hello all. just thought you might want to hear about this... one of my friends from sunny england has just gone to china to teach the chinese players english, in return he gets to train with the chinese national squad. the post is for 5 years!!! at the moment he plays for lancashire county 3rd team, so he is a decent standard, but can you imagine how good he will be when he comes back- if he ever does!! i will try to find out how he is doing and let you know if anyone is interested, mabeye he will give us some secret chinese badminton tips!!!
wow. chance of a lifetime indeed. very excited for your friend. as i know, the Chinese squad do get internet connection in their bedrooms. maybe you can ask your friend to join BC and have him post some pictures and maybe even have him invite the Chinese players here? it will be a good way for them to practice their English, by communicating with their fans in English.
r u serious.... thats not fair :crying: ! I might teach english in Macau next summer hopefully get to train with some good ppl....
That's amazing. I, along with my coach and other players from my club, were supposed to go to China this past year to train, but it didn't end up happening because the head coach of our club is retiring, and our coach had to be there while the head coach was away. That would have been probably the greatest experience of my life thus far.
Well, unlike your BC name, your friend's opportunity is "well-timed" . That's amazing! How the heck did he land the gig . What level players will he be teaching English? Regardless, I would assume he'd be in pretty lofty company, badminton-wise. Congrats to him and we look forward to your updates
as far as i can gather, he will be training with the main players and teaching them english. i think it will be pretty hectic due to the olympics in 2008, he has gone over at just the right time!! if he is still alive, that is!!! i can only imagine how hard they train every day.
Not sure how the accent is going to sound like, though. Perhaps some of the team are Manchester United fans? That would give them an incentive to learn. http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2005/01/11/learn_mancunian_voices_feature.shtml Good luck to your friend. Teach them proper english though. The word "bath" is pronounced "baarth" and not "baf" etc haha
my friend is from the north of england with a thick wigan accent. god help the chinese players. here in wigan we speak like this... aw rite, ows thay doin, wat duz tha want thee.
I wonder if the Chinese Badminton authority take accents into account before employing someone. Surely it's part of their research process.
Talking about accents, in Singapore the education authorities are now considering to hire native English speakers to teach in our schools. There is now a debate whether it is advisible. Some said the standard of spoken English here has deteriorated. Now "Singlish", which is mixture of English spoken in very heavy Singaporean accent, itself very Chinese dialect-based because of the largely Chinese population, with Malay words thrown in for flavour. It appears that many children are still weak in the English grammar and if this continues, our leaders fear that outsiders may not be able to understand the Singlish that Singaporeans use at the world stage such as for business with the western countries. My fear is that, as described in some posts, the so-called native speakers themselves speak differently, depending on which part of the UK they hail from. Some may not be well versed with the English grammar for teaching purposes. There will be different accents, unless we choose language teachers who speak, say Queen's English. I would prefer we engage English lecturers to train our own teachers to teach proper English, which we used to have at one stage. Our own teachers know our local kids better. Our kids may find it difficult to understand the foreign teacher whose accent they may find funny, to begin with. Singlish accent itself is not really that bad as it has its own identity, provided the correct use of grammar is emphasized in our schools. And intonation, the correct stressing of syllables, are taught to the teachers who themselves impart to the school children.
i can imagine one of the chinese team doin an interview at say the Beijing 2008 olympics where millions of baddies and non-baddies watching, jaws dropping around the world: CNN reporter: "So what did you think of that match there XXF?" XXF: "wuz awrite, ada bituva ard taam the'e in tha firs raand, yeah..." reporter: "..." mis-timed, feel free to correct my impression of wigan at any time ^^
