Language Barriers

For a fair proportion of my MBA cohort English is their second language. In fact, some students had never presented in English prior to arriving at the business school in January. The language barrier has made it difficult for them to contribute to class discussions and syndicate work.

For the first time yesterday, I had the sensational of experiencing the language barrier. For the past few months, I've been attending Japanese language classes at the CAE. Japanese has its own alphabets (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) with completely different symbols for each character / word. There is also a romanized version of the written language ("romaji") which uses roman letters for Japanese words. For the first couple of months, we've been using the romaji in class, and I've been progressing well at learning the new words and grammer. We're at the stage now where we're supposed to know the hiragana and katakana (kanji will come later), and in an effort to speed up the learning process, my teacher has switched to using hiragana only when writing on the whiteboard in class. I haven't yet mastered the hiragana (there are 104 characters in the hiragana alphabet), so it takes me a few seconds to translate the written word to romaji, and then to English.

Most of the other students in my class (who perhaps aren't quite so busy during the rest of the week) have already mastered the hiragana, and can thus focus their attention on learning new words and grammer. I spend most of my time converting words to romaji, and thus do not get a chance to respond to questions in class so frequently. Someone else has usually translated faster than me, and has already given an answer before I've even interpreted the question...