Australia Makes Asian Language Learning a Priority 230
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government came a step closer to formalising its plans to make Asian language study compulsory for schools this week. It has released a draft curriculum for public consultation which reveals plans to include Indonesian, Korean and french language in the curriculum. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard publicly stated in September 2012 that in response to the "staggering growth" in the region, the government would be instigating 25 key measures to strengthen and exploit links with Asia. The plan includes the requirement that one third of civil servants and company directors have a "deep knowledge," thousands of scholarships for Asian students, and the opportunity for every schoolchild to learn one of four "priority" languages- Chinese, Hindi, Japanese or Indonesian."
Re:Exactly Backwards (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Learning is great (Score:5, Informative)
Learning is surely great in all forms.
. . . plus by learning the language . . . you also learn the culture. And be able to understand it better. That makes real business sense.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Learning is great (Score:5, Informative)
Abram de Swaan identified a list of twelve "supercentral languages" that he believed serve as extremely common bridges among speakers of different languages in their native dialects. If one considers the region that people in English-speaking countries typically think of as "Asia," four of the supercentral languages are native to that region: Chinese (specifically Mandarin), Hindi, Malay (of which Indonesian is a dialect), and Japanese. This list was probably a strong factor when they were deciding which languages to use.
Geographically speaking, there are actually two other languages on the list that are native to the Asian continent: Arabic and Russian. I doubt, however, that the people drawing up these lists considered the regions these languages are from to be "real Asia." Make of that what you will.
(Incidentally, the other six languages are English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili).
Re:Exactly Backwards (Score:5, Informative)