English put on fast track for Beijing Games

While great progress has been made in getting the requisite physical infrastructure ready for the Olympics, language remains an Achilles’ heel. So, armed with the official Olympic-English textbook, rousingly entitled ‘Don’t be shy, just try’, Beijing’s municipal authorities have launched a veritable English-learning blitzkrieg, including song competitions, free lectures in city parks and special classes for policemen and taxi-drivers.

But while most official efforts to promote English result in little more than by-rote memorisation of set phrases that are easily forgotten—they do not equip the learner to deal with situations outside those set out in textbooks.

For instance, The Olympic Security English, a phrasebook published by the Chinese Public Security Bureau for policemen covers all scenarios from lost passports to hoax anthrax threats. But in one dialogue, a British woman, when stopped while driving a stolen car, protests: ‘‘You’re violating my human rights.’’

As Hugh Cameron, a native New Zealander who teaches English to policemen, says, the problem is cultural, too. ‘‘It’s taken a while to convince them (students) not to refer to people they arrest as ‘criminals’ but as ‘suspects’,’’ says Cameron.

Taxi-drivers have also been handed out phrase books and audio cassettes and instructed to learn useful English phrases. But Zhao Xin Ming, a 32-year-old cabbie, says that of the 100 English sentences he learnt by heart to pass a mandatory test last year, he has forgotten virtually all.

Nonetheless, while visiting sports enthusiasts in 2008 are unlikely to encounter armies of residents greeting them in flawless English, it’s now estimated that over 350 million people are learning the language across China. This number is greater than the total population of native speakers in the world and is set to soar this coming school year, when a new regulation will make it mandatory for primary school students to learn English from Grade-3.

In fact, several districts are going high-tech in their search to reach more people.

In the prosperous Chaoyang district in east Beijing, local authorities have initiated a 28-week-long session of classes that are streamed live on Internet. ‘‘We plan to apply for the Guiness Book of World Records for the maximum number of people involved in an English class,’’ says Ken Li, managing director, Beijing Thumb Access Communications, hired by Chaoyang Authorities to set up this e-community of English enthusiasts.

Each week, native English speakers give lectures about the history of the Games in English, while thousands are logged on. The problem, again, is that only a tiny percentage of students actually understand the lectures.

But Li is not put off by this minor technicality. ‘‘It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand,’’ he says, ‘‘as long as they learn a few words in English by the end of it like ‘Olympics’, ‘sports’, ‘swimming’, etc.’’