on Giovanna is amazing.  She seems to be calmer as she listens to it.  She is beginning to try to sing the words to these songs and already has favorites from the CD. 

On Sunday we had lunch with my friend and her Chinese believing friend.  She was amazed at Giovanna’s pronunciation – especially that she has no accent!  She picked up on the tones and pronounced each work correctly and remembered each word!  We were able to clarify a few things and Giovanna not only learned to speak some words, but to write the characters for several words as well. 

Chiu-Fang is leaving for Taiwan soon and will be looking for more music tapes for Giovanna.  I think we may have stumbled on to something!

“Last one to the library is a failure.”

I recently came across an interesting article from the New York Times regarding “Wild Geese” – a name given to the growing number of South Korean children who leave the country with their mothers to learn English in native-speaking locales. Though highly beneficial to learning the language, the restructuring can create great tension within the family and strain long-held Korean traditions. An excerpt:

Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.

More than 40,000 South Korean schoolchildren are believed to be living outside South Korea with their mothers in what experts say is an outgrowth of a new era of globalized education.

The phenomenon is the first time that South Korean parents’ famous focus on education has split wives from husbands and children from fathers. It has also upended traditional migration patterns by which men went overseas temporarily while their wives and children stayed home, straining marriages and the Confucian ideal of the traditional Korean family. The cost of maintaining two households has stretched family budgets since most wives cannot work outside South Korea because of visa restrictions.

This is actually quite a timely article, as I one of my favorite and most talented students recently left the academy with her mother so she could study English in Canada. There are more people already considering making a move. Let’s hope – for the sake of my student loans – that they decide to stay.

Link via NYT

An interesting piece about the move, by Netflix, to phone-only customer service.
Victory for voices over keystrokes | CNET News.com

Much of it sounds very obvious. Customers tend to prefer phone support instead of email. Customer service representatives who take more time on the phone with customers are more likely to make people happy. Many customers dislike offshoring. Customer service can make or break some corporations. Customers often have outlandish requests. Hourly salaries in call centres will vary greatly from one place to the other, even within the same area.

In other words, Netflix has done what many people think a company should do. We’ll see how it all pans out in the end.

The main reason this piece caught my attention is that I have been doing surveys (over the phone) about the quality of the service provided by customer service representatives over the phone. Not only am I working in a call centre myself (and can certainly relate with the job satisfaction which comes from empathy). But several of the surveys I do are precisely about the points made in this News.com piece. The majority of the surveys I do are about the quality of the service provided by customer service representatives (CSRs) at incoming call centres for a big corporation. So I hear a lot about CSRs and what they do well. Or not so well. One answer I’ve been hearing on occasion was “I’d appreciate it if I could talk to people who are a bit less courteous but who know more about the services the company is providing.” After interactions with several CSRs and tech support people, I can relate with this experience on a personal level.

The general pattern is that people do prefer it if they can speak directly (over the phone) with a human being who speaks their native language very fluently and are able to spend as much time as it takes with them on the phone. Most people seem to believe that it is important to be able to speak to someone instead of dealing with the issue in an “impersonal” manner.

Sounds obvious. And it probably is obvious to many executives, when they talk about customer service. So email support, outsourcing, offshoring, time limits on customer service, and low wages given to customer service representatives are all perceived by customers as cost-cutting measures.

But there’s something else.

We need the “chunky spaghetti sauce” of customer service. Yes, this is also very obvious. But it seems that some people draw awkward conclusions from it. It’s not really about niche marketing. It’s not exactly about customer choice or even freedom. It’s about diversity.

As an anthropologist, I cherish human diversity. Think of the need for biological diversity on the level of species but through the cultural, linguistic, and biological dimensions of one subspecies (Homo sapiens sapiens).
Yes, we’re all the same. Yes, we’re all different. But looking at human diversity for a while, you begin to notice patterns. Some of these patterns can be described as “profiles.” Other patterns are more subtle, harder to describe. But really not that difficult to understand.

The relationships between age and technology use, for instance. The common idea is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be “into technology.” “It’s a generation thing, you know. Kids these days, they’re into HyPods and MikeSpaces, and Nit’n'do-wee. I’m too old to know anything about these things.”

Yeah, right.

All the while, some children are struggling with different pieces of technology forced unto them and some retirees are sending each other elaborate PowerPoint files to younger people who are too busy to look at them.

To go back to customer service on the phone. Some people are quite vocal about their preference for interactions with “real human beings” who speak their native language and are able to understand them. Other people would actually prefer it if they could just fire off a message somewhere and not have to spend any time on the phone. On several occasions having to do with customer service, I do prefer email exchanges over phone interactions. But I realize that I’m probably in the minority.

Many people in fact deal with different situations in different ways.

One paragraph I personally find quite surprising in the News.com piece is about the decision to not only strengthen the phone-based support but to, in effect, abolish email support:

Netflix’s decision to eliminate the e-mail feature was made after a great deal of research, Osier said. He looked at two other companies with reputations for superb phone-based customer service, Southwest Airlines and American Express, and saw that customers preferred human interaction over e-mail messages.

Sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to me. (It’d be fun to read the research report!) I’m pretty sure that most business schools advise future executives against knee-jerk reactions.

One thing which surprises me about the Netflix move is that, contrary to Southwest Airlines and American Express, the Netflix business is primarily based on online communication and postal services. My hunch is that a significant number of Netflix users are people who enjoy the convenience of one-click movie rentals without any need to interact with a person. Not that Netflix users dislike other human beings but they may prefer dealing with other human beings on other levels. If my hunch is accurate to any degree, chances are that these same people also enjoy it when they can solve an issue with their account through a single email or, better yet, a single click. For instance, someone might like the option of simply clicking a button on the Netflix website to put their rental queue on hold. And it might be quite useful to receive an email confirmation of a “Damaged Disc Report” (SRC: DISCPROBLEM) instead of having to rely on a confirmation number given on the phone by a friendly CSR in Oregon or, say, Moncton.

Yes, I’m referring to the specific instances of my interactions with Netflix. While I’d certainly appreciate the opportunity to speak with friendly French-speaking CSRs when I have problems with plane tickets or credit cards, I like the fact that I can deal with Netflix online (and through free postal mail). Call me crazy all you want. I’m one of those Netflix customers who find it convenient to deal with the company through those means. After all, Netflix is unlikely to have such an influence on my life that I would enjoy spending as much as ten minutes on the phone with friendly Oregonians.

As an ethnographer, I have not, in fact, observed Netflix to any significant extent. I’m just a random customer and, as it so happens, my wife is the one who is getting rentals from them. What little I know about the Netflix business model is limited to discussions about it on tech-related podcasts. And I do understand that Blockbuster is their direct target.

Yet it seems to me that one of the main reasons Netflix has/had been succeeding is that they went into relatively uncharted territory and tapped into a specific market (mixed analogies are fun). Even now, Netflix has advantages over “traditional” DVD rental companies including Blockbuster the same way that Amazon has advantages over Barnes and Noble. It seems to me that Amazon is not actively trying to become the next Barnes and Noble. AFAIK, Amazon is not even trying to become the next Wal-Mart (although it has partnered with Target).

Why should Netflix try to beat Blockbusters?

What does this all mean for corporate America?