The test fee is not cheap either. It is not an amount that any student can easily afford. The test fee in the UK is priced at 110 sterling pounds per attempt. Test results that have lapsed for two years is generally considered as outdated by the immigration department and a new test has to be taken. However, no official figures have been released to show how big the UK English proficiency test market really is. According to anecdotal evidence, the similar market in Australia is estimated about 27 million sterling pounds. Archived records from the UK Department of Education and Employment also showed that British English language products were worth about 800 million sterling pounds in 1988. This huge figure is not surprising because most students will pay additional money to go for IELTS focused tuition.

On the other side of the globe, the Australian Immigration and Citizenship Minister Chris Evans have indicated that alternative English proficiency tests will soon be recognised for immigration purposes. Many other test providers welcome this decision. One of them is the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which is designed by the Americans in 1964. Another new test provider, world-wide publisher Pearson, is also said to have applied to the Australian government for an official status. These competitors are very keen to bite off some market share of IELTS.

Australian Minister’s decision is likely to be influenced by the fact that the Australian economy relies a lot on overseas students. The influx of Chinese, Indian and Iranian students are now at the highest in history. These emerging countries have fast growing economies and parents are now financially capable to send their children to Australia, UK and the USA for education. However, not all of the students would have chosen to take IELTS. Many of them would have taken TOEFL because they are also applying to academic institutions in the USA. It is wise of the Australian Minister to realise that by making IELTS the only option, it is likely to alienate potential overseas students together with the school fees they bring to Australia.

IELTS also came under some bad press in November 2009 in India. The British Council is responsible for administering the IELTS in India; however, their employees have been alleged to be taking money to sit the exam for others. Critics commented the issue here is because the British Council does not submit itself to any external audit. They also argued that unless IELTS is taken off the monopoly seat, these fraudulent incidents will continue.

Perhaps it is true when an organisation is in a monopoly position; it is also very susceptible to being abused. I think we should seriously re-assess our approach to the English proficiency test in the UK.

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Why Chinese is so hard to master?

Fist, the pronunciation is difficult master. There are some Chinese pronunciations are difficult for westerners to pronounce. For example like there is a sound pronounced like “uee” this is one of the most difficult sound my students have. But don’t worry about your abilities, it’s simply because there is no such a sound in English. You just need to practice more. It’s like the “th” sound in English. When I was learning English, I couldn’t pronounce the “th” sound. There is no such a sound in Chinese and I was not used to “bite” the tongue to speak. My teacher would bring a pair of chopsticks to the classroom. Every time when I made a mistake, my teacher would try to take my tongue out of my mouth. Actually, she never did but it reminded me every time. For the difficult sounds Chinese, you need more patience to practice. Listen to the sound carefully and then try to imitate it.

Second, Chinese Language has tones. There are four tones and one toneless tone in this language. If you speak Chinese without tones it will sound very confuse, because the same pronunciation with different tones can form a totally different meaning. If you want to speak like a native, you must learn and master all the tones.

Third, if you listen to northern Chinese speak you will notice they have a lot of “er” sound in their speaking. This sounds like the “oor” in “poor”. For example: “na3 li2″ means “where”. As in Mandarin a lot of people would say “na er”.

Those are the tips that can help you speak Chinese more natively. Further more if you really want to learn how to speak Chinese like a native, I suggest you to find a repetitive program or course and learn with the program. There are tones of different programs and courses that you can easily find them online.

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ChinesePod is different with a lot of other famous learning program like Rosetta Stone or Tell Me More. Those programs are basically offline learning program. You install them on your own computer to learn from it. You basically learn by yourself. But ChinesePod is more interactive. You must access the course on the internet, and there is community that you can communicate with other people. And with ChinesePod, you also have chance to get a “really” class with a real teacher through online classroom. They also have one on one course, you will have a face to face class with a native speaker.

No matter you are a beginner or intermediate learner, ChinesePod has lessons for all levels. For each lesson you will learn how to hold a conversation for a specific topic. You can also download the audio files of each lesson. There are also transcript of each lesson in Simplified and Traditional Chinese. They are now also having the application for iPhone. This is a very handy tool, it can make you learn Chinese in a mobile style.

Although this program requires a little expense, it’s worth and affordable. There are different packages with different price. From basic package with 1,300 lessons to Virtual School package with teachers and weekly Skype group classes as well as online counseling. If you are bored with those offline learning program, why don’t you try a new way to learn online with ChinesePod.

