Do You Have An English Menu In Japanese

English as a Global Language In the last few months that I have been traveling, it has become even more apparent to me how important it is to be able to speak English to interact in the world today. Many of the people that I have been talking with over the last few months have not been native English speakers. And it became very clear to me that if they had not learned English, I would not be able to communicate with them, they have to learn a second language to be able to broaden their opportunities for travel, work, and general communication with people from other countries. As a native English speaker, you take this for granted. And as a result, many native English speakers only speak the one language. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the British economic predominance in the...  [Read more]

Once known as the “Jewel of the British Empire”, Singapore is a thriving city-state on the tip of the Malay Peninsula. Evidence of its British colonial history can be found all over the city in its architecture and monuments. Although Singapore is a highly-developed city-state, the city has plenty of green spaces to counteract the urbanization of the island with almost ten percent of the land set aside for nature reserves and parks. Singapore has four official languages including Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. English is the language of instruction in the education system and is also the language of government. Singapore is an easy place to get to with direct flights from hundreds of locations around the world, as well ferries from ports elsewhere in the region. You can even get there by...  [Read more]

Pronunciation Problems for Chinese Students of English As a global language, English has been popularly taught as the second language in China for quite a few years. Now there are more Chinese people learning English on various purposes, such as applying for a higher paid job, studying and living abroad, or establishing business with western countries. According to my experience of learning and teaching English, it is harder to master English pronunciation than English grammar for Chinese students. Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of many highly-inflected Western languages (e.g. Russian, Latin, etc.), or even the low-scale verb conjugations, for instance, of English (e.g. "swim, swam, swum") because of the lack of inflections. Even though there are similarities...  [Read more]