The show has become popular in China by teaching words like “booger” and “oopsie” and phrases like “muffin top”.
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Lisa Mullins: Catchy slogans and phrases in one language don’t always translate easily into another, and that’s why for millions of Chinese who want to learn English, this voice is so helpful.

Jessica Beinecke: [speaking Chinese]

Mullins: This is the voice of Jessica Beinecke who’s a 24-year-old American. She hosts OMG! Meiyu. OMG! Meiyu is a daily three minute video that’s produced by voice of America. It’s aimed at helping Chinese speakers learn American English. Jessica Beinecke, translate OMG! Meiyu for us, what does it mean?

Jessica Beinecke: OMG! Meiyu means OMG! American English.

Mullins: Oh, American English is the Meiyu part?

Beinecke: Meiyu, yes, American English.

Mullins: Yeah, and you know, the energy you just put into answering that question is the same energy that’s on your videos. How long have you been doing the show and how did you get so excited about teaching American English to Chinese speakers?

Beinecke: Oh, wow, we started posting episodes July 27, so it’s just over four months now, oh, three months now. And at our three month anniversary this Monday we passed the four million hits mark on the Chinese web hosting site, Youku.

Mullins: How did the word get out?

Beinecke: We have a few other English teaching accounts here at Voice of America. They helped retweet my videos in the beginning, but this one show that is about all the yucky gunk that comes out of your face really resonated with everybody and you know, this human emotion, you never know what’s really gonna catch on.

Mullins: Let’s play a little bit of that video now. This is the one that you said went viral, ah, the yucky gunk video.

Beinecke: …all of the gunk that comes out of your face. [speaking Chinese] sleepies, [speaking Chinese], ear wax, [speaking Chinese] booger, [speaking Chinese] annoying. You are being such a booger!

Mullins: I love that last part, you are such a booger. Did that go over well?

Beinecke: It did go over well and I think with great influence comes great responsibility, and after I taught that phrase I mentioned you probably don’t want to say that to your parents, just use that among friends…and it’s just a funny way of saying someone’s being annoying.

Mullins: Yes, a little cultural context is helpful here. Okay, let’s have another example of what you’re teaching the Chinese. In this case it’s telling them how to apologize.

Beinecke: I apologize, I apologize [speaking Chinese].

Mullins: And you go on because you like to focus on slang, with another way to apologize.

Beinecke: My bad [speaking Chinese].

Mullins: Now, my bad is cool. I guess badonkadonk is cooler, but I don’t even know what that means. You have a whole video about badonkadonk. What is it?

Beinecke: A badonkadonk is your rear end. One OMG! episode I focused on working out, so I talked cardio and I talked different sit-ups, and I said you know, my badonkadonk is getting a little bit big, I’ve gotta work out a little more. And…0

Mullins: Thanks for being such a good American ambassador, Jessica.

Beinecke: You know, all young people I think in America know badonkadonk, and I think it’s a funny enough phrase that they really appreciated it.

Mullins: And so did you have to give some context to that? I mean when you’re translating American slang, muffin top and oopsy into Chinese, you’d think there’d be something lost in translation.

Beinecke: Yeah, I think muffins also are sort of foreign to our Chinese viewers, so I included a little graphic there, a muffin and then an actual muffin top. And so…

Mullins: How did you include that, maybe you should describe it.

Beinecke: I found graphics online and just threw them up there.

Mullins: I thought you’d brought in a friend with a muffin top.

Beinecke: Right next to each other.

Mullins: Yeah.

Beinecke: Oh, no, I didn’t bring in a friend or anything, but yeah, they think these phrases are really funny and I always remind them that this is fun English to learn.

Mullins: Now, you’re a midwesterner. Where are you from?

Beinecke: I’m from Ohio.

Mullins: How did you learn such at least what it sounds like, convincing Chinese, Mandarin?

Beinecke: I started freshman year at Ohio University coming out of marching band in high school. And I sort of banded music for journalism and I was looking for a new instrument. And it turned out that Mandarin really, really fit. The four tones in Mandarin are just gorgeous and the melodic language, and it really just sort of sparked my passion for music in a weird way.

Mullins: The four tones you call it an instrument, like the four tones, give us the four.

Beinecke: The four tones, so the word ma, you can say ma, ma, ma, and the fourth tone is down, which is ma. And so you can call someone a mother, which is ma, or a horse, ma, very easily. So you gotta be careful.

Mullins: Jessica Beinecke hosts Voice of America’s OMG! Meiyu program and Jessica, we’re gonna feature links to OMG! Meiyu, including that yucky gunk episode. And also we have several more stories on the Chinese language and on the latest edition of our weekly podcast called The World in Words. That’s all at theworld.org. Jessica Beinecke, good luck and how do I say thanks in Chinese?

Beinecke: [speaking Chinese]

Mullins: [speaking Chinese] Thank you.

Beinecke: [speaking Chinese], Lisa.