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Custom Study Schedule

No matter what you may read and see on TV or on-line there is just no getting around the idea that learning another language is going to take a fair amount of practice, effort and dedication to get it right. So anything that allows you to get in more study time is going to be a huge win for you. This is why college classes can actually be a disadvantage to you because you have to make sure you can accommodate their schedule and you only get an hour or two a week of actual study. Think about how this may not work for you if you already have a full time job and other responsibilities that require time. However, when you decide to use a foreign language course on CD you get to decide when you are going to study and for how long. Think about the benefit of being able to take advantage of any twenty minute or so break you may have during the day to use toward learning Chinese. The final good reason to do this is…

A Chinese Language Course CD Is Less Expensive

If you look at the other options available for learning Chinese you can quickly see how expensive they can ultimately be in terms of time and money. An Immersion program is expensive if you can find the time to get away to a foreign country for a few month(s) to do it. College classes are a little less expensive but ultimately they will still cost you thousands of dollars and a lot of time. However, by choosing to use a Chinese language course on CD you will at most spend several hundred dollars.

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Stimulating the brain, by learning languages for example, reduces your chances of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. Multilingualism enhances mental abilities in people. It can improve your memory and slow age-related decline. Studying languages makes you smarter! Your reasoning skills improve as you learn to view things through a different aspects. Learn a second language as it stimulates creativity.

Who does not enjoy eating good food, listening to good music, reading books or watching movies. Learning a language will be one of the most satisfying and enjoyable things you can do. Whatever your reason: Intellectual, sentimental, Practical, learning Spanish is something that you will enjoy and will benefit you for a long time to come.

Travelling to a Spanish speaking country and only speaking English, will confine you to popular tourist resorts where most speak some English. If you speak Spanish you will find yourself being welcomed in a way that would never happen if you spoke only English as Spanish people are very hospitable.

If you study Spanish you will understand English better. Spanish is derived from Latin, the language of the ancient Roman Empire. Many English words are also of Latin origin. When you learn vocabulary in Spanish you will expand your English vocabulary. The grammar of Spanish is similar to English, but you will learn how it is different. You can look at almost any word and immediately know exactly how to pronounce it. Spanish is very nearly phonetically perfect. This makes Spanish one of the easiest languages to learn. Learning a third language eg French, Italian, will be easier knowing Spanish will as these languages are also Romance Languages.

So to Learn Spanish Language for business is a must.

You can better communicate with Spanish speaking business people, employees and co-workers. More than 360 million people whose mother tongue is Spanish is a potential customer for your product or service? In The United States of America and Canada. The fastest-growing market segment is Hispanic consumers. If you are multilingual, you have more career choices and are more marketable and than your monolingual adversary.

With more than 410 million people speaking Spanish, it is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world. English, Mandarin and Hindi have more speakers. Spanish outranks English as a native language. Spanish is the mother tongue in 21 countries. It is an official language on four continents and. The rate of growth and number of Spanish speaking people makes learning Spanish essential. Only English is more popular in Europe than Spanish. There are nearly 40 million Spanish speaking in the United States. With the big growth of the population (over 40%) being among the Hispanic people, a big increase in Spanish usage in the United States is imminent. A Lot of interest exists among US citizens. This interest will only grow as the Hispanic population of the United States reaches 50 million over the next five years.

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Effective communication is, no doubt, at the center of any thriving business activity. Without this, the business is doomed. Therefore, entities that expect to do business overseas need to ensure that they have the ability to communicate effectively in the local language. In the past, this meant hiring local people to handle the local business. But, thanks to advancements in technology, this is no longer a requirement or the norm.

Efficient foreign language translation services make it possible for companies situated in one corner of the map to deal effectively with people from different parts of the world. But, for communication to be effective, the quality of the foreign language translation service must be ascertained. Whether you employ these services for personal or business purposes, certain guidelines must be followed to get the most bang for your buck.

The most important criterion is accuracy, no doubt. You want the translation service to communicate your message accurately and clearly so that there are no chances of any communication gaps.

Hire a foreign language translation service that allows you to contact the translators directly. Some companies keep their translators under wraps. This could lead to confusion at a later point of time.

Choosing a translation service that has specialist knowledge in your area of business may not always be possible, but is preferred. Choose a firm that has sound credentials. Check out the qualifications of those running the service. Linguists who have a passion for languages are best qualified to provide these services as they are committed to providing the best services to their clients.

