Coming so soon after the Beijing Olympics, a time when I regularly admired the excellent English language skills of many of the athletes, I understand that if you’re successful on a world sporting level, it would undeniably be useful to speak good English. A lot of media interviews will be in English, and it’s become the international language by which you communicate with people from other language backgrounds too. But that’s a long way from making it a requirement to success in your sport.

The biggest outcry against the LPGA policy has come from Korea, because a lot of South Korean golfers have become successful in recent years and are on the LPGA circuit. Some of them speak great English, some only a bit, and use an interpreter for many media interviews. So what? I ask. Do any of the foreign journalists think to speak to them in Korean instead? Of course not, because the number of native English speakers who have been able to successfully learn to speak Korean is tiny!

I really dislike the arrogance of the English native speaker who thinks that everyone else should learn English. Most of these people don’t speak a second language themselves and have no idea how difficult it is. And it would be difficult enough for them to learn Spanish, or French, say, languages with lots in common with English. Imagine if they had to learn Korean, with an entirely different writing system, no common vocabulary and an utterly different grammar system. It would be a struggle.

So in answer to the title of this post - my opinion is a strong NO! I appreciate that it would be an advantage for international sports professionals to speak English. But until all the English speakers are prepared to learn another language now and again too, it seems completely wrong to me to expect that of others. Just my loud and angry two cents worth.

When I wrote Teenie’s name on the whiteboard, adding her to the list of all the other students in the class at that time, I unwittingly made a faux pas that I didn’t discover for several weeks. It’s often the case in our school that blue and black whiteboard markers are out of stock, and I end up with only a red marker for a week or two. And so it happened that I wrote Teenie’s name in red.

Teenie comes from Hong Kong, and there, as in many other Asian cultures, you should never write anybody’s name using red ink. As far as I understand it, it’s connected to death. I’d vaguely heard this custom before, but obviously hadn’t remembered it when I wrote her name up that day. The only reason I found out was because another Asian student politely mentioned it to me; when I asked the usually outspoken Teenie about it, she politely told me that because I was her teacher, she wasn’t able to tell me. Another cultural norm - high respect of teachers - leaving the problem unsolved for a long time. Poor Teenie! I apologised profusely and immediately rewrote her name in another colour, and in the future I’ll definitely be more careful about which pen I’m using.

As far as I can tell, these tours are informal arrangements that are promoted by bloggers posting about their experiences and backpackers telling other travellers. When there are so many beautiful places to see in Colombia, why would you want to see where cocaine is grown and made?

I’ve got quite a few Colombian friends here in Australia, and I’m constantly hearing from them that when they meet new people and say they’re from Colombia, inevitably someone will mention drugs. It’s such a pity, because all the Colombians I know are really proud of their country, and ashamed of the bad reputation it’s working to fix.

Fortunately, the news.com.au article does end with another opinion, and this is the one I hope any reader here will remember if they even consider for a second going on a cocaine tour. It’s the opinion of owner of the Platypus Hotel in Bogota:

The production of cocaine significantly damages the environment of Colombia. And money spent on cocaine goes directly to support groups fighting in Colombia’s internal conflict, leading to assassinations, massacres and one of the world’s largest refugee problems

From her perspective, there was no particularly good reason to allow someone without any money (and perhaps in some trouble either medically, politically or otherwise) to come to live in our country, and support them. Taking in refugees is something I’d just grown up with and never thought twice about - it’s just what wealthier nations do to help people who’ve really got nowhere else to go, although of course we never taken everybody who wants to settle here and certainly have our problems with the whole issue, too - I’m not saying Australia’s perfect.

In any case, using the ever-useful resources of Wikipedia, I discovered that there are less than 20 countries who regularly accept refugees from refugee camps (meaning they are usually from Africa, the Middle East, and for a while there, former Yugoslavia). These countries include what I’d call the usual suspects like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, and a few more surprising inclusions like Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso and Mexico.