Mullins: This is theworld.pri, Public Radio International.

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Coming to a new nation as a refugee — adjusting to a new language, culture, and climate — is always a struggle. But now in Fargo, N.D. many refugee parents are being manipulated by their children.

Fargo police officer Cristie Jacobsen works with refugee children (Photo: Fargo Police Department)

“The children didn’t like it,” said Jacobsen. “Because they had gotten used to drinking it, they enjoyed the caffeine splurge and things like that and so it became a power struggle.”

To help deal with problems like this, and explain to refugee adults and children what the law and police can and cannot do, the Fargo Police assigned Jacobsen to work as a cultural liaison officer with new refugees. She meets regularly with the refugee and immigrant community, holding workshops and visiting their schools and places of business. Close to 4,000 refugees have moved to the Fargo area since 1997. That’s about 2 percent of the greater population. The refugees have come from places like Bosnia, Liberia, Iraq, and most recently a large influx from Bhutan.

The children have one huge advantage over their parents: They’re able to master English much more quickly.

“The kids get to know the language and the culture, before the parents do. And the parents are terrified,” said Vonnie Sanders, who directs the English language learners program for the Fargo School District.

Sanders said when refugee children arrive in Fargo, they’re quickly placed in school; their parents go to work at isolating jobs such as cleaning hotel rooms or working in chicken processing plants. The parents do get some English instruction, but Sanders said the classroom time isn’t adequate.

“It’s two-and-a-half, three hours in the morning. That isn’t enough for them, four days a week,” said Sanders. “The other thing is then when it comes to the end of the month, it’s $2.50 to ride the bus, they can’t afford to get there. Or, they have a sick kid, they can’t go.”

In Fargo, there’s another barrier to English-learning: the winters.

“Fargo, we actually won some national competition of being the worst weather city in the US,” said Cristie Jacobsen. She pumped her fist and added with an insincere cheer, “Yea, us.”

Winter temperatures regularly dip down to below 10 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit in Fargo. “And then with our wind-chill factor, we can get into negative 30, or negative 40,” said Jacobsen.

Now imagine you’re a refugee from Rwanda or Sudan. And you don’t have a car because you came to this country with nothing. And there’s no direct bus to class.

“And so, you’ll see them just bundled up like little Eskimos, walking a couple of miles to English class and back to their homes,” said Jacobsen.

Heather Ranck teaches at the University of Mary in North Dakota (Photo: Heather Ranck)

“And time after time, in every class I would see a fairly negative article from the students about why there were so many immigrants moving into the community, a lack of understanding about who refugees were or why they were here,” said Ranck.

This got Ranck thinking: there has to be a better way. She helped raise money through the local Rotary Club to provide alternative places and times for refugees to learn English. They’re also using the classrooms and resources of the local school system, which the Fargo school district is providing.

In an evening class I visited, about a dozen refugees from Bhutan and Ethiopia were hunched over computers, looking at colorful images on the screens. They were using software from the company Rosetta Stone. A voice described the photo, then the students repeated a syllable, a word, or a phrase into a microphone. The students were paired with volunteer tutors from the Rotary Club.

The students were engaged and seemed to be learning, but the software wasn’t perfect. One woman was trying to say the last syllable of the word “children,” repeating the syllable “dren” over and over for about 30 seconds.

Refugee learning English in Fargo (Photo: Heather Ranck)

I spoke with several refugees about their experience learning English, unable to go too in-depth with my questions, because, not surprisingly, they don’t speak much English. Still, I asked Bedha Adhikari from Bhutan: What was better, the classroom or the computer?

“Easier in the computer,” said Adhikari. “Because we listen to the sound and accent, that is why it is easier to understand.”

Rosetta Stone has been used successfully with school children. The US government and military also utilizes the language immersion software. But there haven’t been any definitive studies that show how well the software works with refugees. But local Rotarian Heather Ranck provided this unscientific assessment: “I think it is working.”

When Ranck says “it is working,” she’s talking about more than just the software. She says it’s working because local volunteers are interacting with the new immigrants. And they’re creating connections between communities.

Ranck said eventually the Fargo Rotary Club would like to offer the computer-based program in more locations throughout the area, at places like local libraries. The limiting factor, however, as always, is cost. The software is expensive. Right now, the Rotary Club only has funds for about 15 software licenses.

Other than its dialect, the former coal-mining town we want you to name is famous for its rugby league, a Heinz baked beans factory, and a Hollywood celebrity who spent his early childhood there, Sir Ian McKellen.

So, which town in Lancashire are we talking about? Answer: Wigan!

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Martin Bradley of the British IT company Athernet Web Solutions. Bradley hails from Wigan himself. He and his colleagues have developed a mobile phone app to translate the dialect of “Wiganese” into plain English.

No-one in Britain seems satisfied with the state of the nation. There’s finger-pointing galore: at the looters, the police, the Murdoch press, the politicians, the footballer-celebrities. And, of course, at the immigrants.

