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Curiosity is a universal language

TWO THINGS surprised me when I spent a month learning Mandarin this year. The first was how enjoyable it was, the second was how hungry I would get after an hour grappling with pin yin or the anglicised words to denote the Chinese characters. Learning is calorie-intensive but it’s also extremely rewarding. My schoolday French and Irish came bubbling up from some part of my brain that had rusted-over through years of neglect. Like stretching, learning an entirely new language is painful at first but the more you do the better you get.

THE EXPERT

Chinese teacher Grace Mullins, or Deng Xiao E, has seen a big increase in her students in the last four years of teaching Mandarin in Dublin. Most of her students in the earlier years were diplomats or businesspeople taking a language course before travelling to China. Now she has seen her classes expand to include secondary school students whose parents want to give them an edge for the future.

“The good students are not too shy to speak and they put in a lot of effort. I do evening courses of one and a half hours a week so the people who did well put more work in rather than just that time once a week. They had a genuine interest in speaking the language.” One of her students designed his own web page with all the vocabulary they had learned and a tool to turn them into working sentences. “If they can put pieces of information in Chinese together in real-life conversations that’s the key,” Mullins explains.

She has also seen a big increase in the number of students from countries other than Ireland. They have come from European countries and also from Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea. Her Eastern European, Japanese or South Korean students may have been in between jobs or using their time to add Mandarin to their CVs.

Shane Zerbe is manager of the Sandford Language Institute, where Mullins teaches, and he says they have seen a shift away from “holiday home” languages into the languages of business. Lots of people took Spanish or French during the boom years to improve their language skills for leisure purposes, or with a view to living in their holiday homes for a number of months a year.

“Italian has taken a big hit in terms of numbers this year,” he says. German is very popular, as many people studied it in school and want to refresh their skills. Arabic is also increasing, along with Brazilian and Portuguese. Have online language courses hit the language schools? “People tend to go for physical classes,” he says. Although he believes if you have limited access to a language school it can be an easier way to take a language course.

CC

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