A good foreign language translation service might desire to know the full spectrum of their work before they accept a project. Such service providers are concerned about the quality of services they provide and make appropriate enquiries in order to be better prepared to deal with the requirements that may come up.

Quality control is an important aspect of foreign language translation. A reputed company makes use of professionally qualified, experienced translators. These translators should have formal training in translation services. Many companies have different translators to handle different languages. A reputed service provider has the backup to deal with sudden exigencies. Companies that provide ‘machine translation services’ are a definite no.

Some companies hire translators who are well versed in the culture and social nuances of a country and visit the country frequently. This is because language evolves rapidly and close association with a country is necessary to keep up with the rapid changes in language.

Understanding these aspects before you hire a foreign language translation service can help you pick the right service providers for your business.

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This course is so designed that anyone belonging to any age group or nationality can learn the language with comparative ease. What helped me most in this course are the following:

I can learn a new thing or do any task only if those are arranged in a systematic manner and in simple steps. Rocket Chinese software is designed exactly in that way! There are step-by-step instructions on how to learn Chinese – be it Pin Yin, conversational sentences, or Chinese characters.

Within a few days of learning Rocket Chinese, my confidence level catapulted to higher levels. This was made possible by this software by the conversational lessons and audio lessons included in them. While audio lessons taught the correct pronunciation, conversational lessons gave confidence to mingle with Chinese-speaking population. I could start interacting with Chinese speakers with enough confidence. This interaction also improved my language learning. However, without the ingenious methods, this interaction would not have been possible in the first place.

Equally worth mentioning is the forum support provided by Rocket Chinese. No language learning software can provided us with anything and everything we need to master the language. Therefore, this course found the right solution by providing a round-the-clock forum support. Here, I could meet others who are using this same software to learn Mandarin. I could discuss about many things that were not covered in the course material. This not only expanded my knowledge, but also provided me a platform to interact with other fellow students in Chinese!! Moreover, all this facility comes at no extra cost.

By interacting with other students, I came to know of lot of other salient features of this language learning software. Therefore, I confidently and authoritatively recommend Rocket Chinese to anyone who has a passion for learning Chinese.

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Heisig also advocates a divide and conquer strategy with learning kanji. Rather than trying to learn one kanji, and all the associated facts, compounds, pronunciations e.t.c. with that one kanji, he recommends learning only one single fact associated with each kanji, one single keyword that most concisely describes the ranges of meaning associated with that kanji. Once one of these is associated and remembered with all the 2042 kanji listed in his book (all of the Juyo kanji, followed by several dozen more kanji that are either common as components of other kanji, or commonly used as name kanji), it should be easier to “bolt-on” extra facts for each of the kanji; the pronunciations, the compounds it is part of and so on needed to use that kanji as part of the whole language.

While on it’s own, this method isn’t going to make you literate in Japanese, what it does provide is an ability to comprehend Japanese text similar to that of a Chinese person reading the language for the first time. That is to say, a general “feeling” and “sense” of the text. It`s well known that L2 learners of Japanese that come from another kanji based language (e.g. Chinese) learn Japanese in a far quicker time-frame than those coming from other, non kanji character-set, so this method should also in theory speed-up the learning process further down the line.

Heisig not only provides the details of his method in his book, but also provides his personal “path” through the method, that is to say, the component breakdown he used to remember all the kanji, as well as the order he used to build up the increasingly complex stories. He also provides his own imaginative mnemonics for the first several hundred kanji in the book, before starting to slowly wean the reader off his own created mnemonics, and thus forcing the reader to start creating their own, personal stories for the kanji.

Heisig is effective for a number of reasons:

1) Confidence building – The Heisig method builds confidence in the ability to tackle kanji. Before Heisig, kanji seems something of an impossibly large and difficult hurdle which is insurmountable. What Heisig does is give some scope to the language, breaking the task down into a system and series of steps for tackling the difficult problem of remembering them all.

2) Word Mnemonics – The Heisig method introduces the kanji at the individual level. While most of the words in the Japanese language, outside of verbs and simple nouns, are made of compounds of 2 or more kanji, in a similar way to building up the stories for the kanji out of components, it is possible to build stories to remember compounds, based on the keywords present in the individual kanji in the compound.

3) Speed Reading – The Heisig method generally helps with the process of moving your eyes over a page of kanji, from quicker recall, to giving an gist of the meaning of words you haven’t seen before.