As of late 2010 the UK requires applicants for some immigrant visas to take a proficiency test in the English language. If you want to settle in Britain, the logic goes, you should learn the language. Cities should not be multilingual mosaics. Everyone should speak the common language.

Try telling that to the 58-year-old Indian husband of Rashida Chapti. Chapti, a naturalized British citizen, was born in India. Her husband still llives there. Before the language requirement came into effect, securing a resident and work visa for her husband would have been virtually automatic, as it is in the many nations that have family reunification immigration policies. But in Britain, Chapti’s husband must now prove that he has a basic command of English.

Chapti’s husband lives in a remote village, more than 100 miles from the nearest city, where he could take English lessons. In any case, she says, he wouldn’t be able to afford the lessons. Chapti is suing the British government under the European Convention of Human Rights.

Also, in Britain, the town of Barnsley has starting fining people for swearing in public. Heck, yeah. Not sure how widely that’s being enforced amid the riots and looting (which, I hasten to add, have not spread to Barnsley).

In Alaska, meanwhile, no-one’s too worried about swearing. (I briefly lived in Alaska, where I learned a great deal about American English expletive usage.) Some Alaskan children are learning a language. But not English, which they already speak.

These kids are the American-born children of Sudanese refugees. They are learning their parents’ native Nuer language. Some may end up speaking it at home. Some may use it if they visit their parents’ homeland. Some may never use it outside their Anchorage classroom.

Finally in the pod this week, a conversation with Greg Barker, director of Koran by Heart.This is the story of three children who take part in a competition to memorize and publicly recite the entire Koran.

Hearing the interview reminded me of an encounter I had a few years ago in Bangladesh. I visited a madrassa, a religious school. The school building was essentially a countryside shack. Inside were a few tiny classrooms, each with a dozen or more students crammed inside.

I talked with several students, including one who told me of his primary educational goal: to memorize the Koran. He recited a lengthy segment of it for me– in Arabic, not his native tongue, Bengali. He’s the student on the far left in the picture below.

I also talked to the head of the madrassa. He said that although this was a religious school, most parents who sent their kids here weren’t especially devout. The choice, like in so many parts of the world, was between underfunded, sub-par government schools and religious school like this one.

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[photos: Wiki Commons, Annie Feidt; Patrick Cox]

Publisher and dictionary-maker Ramakrishnan (Photo: Alex Gallafent)

Another 10 million speak a different form of the language in Sri Lanka.

In south India at least, Tamil is at a crossroads.

It has ‘so many problems,’ says Mr. Ramakrishnan in Chennai, formerly known as Madras.

“Problems in terms of meaning. Problems in terms of forms of a word. Problems in terms of syntax.”

Ramakrishnan is a man on a mission: to standardize modern Tamil.

“We don’t have a comprehensive grammar of modern Tamil. The last grammar was written in the 12th century,” he says.

That’s not to say Tamil is an endangered language. All those millions of people aren’t going to suddenly stop speaking Tamil anytime soon.

Still, it is struggling.

Written Tamil is different to the spoken Tamil people use every day. Tamil shares that feature with several other languages, notably Arabic.

For many, writing in Tamil can be off-putting. Ask someone to try and they’ll respond, “‘Oh no, I can’t write Tamil’,” says Ramakrishnan.

“The reason he says this is because subconsciously he thinks if he writes it should conform to the classical standards.”

Sadanand Menon is a well-known writer in Chennai. He argues that Tamil has become lost in a sense of nostalgia which does not enable it to be a modern language.

Menon says that after the British left India, local politicians used the centuries-old classical Tamil of epics and royalty to define a proud regional identity.

Since then politics has moved on. But day-to-day Tamil hasn’t.

“So like if we were discussing this instrument that you’re holding, in Tamil, then just about everything that is part of your radio equipment–recorder, your microphone, your earphones—for everything I’ll have to use English words. Tamil has got locked in the past and hasn’t found a device to describe what is happening around them at the moment,” he says.

That’s reminiscent of the challenge Hebrew faced at the turn of the 20th century. It couldn’t describe the modern world either.

Now it’s a fully-functioning modern language–and classical Hebrew is a different animal altogether.

Arguably it took the building of a nation to produce such a radical shift. But there’s no such impulse for Indian Tamils, who got their own state within India in 1969: Tamil Nadu.

Besides, now they’re hungry for something else: English.

English words are scattered across Tamil movies and songs. Sadanand Menon rolls his eyes as he recalls choruses like this:

“Shakalaka baby, shakalakababy, will you fall in love with me?”

But it’s not just pop culture. English is infiltrating everyday life too.

Ramakrishnan worries that people in Tamil Nadu–especially the poorly educated–know neither English nor Tamil very well, and get by only with a limited mash-up of the two.
He says you can’t even give directions to a local cab driver without using English.

“So today if I tell my driver ‘turn right’ in Tamil, he will not understand. I must use the words ‘right’, ‘left’ and ‘straight’,” he says.

