Job Discussion Forums

william wallace · Joined: 14 May 2003 Posts: 2869 Location: in between

Nothing to say.

limits601 · Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 1:49 pm Post subject:

Excellent tid bit.

:+)

Norman Bethune · Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 731

Jolly · Joined: 12 Apr 2004 Posts: 202

Roger · Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 9138

I believe Chinese students who complain that they "don't have a chance at speaking English" are under the same illusion as many FTs: why should Chinese learn English in the first place?Certainly NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF DOING CHITCHATS - but as a patriotic duty to help their country lift itself to a higher level of intellectual and cultural level by learning from the more advanced societies. Investing in a foreign language on such a scale is a huge outlay, and China cannot afford to waste their funds on useless oral English fluency when speakers don't even have any intellectual maturity to use it. In this way, the current English-speaking mania is a symptom of a deep-rooted malaise and of misunderstandings and misprioritisations.

Brian Caulfield · Joined: 14 Sep 2004 Posts: 1247 Location: China

Learning Chinese is important so that you can understand the errors of transfer the students make . When the students say things like "Your mother , he's OK now ?" they are making an error of transfer .
Where I live the foreign companies all use English to communicate with their employees . It is todays lingua franca .
My beef with China is not about the loss of jobs in the west , but the eploitation of farmers in China and the rest of the world . The World Trade Organization wants all governments to stop supporting farmers and let the price of commodities work themselves out in free trade . But China has deliberately kept the price of food down to encourage the farmer to leave their land and take a job in a factory . This plays havoc on rice farmers in South Korea and Japan .