Australians Teach Asian Languages
The Business Alliance for Asian Literacy. Sounds pretty classy. Basically, because there is so much of Asia going on in Australia, the country has formed a business-led initiative to teach Asian languages to more college students. FYI:
Asian population in Australia: 6.7%
Asian population in U.S.: 4.2%
You know, in the ’80s, there was a spike in college enrollment to Japanese language programs, which some scholars attribute single-handedly to James Clavell’s Shogun, which timed well with the whole Bubble Economy. Now U.S. colleges are seeing a second-wave spike in Japanese language enrollment popularly attributed to the manga/anime boom.
In grad school I met a woman not of Korean heritage who said she was taking Korean 001 to learn what convenience store owners were saying about her. Oh who am I kidding… she’s black, and was convinced a race war impended her every visit to the corner deli. [I say much of this in jest, but she truly believed in a Korean-American conspiracy against black America.]
We “learn Chinese” from fortune cookies, and Mandarin is now one of the most popular high school language courses in the country, and if I had a penny for every hackneyed pun of Vietnamese food printed in restaurant reviews… well, phoget a-bao-t it.
So who is learning Asian languages, and why?