The local government has been trying to improve Tamil’s status. A new law requires business signs to be written in Tamil as well as English–the same kind of thing happened years ago in French-speaking Quebec.

And official committees have invented thousands of new words–although it’s not clear they’re being used.

Then again, between Tamil and English, people are getting on OK. English words often gain new meanings in Tamil: ‘assault’, for example, has come to mean ‘casual.’

Plus, in the last couple of decades there has been an explosion of contemporary Tamil fiction–those books are written in an updated form of the language.

But that kind of writing is the exception. The general standard of written Tamil isn’t very high.
And so, in purely economic terms, its value is limited. The language can’t take your business around the world, like English, or even across India like Hindi.

To do that, Ramakrishnan says, Tamil needs clarity and consistency.

“We don’t have a grammar, we don’t have a thesaurus, we don’t have a good English-Tamil dictionary. We need so many things.”

For years he’s been building his own Tamil dictionary, painstakingly charting the modern use of the language. Take the word for ‘put’. That one word and its 54 shades of meaning in Tamil took him weeks.

And Ramakrishnan wonders, “If you have to spend nearly one month on one word, what word do you call it except madness?”

Maybe, maybe not. No language can be modernized in isolation. Along with the challenge of English, the Tamil spoken in India has to contend with, say, how the language is used in Sri Lanka, and how it’s morphing online.

But as Ramakrishnan ticks off elements of Tamil grammar, it’s hard to argue that a few rules along the way can help.

In reality, there is no such language requirement in China. Nor is there one for immigrants to the United States. The only language proficiency test in the United States is for citizenship.

But there is now such a test in Britain.

It has been introduced by Britain’s Conservative-led government, which has vowed to tighten immigration and reverse policies of multiculturalism.

“Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we’ve encouraged different cultures to live separate lives apart from each other, and apart from the mainstream,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in May. “We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

Cameron’s government has introduced a new English language proficiency test for some would-be immigrants.

Anyone applying for a visa for long-term residency— roughly equivalent to a U.S. green card— will now be tested to make sure they have a basic grasp of English.

As a result, Rashida Chapti, a naturalized British citizen, cannot get a visa for her 58-year-old husband, who, like her, was born in India.

Chapti said if her husband was younger, it would have been different. “If he’d come [to Britain] earlier, he would have learned English. But now he’s old.”

Chapti is suing the British government on human rights grounds. She’s essentially arguing that’s she’s being deprived of the right to be with her family.

Aside from the language issue, her husband meets all the other requirements to qualify for a visa.

Mian Myat, a local councillor from Leicester, the city where Chapti lives, said Chapti’s husband cannot reasonably be expected to take English lessons before he arrives in Britain.

For one thing, he lives in a remote village where no-one speaks English.

“He would have to travel something like 180 miles just to take these lessons,” said Myat.

Myat said Chapti’s husband would need to take at least 40 lessons to pass the test, and that would cost him “something like 15 times his annual salary.”

Family reunification is at stake. It’s a principle that’s been enshrined in British— and US— immigration law for decades. But under the new rule, Rashida Chapti and her husband don’t qualify for it.

Conservative member of parliament Dominic Raab supports the new rule.

“Of course one feels sympathy for the Chapti family but I think the government policy is right,” he said.

“Coming to Britain is a privilege, not a right [that carries] certain responsibilities. One of those is to learn enough English to get by in the community”

Raab is particularly annoyed that Chapti’s lawyers have invoked the European Convention on Human Rights. Many British politicians resent European laws that supersede their own.

But in rejecting multiculturalism, the British government’s rhetoric is actually in line with many on the European mainland, notably Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” and that everyone living in Germany should learn German.

Some of Mizuki’s manga narratives also deal with his experience as a soldier in World War II. And one of his most famous Soin Gyokusai Seyo! (Translated as Onward towards Our Noble Deaths) has just been published in North America (Drawn + Quarterly, 2011). But it’s not like the super-hero stuff you’ll find in classic American war comics.

Sgt. Rock is one of those classic characters of war comic books in which fantasy meets reality. After all, he used to shoot down Nazi warplanes with just a submachine gun.

The war comics of Shigeru Mizuki are very different. They’re more like poetry meets reality. Think Terrence Malick’s 1998 war movie “The Thin Red Line” and the philosophy of war expressed by the hard-nosed Sgt. Walsh played by Sean Penn. Remember Sgt. Walsh berating the lower ranking Private Witt for going AWOL?

“What difference you think you can make, one single man, in all this madness?” Mizuki askes. “If you die, it’s going to be for nothing. There’s not some other world out there where everything’s going to be okay. There’s just this one.”

That’s the same vision sketched out in pen and ink by Shigeru Mizuki in “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.” Only, for the Japanese soldiers he portrays, the vision is even worse.

