I was both intrigued and entertained by Mike Meyer’s "Learning to Speak Olympics" article in the New York Times Book Review last week. In it, he talks about the English lessons Chinese school children have been receiving for several years now by way of an cartoon monkey. As Meyer explains, "Mocky is the poster monkey for the drive to have 35 percent of the population conversant in English by the Olympics."
As part of this initiative, the Chinese publishing industry has apparently been rolling out a VERY diverse array of English language books. Meyer describes their appearance in one bookstore this way:
With 230,000 titles on display, Book Mansion is China’s largest bookseller. Textbooks fill one of its five floors, each the size of an Olympic swimming pool. There’s an entire aisle of English-Chinese dictionaries and another filled with preparation manuals for English competency exams…
Book Mansion categorizes its manuals by category: leisure English, phone English, taxi English, job-hunting English, even badminton English. I opened one of the many books titled “Olympic English” and found this: “I have made a reservation for tonight through the telephone. My name is Cable Guy.”
The Chinese government has provided police with a book called Olympic Security English designed to educate officers in the conversations necessary for “Dissuading Foreigners From Excessive Drinking” and instructions on “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage.”
Meyer’s article is entertaining, interesting, and in places disturbing. I shudder at the thought of Chinese government officials selecting the necessary phrases to include in their police handbook. And who were the authors of Love English who decided to teach Chinese citizens that the words "I’m bored" mean "Do you want to have sex?"??
All of this, though, has me pondering what phrases and words I would put in an introduction to the English language, were I writing one specifically timed to coincide with this year’s summer Olympics. What sentence or idea do YOU think China’s citizens ought to learn before when the world shows up and tunes in this August?
“We apologize deeply for killing our own people at Tienanmen Square and next month will institute a democratic government.” Nah. That’ll never fly.
Sorry. A PS: “We also apologize for calling people with disabilities self-centered, self-pitying, stupid and deformed. We’ll take down those wheelchair signs with ‘Deformed’ on them right away.”
Thanks for posting on the NYT article, Alison. Has any other country gone to these lengths to promote English in a non-english speaking country? If we spoke their language could we change their minds?
Kate, Interesting questions. I don’t know if other countries have to gone to such lengths when hosted the Games. Nor do I know if French language books are being promoted as heavily as English ones in China, though I doubt it. (French and English are the two official languages of the IOC.) If I learn more on these subjects I’ll post as much here!
we just want to show the best china
For Christine:Pot talking to kettle, think: Waco, Ruby Ridge, Kent State, any black suburb Bush and Florida Elections, Federal Reserve and military industrial complex