You run a small Japanese company. You have patiently grown the business on a
tight budget. Every decision - whether to
hire a new member of staff, where to rent an office, from whom to purchase your
raw materials - has been taken with painstaking care. You know that most businesses fail within the
first few years. You have been running
at a loss, running up debts that you hope to pay back when the business matures.
And now along comes a critical opportunity. A foreign company is interested in buying
your products. The success or failure of
this deal could make or break your business. So you send your most trusted employee to give
a sales pitch and conduct the negotiations. It will have to be done in English, of
course. But don’t worry. All of your employees are fully trained in
business English. They did an on line
course. The course providers promised
that junior high-school level English was fine, if only you knew how to use
it. It promised to give your employees
sufficient business English skills from only 1,500 words. So what could go wrong?
Now that scenario might sound rather fanciful. But I haven’t entirely made it up. A good friend of mine who works for a small
Japanese company was recently asked to do further business English
training. The training course used only
junior high-school level grammar and vocabulary. The course claimed that a knowledge of just
1,500 English words was enough for dealing with normal business situations. Their argument was that business English is
mostly spoken by non-native speakers.
For a Japanese company, you might be dealing with a Chinese or Korean
company, whose staff also speak English as a second language. So, unlike native speakers, they will tend to
use simple sentences and vocabulary.
That argument does make some sense. I have occasionally taught students who were
obsessed with perfecting an American accent.
If a Japanese person is speaking to a Chinese person, I don’t see why
either of them has to have an American accent.
But they do need to know a lot of words that junior high-school students
don’t study in Japan. Could a typical
junior high-school student explain why one piece of financial software was more
efficient than another?
One of the example sentences being taught
by the business English course was, “I want a nice apple.” I am struggling to think of a business
situation in which this sentence might be useful. Your company makes apple juice? An apple farmer tries to sell you some apples
that aren’t nice?
[a, the, an, one, two, is, I, and, nice,
apple]
That’s ten words. You only have 1,490 left!
There are no shortcuts to learning a
language. Don’t believe in magic
solutions such as tapes which teach a language in your sleep, English courses
which can be learned without any effort, etc.
On the other hand, if you are just going on holiday or learning English
for fun, knowing ten words can be much better than knowing none at all.
[Sorry, Thank you., I don’t understand., Yes,
Please, No, Beer]
With only these ten words, you can have a
great holiday.
And here are some more words...
Vocabulary:
raw materials – materials before they have
been processed – for example, in a paper factory, wood may be a raw material
painstaking – needing a lot of care, effort
and attention to detail
to run up debts – to accumulate debts, or
money that you owe to another person
(for a business) to mature – (for a
business) to move from an early stage to a later stage of development
to make or break – to be either a great
success or very damaging failure
a sales pitch – a speech, demonstration
etc. in order to sell something
fanciful – unrealistic; imaginary
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