Mizuki’s manga is set during a final and seemingly unwinnable campaign in New Guinea in World War II. The story centers on the agony faced by a Japanese platoon of soldiers whose commander orders them on a suicide mission. He sends them into battle and tells them national honor depends on them dying. They must not return home alive.

It’s a grim tale, told with a peppering of humor. It’s not comic relief though. When I met Mizuki at his small studio on the outskirts of Tokyo, he told me that for him and his fellow soldiers in New Guinea, joking was key to their survival.

Surrounded in his office by action figures of his myriad of manga characters that he’s created over 50 years, 89 year-old Mizuki told me that he only wrote what actually happened.

“All the conversations in the book,” he says, “they did take place. It was so boring digging trenches, so we had to have a laugh. Otherwise we wouldn’t have made it. Every single day, it was just digging trenches.”

During the fighting in New Guinea, the Japanese fought the Americans. In one Allied air raid, Mizuki lost his left arm. He was also pitted against his own ruthless superior officers, and the elements.

Writer and manga afficionado Fred Schodt is the author of “Manga Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.” He has met Mizuki several times, and knows his life story better than most.

Schodt says Mizuki and his fellow Japanese soldiers “were eating bugs and grass, they were practically starving. (Mizuki) himself also developed malaria, nearly died, and was nursed back to life in New Guinea by some of the natives.”

Interestingly, it was in New Guinea where Mizuki discovered what would become a lifelong interest in primitive occult practices and folklore, and that in turn fed his heightened interest in Japan’s yokai after the war.

But it was the war itself and Mizuki’s own brutal experience during it that pre-occupied his thoughts when he returned to Japan. Fred Schodt says that when Mizuki finally wrote “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” in 1973, he was motivated by two things.

“He had this built up anger about what he’d experienced in World War II, and he had this drive to sort of tell people about it,” says Schodt. “But it was also occurring at a time when there was a great political convulsion in Japan. Just a few years before he brought out the book, the streets were convulsed with riots, universities were shut, and there was a profound anti-war movement in Japan – anti-Vietnam war, and also by extension, anti-all war.”

Schodt makes the point that after World Word II, Japan was so completely destroyed, there weren’t many people who were in favor of war anyway. But Mizuki was unique in that, as an artist, he used his work to oppose the war.

Shigeru Mizuki's article in The New York Times

That makes “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” an anti-war graphic novel. It challenges the blind obedience within chains-of-command, in this case proud senior officers with life-and-death control over subordinates.

Mizuki conveys his pen and ink messages with a surreal combination of cartoon-like people superimposed against harsh realistic renderings of their environment. That’s one of the trademarks of his style. Caricatures of soldiers, for example, are crushed on their suicide mission by very real looking American tanks. It’s odd but effective.

Mizuki is cited as one of two or three leading innovators of manga in Japan. That role won’t change. But his masterpieces have been overshadowed by volumes of recent pulp manga whose narratives are mostly banal accounts of modern daily life.

Shigeru Mizuki says he wishes that would change. He wants to see more “decent” mangas.

“Mangas with more depth,” he tells me in Japanese. “Normal mangas,” he says with a slight smile. “So many mangas have been ridiculous and yes they do sell. But they need to have more substance.”

Mizuki is working on new material, a story currently serialized in a Japanese magazine. But he’s not written any stories yet based on the tragic events of March 11, although he has commented on the disaster in his own way.

A few days after the earthquake and tsunami, the New York Times published an illustration by Mizuki on its op-ed page. It shows a hand emerging from an eddy at sea, outstretched, grasping for help.

When I asked Mizuki to explain it, he said, “Modern Japan is drowning. It’s lost its sense of traditionalism. Though,” he reflects, “during World War II, Japan might have been too Japanese.” Mizuki believes perhaps Japan is now entering an international era.

Somewhere between being subsumed by the rest of the world, and being too Japanese, Mizuki sees a middle space, where the bright lights of modern Japan don’t blind its citizens from the past. And where a story like the one Mizuki tells in “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” may inspire younger manga artists address Japan’s many current challenges.

By Jason Strother

Education is highly prized in South Korea. Most grade schoolers study English, taught by native speakers flown in from around the globe. But at one school in South Korea, students have been studying with the help of a teacher who didn’t come from abroad. In fact, she was completely assembled in Korea.

Meet Engkey, the Hagjeong Primary School’s newest English teacher. She’s about 3-feet tall and shaped kind of like a penguin.

She’s a robot.

Engkey wheels around the front of the classroom and stops in front of each of the six 4th graders taking part in this educational pilot program. She asks them to repeat English phrases and leads them in song.

Engkey is not entirely a robot. She’s hooked up via teleconference to the Philippines, where an English teacher conducts the class through a video monitor. It’s a kind of outsourcing.

When Engkey speaks, students hear the instructor’s voice, and they see a Caucasian face that appears on Engkey’s retractable LCD panel head.

