Eric's Beijing Diary

This afternoon Nancy invited me to be the judge for the English contest she put on for her students at the Walmart Superstore. Nancy has an after-school English school for elementary students. Some of those kids really do quite well. I emphasized to them, as I do to all students of English, that listening to English is the most important thing they can be doing at this age. And there are lots of opportunities for this in a city like Beijing. This is one major difference between China and Japan. There doesn't seem to be as much emphasis on English language learning in Japan as there is in China. When Piano first went to Tokyo to do an internship, I asked him if he thought his Japanese was good enough. He told me that they would use English for awhile until their Japanese was good enough. When he got to Japan, he discovered that the young engineers he was working with did not speak English. He was flabbergasted. When he asked them about it, they told him rather nonchalantly that they did not need English.

And there is no English channel in Japan. This is another thing that really amazes me. Here in China, CCTV has a 24 hour English channel. Beijing public television is not, perhaps, the kind of programming that everyone would enjoy, but I have found it to be very useful and informative. The news is a bit slanted...actually not so much slanted as limited. But I have all kinds of other sources for news, so that is not an issue. But programs like Dialogue and Documentary do a lot to fill in the gaps in my attempts to understand the huge changes that are taking place in this country.

Every law in China is printed both in Chinese and in English. In fact, anyone who wants to can purchase an English Language bound set of the laws of China. I don't want to overstate this. It's certainly not like India. But English really is the defacto second national language in China.