When one of my Korean students reported the news that the rate of increase of Koreans becoming millionaires was just announced to be the fourth highest in the world, I suggested that Korea might be ready to take in a few refugees. I didn’t get any takers but I guess that just like my (opposite) thinking on the subject, they need some time to think about it. I’m constantly surprised by the assumptions I make about what’s normal in the world and I have to keep reminding myself that nothing’s really normal, anywhere!

Like me, Hamish Beaton - “Mr Hamish” to his students - went to Osaka to teach English. Unlike me, he already spoke good Japanese, and was hired in the JET programme which puts native speakers in Japanese schools to assist local English teachers. He ended up in a junior high school in Kanan town, south-east Osaka. With a great attitude and a willingness to try new things and meet new people, Beaton had three years of joy in Japan, and reading his account of it really took me back to my Osakan days too.

Describing life in Japan from the point of view of a foreigner is a tricky business. There are all manner of what seem like unusual rituals and habits there, but to describe them without making any judgement takes a special art, and Beaton does this well. The contrast to what I call a “bad foreigner” is evident when Beaton mentions another teacher who arrives from England and refuses to try any of the local food or indeed make any effort to fit in. Beaton, on the other hand, is ready to embrace all things Japanese and as a result makes countless friends and is taken on plenty of special excursions, dinner outings and even camping trips.

Above all, what I noticed in Beaton’s book is the same eagerness to help the foreigner that the Japanese people I met always showed. A Japanese person doesn’t just point out the direction you need to go if you ask where the bank is - they take you there and introduce you to the manager. They don’t buy you a bunch of flowers for your birthday - they find out which major electrical appliance you don’t have and order one for you. There’s a generosity of spirit that is hard to match.

For those who haven’t spent time in Japan, Beaton’s book will be both interesting and hilarious - take, for example, an uncomfortable dinner with his student’s family when the father demands to know more about Beaton’s tastes in pornography. And there are the usual foreigners’ antics with late nights in downtown Osaka, too much alcohol and ending up asleep on a train that ends up the other side of the city.

With thousands and thousands of native English speakers heading to Japan every year to teach English, this isn’t the first book I’ve read on the subject - but it’s the one that’s captured the experience most accurately.

These days, despite the fact that Moscow’s become one of the most expensive cities on earth, the local authorities can’t keep up a supply of hot water all year. Each district of Moscow experiences a shutdown of the hot water system for around three weeks (sometimes shorter, the authorities say …). Of course, when I come from a country where each house must choose its own method for creating hot water - here in sunny Perth, I’m happy with my solar heater, but that mightn’t work so well in Moscow - it’s odd for me to imagine the hot water being controlled by the state.

When I <a href=”http://sameskymagazine.com/2008/06/staying-with-locals-in-russia/”>homestayed</a> in Vladivostok a few years ago, my guidebook told horror tales of electricity failures even in the far east’s long winter, and I distinctly remember the incredibly thick fur coats my host family kept at the door ready to deal with minus forty degree (Celsius) temperatures. It made me start to appreciate that Soviet-era infrastructure might not be the most reliable. I must have been lucky during my two summer stays in Moscow to be in the right district at the right time, as I always had hot water. If not, perhaps I would’ve been invited to a shower party - apparently it’s important to have friends in different districts and then they’ll invite you round for dinner and a hot shower.

The problem with invite is definitely best illustrated by the bad experience of a bunch of German students I used to teach. They were on a business trip in Brazil, meeting some management counterparts in a factory the German company had just acquired. They were all speaking English with each other, since Portuguese and German weren’t languages they had in common.

On the last evening, the Brazilian managers invited the Germans out for dinner. And they used, in English, a phrase like “We’d like to invite you out for dinner.”

The Germans heard one key word, invite, and translated it to the German, einladen. In German, that means that the Brazilians were going to be paying for the dinner. The Germans were excited, because it was a really expensive restaurant. They went along and ordered copious amounts of food and alcohol.

Then the end of the night came. One of the Brazilians collected the bill from the cashier and then told the Germans how much their share was.