More than a screen on wheels

But Engkey’s creators say this robot is much more than just a video screen on wheels. Kim Mun-sang, director of the Intelligent Robotics Program at the publicly funded Korea Institute for Science and Technology in Seoul, said Engkey is more like an avatar.

“We can detect the motion of the English teacher. As soon as the teacher moves his or her hand, the robot raises its hand. If the teacher laughs, we can detect a laughing expression. So the robot can do just what the English teacher does,” Kim said.

Engkey also has an autonomous mode, said Kim. The robot is programmed to help students with their English pronunciation, and it plays a little tune when they get a word right.

Saving money

Learning English is all about repetition and that makes a robot an ideal teacher, according to Jang Byoung-ok, the principal at the Hagjeong School. He added there’s another reason to choose robots over foreign teachers. They’re cheaper. Jang said it costs around $40 thousand a year to support a foreign English teacher in Korea; it’s about half the price to build an Engkey and contract with a teacher in the Philippines.

But there are better ways for the government to save money and improve education here, according to Yu Do Hyun, who lectures in English education and pedagogy at Seoul’s Kookmin University.

“We need Korean teachers for beginners and intermediates,” Yu said, adding that Korean teachers know how to teach English to Korean students. English teaching robots would also deprive students of the most basic reason to learn a foreign language, human interaction, Yu said. “Communication is between humans, so they need practice with native, human teachers. Even though they may practice English with the robots, when they meet human native speakers, they will be very nervous, because they haven’t conversed with real speakers.”

Engkey’s creator, Kim Mun-sang, said he’d like to see all Korean schools use robots one day, but isn’t so sure they could ever completely replace human teachers.

In the end, Kim said, it’s the students who will determine whether robots can be successful substitute teachers. At the Hagjeong School, Engkey receives high marks from the students. One 10-year-old boy who goes by the English name is Tony said he was a little nervous about the robot at first, but he liked its singing and dancing.

His classmate, 10-year-old Charlotte, said, “I like the robot teacher better than human teachers.”

Here’s one way to get under a Frenchman’s skin — suggest everyone in France should learn English. France’s education minister Luc Chatel recently announced he wants French children to study English, starting at age three.

That is already happening at some French private schools. At the Babylangue language school in Paris, toddlers sing songs and play games, to get a feel for the sound of English. They are too young to learn grammar and spelling, but they are learning colors and parts of the body.

Caroline Benoit-Levy, a linguist and founder of Babylangue, said it is easier for young children to learn a second language.

Learning a second language early

“Kids who learn a foreign language early in life have a better ability to read and write,” she said. “They have a vocabulary that’s richer compared to monolingual kids. Learning another language helps you get better at your first language. It enhances your mother tongue as well.”

But for most children in France, second language instruction doesn’t start until age seven, and most French people never master any language but their mother tongue. Education Minister Luc Chatel has said that he would like to rectify that.

“The fact the French have not mastered English is a major handicap,” Chatel said in an interview with French public television. He plans to reinvent how English is taught there. Chatel said that would mean starting English classes in nursery school, using the Internet and podcasts as learning tools.

Language of power

French governments have made other attempts over the years to persuade the French to learn English, but none has provoked quite as much anger as Chatel’s recent announcement has.

“It’s totally pointless, if not ridiculous,” said Claude Hagege, a linguist who is one of the loudest critics of Chatel’s plan.

Hagege has won awards in France for his work to promote and maintain a diversity of languages, and he supports the idea of people learning several languages if they can. But Hagege said that language is power, and focusing on English gives too much power to countries like the United States.

“Speaking English is not quite innocent,” Hagege said. “Speaking English is a guilty act because it is the language of very wealthy, industrialized countries. And I think any person who has a minimum of sense of justice cannot accept that because this means domination by the countries whose mother tongue this language is.”

But for the parents who bring their children to study English at Babylangue, language diversity and international power struggles aren’t their primary concern.

One parent there, who didn’t give her name, said “French is a beautiful, melodious language but the fact is 80 percent of people in the world speak English, so it’s absolutely essential to speak it as well as another language.”

That statistic is an exaggeration.

Still, the woman said that she hopes she is giving her daughter a head start in a world where, like it or not, people who speak English often get the best opportunities.

Also, now that millions more Americans have health insurance, clinics and hospitals are under pressure to make their services more accessible to non-English speakers. The pod has a report from Kansas City.

Then, a quick update on World Cup TV viewing habits in the United States with Brad Adgate of Horizon Media. If you think that only Spanish speakers watched Univision, and only English speakers watched ABC and ESPN, think again.

