Busytown: Sons for the Return Home
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Every time we came home to visit we'd sit in the departure lounge quietly listening to the people around talking .... it was wonderful
Heh - I do that, or things like it. Even after just a few months away the departure lounge on a flight to Auckland is mesmerizing.
Coming back to Auckland in the mid 1980s, after three years away, when I boarded an Air NZ flight and was offered a Steinlager I had to fight back a very happy tear.
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Sacha, in reply to
offered a Steinlager I had to fight back a very happy tear
Nah, that's just wrong, eh. :)
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My impression is that there was also a shift in Chinese Government Policy away from sending students abroad for English or international education to one of providing better quality services in China. This is more speculative though, as based on anecdotal evidence of teachers choosing China over Sth Korea and Japan.
Regarding promoting education:
As of April 2011 a 24% rise in Chinese students studying abroad. It’s beyond the scope of the Chinese Government, with more money families have more options.
Primarily due to:
Which in turn could be in part due to:
Which despite theoretically meaning:
As I’m sure you’re aware Recordari, this is inadequate and below the current requirements of most internationally recognized universities and possibly influential in the drop off of NZ universities in international rankings. There is a perception of New Zealand as providing a second tier education at warehouse prices.
There are certainly more international education providers in China now, But at the tertiary level they are largely inferior branded versions of the product offered by their western franchises, offering semi-internationally recognized qualifications for exorbitant prices as gateways to foreign based universities. The international schools are better and their clientele will generally graduate to better ranked foreign universities.
Generally speaking, The attraction of the New Zealand beyond the obvious aesthetics is that it’s a second chance for Chinese students who failed the local university entrance exam or were unable to complete highschool, and it’s seen as a soft touch for immigration, serving as the perfect springboard for emigration to more attractive countries such as Australia or Canada. Essentially
but our ability to provide a supportive, welcoming multi-cultural environment seems to have been evolving. It is a strength that’s valuable in many ways.
Isn’t a qualification that sets the prospective student cum job seeker in better steed.
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I’m not sure about the US education system Jolisa, But the main thing I found upon returning to New Zealand from the UK as a child and especially as a teenager was that the local education system was vastly under-demanding so it may be a good time to encourage the young ones into some hobbies. At the very least take a comparative gander over the respective syllabi. If your sons are having to repeat too much material, it can play havoc with their motivation. Potential issues could arise when they start covering new ground again. Keeping them challenged in the meantime would be more conducive to their development. But as I said, I've no clue about the US system, maybe it’s a non-issue.
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I lost the ability to tell the difference when I lived in London – and gained the ability to tell a North Dublin accent from a South Dublin one.
I lost the ability to understand much of New Zealand speech. In Australia. I'd have to struggle and strain often to make sense of what people were saying. But then, I could listen to someone and fairly accurately tell you what part of Sydney they were from, despite having never lived there, and only been in Australia four years. Not everyone has these experiences, of course.
Dropping in this wonderful photoessay, What are Young Chinese Thinking? because it deserves to be shared, and this is a slightly less arbitrary discussion than most.
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Dropping in this wonderful photoessay, What are Young Chinese Thinking? because it deserves to be shared, and this is a slightly less arbitrary discussion than most.
Nice one George, thanks for posting that link. This might also interest you, photos taken by Chinese Uni students. Some of them are gold (WARNING - frat antics - NSFW).
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
I do see Australia as a foreign country. We share remarkably little of each other’s news, and it feels somewhat culturally different when I’m there.
Quite - the thing I find pleasurably disorientating about visiting Australia is that it's just similar enough not to go into full on culture shock but just weird enough to be interesting. Still, no matter where you are the Eurovision Song Contest is horrible but impossible to look away from...
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BenWilson, in reply to
80 million?
No, the 1.2 million that they say were born in Ireland and are living abroad, which gives 18.8% comparing apples with apples. 80 million is 13 times the population of Ireland. It's an interesting number, sure, but you get that when you count everyone with any descent from your country for 3 generations as your own. Still impressive, even then, to increase a population 13-fold in only 2 generations.
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I find accents hard to pick out abroad, including the kiwi. You lose the reference point, and it's comparably hard to achieving perfect pitch in music. If you get a tuning fork, someone with the same accent talking next to them, you'll spot it straight away. But doing it raw, after your ears have been hearing foreign sounds even for only a few days is much more difficult.
Also, just guessing people's accents for fun doesn't really help, unless you actually ask them afterwards. You could just be wrong and not know it. There's quite a range for some accents - the country Ozzie drawl is totally different to the fancy accent of a privately schooled Australian, which can sound almost English. Ozzies will slip back and forth between this one, if they can, depending on the other Ozzies they are with. There are also some differences between the states. Similarly a rural kiwi accent is a lot different to a posh one here. And anyone traveling usually alters their accent somewhat to make it clearer for locals. I think I'd rather pick the difference between a Thai and a Malaysian accent, some of the time, at least the tonal cues are consistent.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Nah, that's just wrong, eh. :)
It was a very, very long time ago. I could've substituted Lion Brown or similar but not much else. A Steinie was the height of Kiwi sophistication then.