You can imagine the surprise. The Brazilians had correctly used the word “invite” in English, where we don’t necessarily think that anyone is responsible for paying. The Germans had to scrounge around with credit cards to pay their share of the meal (and had trouble claiming this big expense back from their company!).

I often tell my students this story and teach them phrases like “It’s on me,” or “It’s our shout.” Anyone who speaks another European language tells me that invite in their language means that whoever invites has to pay. It’s funny that there’s this extra meaning to the word - but it wasn’t funny for the out-of-pocket Germans in Brazil.

People often ask me about what really makes up Australian culture, and I’m never quite sure what to tell them about. Australia Day tends to rate highly, though, and I think this year’s experience of our national holiday gives a pretty good explanation about at least some aspects of what it means to be an Aussie.

What’s Australia Day, Anyway?

Australia Day rolls round every January 26, towards the end of the summer holiday period, and usually when it’s really hot. That date was picked because that’s when the British began colonising Australia back in 1788, so Aboriginal people (and an increasing number of other Australians) think of it as “Invasion Day” instead; but for want of a better date, January 26 is still our national day.

In any case, most Australians like to celebrate Australia Day, or if nothing else enjoy the long weekend. But I’m always quite surprised by how patriotic most people get around this day, and it’s something that seems to be increasing. Mostly it’s in the form of “good” patriotism, the healthy kind, but I’m not sure if the direction it’s headed is good. But I digress.

Celebrating Australia Day With a Barbecue

Good Aussie culture means throwing a few snaggers (sausages) on the barbie, and that’s certainly how we celebrated our last Australia Day. In fact, we were invited to a street breakfast a few suburbs away from where we live, where an entire street were gathering to celebrate together. This street rotated the hosting duties and this year they fell to parents of a good friend of mine, who invited us to enjoy some good Aussie company.

They live near the beach, so a few people had a dip before they arrived at the breakfast - the invitation expressly said that sandy feet and wet towels were welcomed. That gives it a good Aussie feel to start with. Following the street traditions, the Australian flag was raised and the national anthem played, with our host making a few welcome speeches from the balcony.

Then came the awards. A girl who’d just emigrated from Britain, and her visiting sister, were given certificates to acknowledge their first Australia Day, and my German husband was given something similar. Australia is almost entirely a land of immigrants, so for me it’s very important that new immigrants are welcomed, too.

The morning culminated in a typical Aussie BBQ, but an impressively organised one, with three barbecues lined up for all to use and two marquees covered with Australian flags set up to keep the breakfasting Aussies out of the sun.

The Great Aussie Stereotype

When I was teaching overseas I often tried to answer questions about what Australians are really like, but I found it hard to figure out if the stereotype I’d got from the media and the reality were one and the same thing or not. Since I moved back here, I can see Australians with slightly fresher eyes, and some of the stereotype is definitely true - the good bits! Aussies are friendly and easygoing, especially in social situations like this. Get a bright sunny day and a beer or glass of champagne and everyone’s your best mate. And at times like these they are open and welcoming too, and everybody wanted to know how my German husband was enjoying his new life in Australia.

There’s plenty more to be said about Australia - that’ll be seen in future posts - but sharing a drink with strangers over a barbecue breakfast in perfect sunshine, and enjoying it immensely, is a pretty good sign of the best of Oz.

What do you know about the Aussie stereotype? Let me know in the comments, mate!

As you might be able to guess from the title, Bennett follows a trail through various parts of China to find where all the constituent parts of his newly-purchased underpants came from. In fact, he also has a side trip into Thailand looking for the rubber trees that produced the elastic for the waistband of his underpants, but he’s not so successful there. The Chinese journey, however, is really fascinating, because he gets to see a bit of “real” China - in the factories on the east coast which are all staffed by cheap labour from the poorer western regions, and then out to the cotton fields of the vast west of China itself. His journey is funny, interesting and honest, and it makes the book a good read.