Finally, a conversation with Gregory Levey, whose book Shut Up, I’m Talking has more Facebook fans than Bill Clinton. Gregory has concluded that these are fans not of his book, but of the expression shut up, I’m talking. He’s trying to figure out how — or even whether — to address these followers. It’s the curse of having come up with a catchy, slightly obnoxious book title. In our interview, I suggest to Gregory that for a future book, he might consider the title I Hate When One String of my Hoodie Becomes Longer Than the Other. That title would come with more than 1.5 million Facebook fans, even before publication. Our original, 2008 interview with Gregory Levey, about his adventures writing speeches for the Israeli government is in two parts, here and here. Download MP3

• Dora The Explorer
• Dora La Exploradora (in Spanish)
• Ni Hao, Kai-Lan
• Sesame Street

Read the Transcript
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MARCO WERMAN: A few months ago, a picture began making the rounds online. It’s a mug shot of the children’s TV character, Dora the Explorer. She has a black eye and is holding a sign that states her crime, “Illegal Border Crossing, Resisting Arrest.” Whatever the creator’s intent, the picture has become a prop in the heated American debate over illegal immigration. The World’s Alex Gallafent decided to explore what, if anything, this bilingual cartoon character says about America.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Perhaps you don’t watch Nickelodeon or Nick Jr. Perhaps you don’t have kids. If so, you just might not know who Dora the Explorer is. Dora is a young Hispanic girl. It’s not clear from where exactly, excited about seeing the world, or chasing rainbows, in the company of a menagerie of friends. And she throws in a Spanish word from time to time. So that black eye does seem a little intense.

LYNNE MCVEIGH:  To do this to this character with this kind of an image is saying in a way the ridiculousness of this type of prejudice.

GALLAFENT: Lynne McVeigh is a children’s TV expert at New York University. What’s striking about Dora’s show, she says, is that it’s not really about being Hispanic.

MCVEIGH: She is not actually promoting Hispanic culture. It is the fact that she is Hispanic. So in the adventures she goes on, the culture is not being revealed.

GALLAFENT: It simply is, just as it is in the United States. But Dora the Explorer is a children’s fantasy, not the real world. So should a show like Dora present the world as it actually is? Or the world as it might become? Or the world, perhaps, that it ought to be? Those questions can be asked of any children’s TV. But they’re particularly loaded when you’re talking about a TV show that presents the changing voice of America.

BIG BIRD: A question is what you ask somebody when there’s something you want to find out. Like…

GALLAFENT: Like what are these shows telling our kids? Thanks Big Bird. Sesame Street has one of the longest track records of incorporating diversity in its cast of characters. But the show’s executive producer, Carol-Lynn Parente insists diversity isn’t something they go out and seek. For instance, there’s a long-running character on the show called Rosita. She’s bilingual, speaking Spanish and English.

CAROL-LYNN PARENTE: We didn’t set out to create a character that spoke Spanish. We happened to cast a wonderful puppeteer in Carmen Osbahr who is just a Mexican American. And so she is bilingual and we worked that into her character.

GALLAFENT: What Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer do is present a positive vision of a world in which diversity is considered normal and valuable. Kids get a picture of that created world and then they’re offered a few linguistic and cultural tools to navigate it.

PARENTE: You know we really try at Sesame Street to prepare them for what they’re going to encounter in life.

GALLAFENT: So what are they actually going to encounter? For the majority of Americans, normal is a world in which the dominant language is English. But that’s not necessarily going to be the case forever as demographic shifts help other languages catch up. So ought there to be a principal, chosen language for America? US English, a self-described citizen’s action group in Washington, says “Yes.” It argues that all official business in the United States ought to be conducted in English. Spokesman Tim Shultz says this doesn’t mean other languages losing their place in American life, including in TV shows for young kids.

TIM SHULTZ:  We think that these programs, which are targeted at native English speakers and help them learn another language are fantastic.

GALLAFENT: But, referring to a recent study, he identifies English as the language that makes Americans American.

SHULTZ: Immigrants who speak English in their home are 17 times more likely to self identify as Americans than those who don’t. 17 times more likely. So the link between sort of language and how you see the world, the link between learning English and sort of transferring an immigrant’s allegiance gradually to the United States,  those things are tied together very, very tightly.

GALLAFENT: Of course, many non-English-speaking pre-schoolers aren’t immigrants at all, they’re native-born Americans who happen to speak a language at home that isn’t English. So where does that leave things? English is by far the dominant language in the United States. But Spanish is a language of America too, and it’s growing rapidly. And there are countless others.

KAI-LAN SONG

GALLAFENT: That’s Kai-lan, another animated preschooler. This one the star of a different series from Nickelodeon, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. Kai-lan explicitly introduces the audience to Chinese language and Chinese-American culture. Nickelodeon, in its marketing materials, says “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan reinforces the idea that being bicultural and bilingual is being American.” But if Kai-lan is the Chinese Dora, she has an easier road. Chinese immigration is hardly the hot button issue that immigration from Hispanic countries is. So, maybe we won’t be seeing pictures of Kai-lan with a black eye. By the way, Dora the Explorer airs in the United States in a Spanish version too. The foreign words she helps kids learn are in English. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

WERMAN: For more stories about language, check out our weekly podcast “The World in Words.” In the latest edition, a British politician calls French a “useless” language to learn. He prefers Spanish and Chinese. To hear The World in Words, go to TheWorld.org/Language. This is PRI.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Mark Bowen/Scripps National Spelling Bee

14-year-old Anamika Veeramani won 83rd National Spelling Bee on June 4 by correctly spelling the word stromuhr. It’s one of many English words in the contest that sounded decidedly unEnglish. Other words from this year’s contest: barukhzy (from a Pashto word that went through Russian before becoming English) , tanha (from a Sanskrit-derived Pali word), izar (originally Arabic, then went through Hindi before becoming English) and uitlander (from Afrikaans, which formed it from two Dutch words, plus a Latin-derived combining form).