It was. Really.
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BenWilson, in reply to
A Steinie was the height of Kiwi sophistication then.
This is scarily true. I still preferred wine cooler, though, preferably from a cask.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
This is scarily true. I still preferred wine cooler, though, preferably from a cask.
And Müller-Thurgau never really recovered from its association with the Equiticorp crowd.
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Sacha, in reply to
A Steinie was the height of Kiwi sophistication then
Thank goodness for the arrival of Macs Gold..
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Sacha, in reply to
wine cooler
Miami vice
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Tamsin6, in reply to
I lost the ability to tell the difference when I lived in London -- and gained the ability to tell a North Dublin accent from a South Dublin one.
That really is impressive. I am married to an Irishman and still struggle to tell a Kerryman from a Dub even, let alone south Dub vs north. Though I can hear there is a difference. Subtleties in Irish accents fascinate me, as I think I would struggle to hear the regional differences in NZ the same way they can be distiguished in a similar size population in Ireland.
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A Steinie was the height of Kiwi sophistication then [mid 1980s].
This is scarily true.
Indeed, but after sponsorship of Round the World yachting and the All Blacks and reducing the price differential with standard beers, by the mid-late 1990s careful observations showed fully half the hoon-tossed bottles littering the streets of Gisborne were Steinlager. It would be an interesting study in marketing strategy and outcomes if it hasn't been done already.
Yes, as a cyclist I had a special interest, more in the fragmentary bottles, but still the green glass was an almost reliable signifier of Steinlager then with numerous labels for sample calibration. Not the same now, so much more choice in that end of the market, so many more greens ... The things you can see from the seat of a bicycle!
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recordari, in reply to
Generally speaking, The attraction of the New Zealand beyond the obvious aesthetics is that it’s a second chance for Chinese students who failed the local university entrance exam or were unable to complete highschool, and it’s seen as a soft touch for immigration, serving as the perfect springboard for emigration to more attractive countries such as Australia or Canada.
I certainly recall this in some cases, but we did see a lot of young Chinese, Korean and Japanese students here to complete a second degree in an English speaking Uni, or with genuine intent to do well. One of the biggest problems with IELTS is the tendency of many schools to just teach the test, not the academic skills required to succeed at tertiary level. It was 8 years ago, as mentioned, but the school I worked at did better than most in providing proper English for Academic Purposes courses, and over the 9 years there, students tended to do well at Universities after completing usually 6 months to a year of studies. We tended to aim at IELTS 6.5 or 7 too, which helped a bit.
Anyway, thanks for all the updated information as I haven't been immersed in this for some time.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Still, no matter where you are the Eurovision Song Contest is horrible
Hey, watch it there, young man!
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
As a business option, NZ universities could offer some 100-level courses with Mandarin as the teaching language? That would allow Chinese kids with a poor grasp of English to start giving us money while learning enough English to do the usual classes in the second year.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
I'd still caveat that with leaving out the car or motorbike.
Depends how 'custom' (and therefore emotinally attached) it is.
I have a friend who brought his old matchless over in a container years ago, and still hasn't got round to putting it on the road, but he doesn't regret doing it.
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Brigid and I play a game on the train in Bangkok sometimes to kill a moment - you see an antipodean (they stand out strongly) and try to pick whether they're Australian or New Zealanders.
I used to play a similar game when travelling round Indonesia and strolling on the beaches. Picking the nationality of the tourist group I was walking past. The English were embarrasingly easy, being round and red with a tendency to waddle.
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I went to a course on teaching international students a couple of weeks ago, and got some fascinating insights from other staff members who had come here as international students. One woman from Guatemala (true!) said that she had arrived with an IELTS of 7.5 (that's very high), to do a Masters, and she struggled to understand anything at all for the first three or four months.
We face a further problem with our international students, in that many of them don't want to be doing business degrees, but their parents insist on them doing it. They get perfectly respectable grades in the subjects they want to study, but their business grades are appalling.
New Zealand tertiary education as a whole is not particularly poorly funded, but the split between support for students and support for institutions is... interesting. We spend a high proportion on students (allowances, interest free loans), at the cost of institutional support. Investment in tertiary institutions has been declining, and now the costs of that decreased investment is starting to show in our falling rankings. However, there are more students, or votes, than there are staff, or votes.
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Sometime last year I came to the sudden realisation that British accented English now sounded normal to me. It happened in the middle of the working day and it mildly amused and confused my English colleagues. However I am still not quite sure what I meant by that comment.
I do also share the fear that my accent is either now, or on its way to a halfway house of not British and not Kiwi. Not much I can really do about that I guess, except move back to Oamaru asap!
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Hey, watch it there, young man!
What happens on holiday, stays on holiday. That's all I'm saying. :)
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
One woman from Guatemala (true!) said that she had arrived with an IELTS of 7.5 (that’s very high), to do a Masters, and she struggled to understand anything at all for the first three or four months.
Was that because of language problems or culture shock? I don't mean to sounds like some immigrant-basing arse but if I got dropped in the middle of Guatemala de la Asunción or Beijing I don't think I'd handle it at all well for a while either.
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