4) Radical familiarity – Heisig introduces Kanji at the radical level, and builds up stories from kanji components. While the “radicals” used in the kanji mnemonic stories don’t quite match the official radicals in the Japanese language, the method does give you an appreciation as to how complex kanji are built up from more simple components. Also, a familiarity with the kanji at the component level helps the brain with categorising more complex kanji not inside the book as and when you see them.

The missing component in my opinion with Heisig is a “Heisig software look-up” application, something that processes an English keyword into a Heisig kanji. For example, you could type in “exit” and on hitting enter would be presented with “?”

In my opinion, this would further increase the utility of the Heisig method, allowing it to not just act as a method to “not forget the meaning of the kanji”, but also giving it utility as a powerful input method for those who have tackled the book and method. Combining this with the iPhone would be great, allowing the Heisig learner to look-up unknown compounds on the move. So if there’s any budding software developers out there reading this looking for a project to carry out, this would be a good one!

The next post will cover the clever, schedule organising SRSes and their ability to optimise your learning pipeline. Until then, good luck with Heisig!

Technorati Tags: book, James W. Heisig, Kanji, l2 learners, languag, language, method, order, rote learning, visual memory

The language is not only considered to be a compulsion, as far as learning the language pattern of any country is concerned, but also it extends beyond such a concept, as it is also meant for you to socialize, as you can interact with the people living in different parts of the world with the use of such a unique language form.

Learning the Chinese language is associated with enthusiasm and diligence. It is significant to mention the fact that there are several varieties of Chinese’s language forms, but the most important among them is Zhongwen that stands as a blend of linguistic and cultural heritage associated with all the forms of Chinese languages.

The Chinese characters which are known as ‘Hanzi’, which are written in the imaginary pieces of rectangular blocks, are arranged traditionally in vertical columns and are supposedly read from top to bottom following the pattern down to a column and from right to left across the columns.

Learning the Chinese language is implied with great skill, and it is estimated that almost one-fifth of the total population of the world is implied with a fascination for this particular language, and it plays a major role in the field of attaining economic stability, as the economic affairs are undergone with the use of this unique language structure.

It plays an influential role in the field of business, tourism, IT affairs, etc., and the language has its influence, even in history and by learning the Chinese language, we are able to derive information regarding Confucianism, Buddhism, Chinese culture and heritage, etc.

It is quite a well-known fact that the grammatical structure of the Chinese language is logical and pragmatic, and at the same time, it is manageable as well. Unlike Spanish, the Chinese form of language is void from any significant role played by the verb conjugation, there is no influence of tense inflection, gender distinctions, noun declension, number distinction, etc.

It not only helps you to attain knowledge regarding the sentence structure, but also it makes you aware of the comprehensibility. The loan words have a great influence over the cultural heritage of the country itself.

There are several countries that have imitated from Chinese loan words to frame their words like Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc., and these countries share a common corpus of terms, which in turn has been imitated from the Greco Latin terms that share its implication with other European languages. The Chinese language helps the growing population of the world to interact with each other, which in turn describes its popularity.

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It is a fact that native English speakers are a bit spoilt because English is arguably the number one international language. I have never been to any international airport or 5 star hotel where you couldn’t communicate in English. That is why a lot of native English speakers fall into the trap of not being bothered to learn a foreign language while living abroad for an extended period of time.

Spain comes to mind as a very good example of a country with a lot of expatriates, but very few who can speak Spanish well. That is because it is not really necessary to the average expat to learn the language, especially in the popular coastal areas.

China and Taiwan however are a whole different ballgame. Firstly, you will find it very hard to find a taxi driver who can speak English. Yes, even at the airport or in major cities. Secondly, although all Chinese get English lessons in high school, there are very few that master the English language apart from “How are you?” and “I am fine, thank you.”

So it is obviously very beneficial to a foreigner living in one of these countries to learn Chinese. Imagine not being able to buy a train or bus ticket, order a taxi and so on. This alone would already be a big motivation to learn the language.

It also explains why so many foreigners can at least hold a basic conversation in the local language as opposed to native English speakers living in most other countries. Another reason is that a fair amount of these foreigners are actually Chinese language students who specifically came to those countries to study at a Chinese language institute or university.

The advantage of living in a country where English is hardly understood or spoken, is that you will be forced to start speaking the local language as soon as possible. This gives you the opportunity to move on from the basic to the intermediate level at a fast pace. It does not mean you will achieve fluency in Chinese in a short time, but it will help you to get by on a conversational level. Communication is after all what learning a foreign language is all about.

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