These are all English words…yes, English words, even if they’re spelled according the rules and pronunciation of other languages. There are many reasons for this mongrelization of English spelling, and that’s where David Wolman comes in.

His book traces the anarchic evolution of English spelling. Unlike some languages, English is barely policed: foreign words — often with their foreign spelling intact — migrate unhindered into English. From time to time, people try to impose order, to simplify or regulate the spelling. Even President Theodore Roosevelt tried (and humiliated himself in failing).

The reason for contact between English and all those languages in the first place is colonialism, first British, then American. American colonialism has been as much cultural as political, which has only encouraged the English language to colonize smaller languages. But the great openness of English is key too: foreign words, with all those loopy spellings, will thrive in English’s marketplace of linguistic ideas, if they are descriptive and original enough. Wolman told me he thinks of English spelling as jazzy: rootsy yet improvised, rule-bending, dangerous and inventive. Most kids don’t like jazz any more than they do spelling.

Finally, we remember John Shepherd-Barron, the man who invented the ATM. He died recently, which gave The World’s Alex Gallafent an excuse to point out that you shouldn’t really say ATM machine or PIN number. Download MP3

In this podcast, our monthly top-five roundup of language stories:

5. Why Google Translate rules (and why human translators shouldn’t feel threatened.) Google, as we’ve come to expect by now, does things differently. And that includes translation. We tend to think of translators as human or robotic. Google Translate combines the best of both. Which is why its translations can be poetic — yes poetic – as well as accurate. Of course, it’s still not difficult to outwit Google Translate, and make it fail. But with each new iteration, it’s getting better. However, it’ll only continue to improve so long as humans keep translating stuff (because Google Translate uses online human translations as its source material). Also, one day, Google may need to clarify that its translation tool, however ubiquitous and accurate it becomes, is no substitute for learning a foreign language. Humans live and thrive — and love and make money — by communicating with each other. And they do that most effectively with their mouths, tongues and vocal chords.

4. Over-egging the job title pudding. The BBC reported that a weight-loss company recently advertized for a Product Testing Associate. This job would consist of eating an extra 400 calories a day, as well as popping a few of the company’s Proactol pills. That got a bunch of readers of the online BBC article to relate their own favorite misleading job titles: modality manager (translation: nurse, not to be confused with mortality manager); coordinator of interpretative teaching (tour guide); welcoming agent and telephone intermediary (receptionist); and field force agent (tax collector). All of a sudden, I’m thinking my job title — language podcast host — isn’t grand or pretentious enough. So henceforth, I will be known as a digitized philology presentation practitioner.

3. Accent discrimination. As a native English speaker with Brit accent (it’s drifted into the Atlantic after 20+ years in the United States) I think I’ve experienced positive accent discrimination. Many Americans have told me they’ll believe anything a Brit tells them — a good, if dangerous, thing for a reporter to hear. However, there are plenty of examples of the other type of discrimination. The latest concerns a US-based native French speaker who’s a senior partner in a global consulting firm. She speaks of being dis-invited to meetings with American clients, because of the fear that her accent would put them off.

2. The rise of Hindi (and English). My Big Show colleague Rhitu Chatterjee told me about an old friend of hers. He was born and raised in New Dehli by a Marathi-speaking mother and a Telugu-speaking father. Because of the language divide, the languages of the household were Hindi and English; Rhitu’s friend neither spoke nor understood the native tongues of either of his parents. That story writ large is the linguistic story of modern India — multilingual marriages, migration to big cities, a big generational shift to Hindi and English. English has now eclipsed Bengali as the the second-most popular language in India, according to recent census analysis, and Hindi continues to dominate.

1. New French words to replace English invaders. The Académie française (pictured) is the jealous protector of all things French: it determines what can and cannot be said and written, even if people often ignore its pronouncements. Often, the Académie finds itself with no alternative but to make up new words, usually when the hoi polloi are using one of those nasty English words (like podcasting). Some officially coined terms stick (logiciel, meaning software); others don’t (frimousse, meaning smiley). Authorities have now taken a new tack: they have turned to the people themselves. Citizens sent in their suggestions for words to replace Anglicisms such as buzz and newsletter. A committee decided which to adopt.

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• Opera Boston
• Facebook Madame White Snake: World Premiere
• Madame White Snake’s study guide
• Cutler Majestic Theatre