Insights into “Culture” in Bennett’s Underpants Story

Yeah, it’s not just underpants. Joe Bennett made a few observations about culture that were insightful enough for me to find extra bookmarks to stick into various pages so I could check back with these insights again later. The first is quite simply a really nice definition of what on earth “culture” actually is:

… [It's] not culture in the sense of unreadable Arts-Council-sponsored poetry, but culture in the true sense of the word, meaning what people do because it’s what people do, stuff that they do unconsciously.

My italics. So true that some people want to turn the word “culture” into something arty-farty, but really it’s just what normal people do every day, and cultural differences are just simple things about how we run our lives differently from our neighbours.

Bennett also talks about languages, and the problems encountered by travellers who can’t speak the language of their destination. It can be frustrating at times, but he’s quick to point out that we should be grateful for anyone who tries to speak our language, and never berate them for not doing it well (although this is a scary fault you’ll find all too often amongst English-speaking tourists …). As Bennett puts it:

I am in no position to complain that the Chinese haven’t learned my language. I haven’t learned theirs. I can reliably say only hello, goodbye, thank you, banana, postcard, how much, most of the numbers from one to ten, a few interrogative adverbs, and toilet.

He goes on to reiterate that body language and gestures can go an awful long way though - even if his demonstrations of toilet (when he has trouble with the pronunciation of its Chinese version) have a really suspicious-looking mime. It reminds me of my father’s attempts to demonstrate “toilet paper” when we wanted to buy some in a supermarket in France.

The Universal Problem of Racism, According to Bennett

Finally, Bennett gives a totally accurate account of what racism is - in its original benign sense, arising out of a self-preservation instinct to be suspicious of strangers. Out in the western provinces of China, he encountered Chinese people who had nothing at all good to say about the native Uighur people of the region, even though they’d lived amongst them their whole lives. This experience inspired him to say this:

Racism sits near the top of our catalogue of sins. It is the indefensible position and I am not about to defend it. All I will say is that I, too, am racist. Before I came here I harboured a distrust of the Chinese. They looked different, they spoke a strange language,and they used chopsticks. Iknew nothing of them, so the oldest part of my brain sounded an alert … A couple of months in China and the bleep is silenced. Of course. People are people. That’s all.

Couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say here at Same Sky. People are people. That’s all.

Chinglish: Found in Translation

Enough of my rant, it’s just a preamble to why I particularly like Oliver Lutz Radke’s book Chinglish: Found in Translation, and the accompanying blog The Chinglish Files. Radke isn’t just some tourist who snapped a bunch of funny photos, but he reads and speaks Chinese fluently so he can give a literal translation and explain how the Chinglish phrase emerged - and he even politely suggests more suitable translations. (What impresses me one step further is that he’s written books in German - and is German, as you’d guess from the name - but is still able to do all of this in English as well. A real multilinguist).

Let me give an example: today the Chinglish Files blog has a post about the coming Beijing Olympics and a website that urges us to Contact the Olympics. Okay, it’s not as hilarious as some of the other mistranslations, but Radke gives it some thought and explanation from a Chinese language point of view - two words with more or less the same meaning - and suggests what they’re really trying to say is we should “Feel the Olympics” - a slightly catchier slogan.

It’s All the Beginning of International English

Chinglish goes one step further than funny signs. At some stage these grammatically not-quite-right or contextually unusual English phrases start to be taken as “real English” by local populations - and even used by native speakers, just wait for my post on sharehouse owners and sharemates - and sooner or later, it becomes part of a new language - International English. Depending on whose stats you trust, you could say there are now almost two billion people in the world who speak English, but only 20% of them are native speakers. When I taught Business English in Europe, most of my students needed English to converse with people from other countries, but not native English speakers. So English is changing (or being mangled, depending on your point of view) by all these extra speakers. That used to bother me, but now I just find it fascinating.

Don’t Toll a Temple Bell

PS: That’s my picture up there. It’s actually from Japan, so really it’s Japlish. And just for the record, I didn’t toll a temple bell at that particular temple, but I did elsewhere (only in places without such signs). But strictly speaking I disobeyed this sign’s instruction. Sorry.