beijing okay

As well as learning how to read menus, receipts, bank slips and store signs in Chinese, I'm also learning a bit about my own language and how we Americans actually speak. I'm tutoring this head of a software company named Michael that makes online games that are popular in Asia, but so far have no market in America. (He obviously wants to change this.) The lessons he wants are simple enough: American colloquial English and idiomatic phrases, and not to emulate us, but to understand the way we talk and think. Ultimately, he wants to do a lot of business with Americans.

English is required in Chinese schools, but many Chinese cannot speak English; they can only read with little sense of what anything means or answer grammar questions. There are only a few English language proficiency tests that even require spoken English and none that really focus on American/British culture. So, in turn, Chinese do not understand phrases like "Sorry, I didn't get around to it"or "They have a lot of sense, I'm gonna go with them" or "I'm about ready" and instead they're stuck with "How do you do?"and "I'd like to pay you a visit" or phraseology we no longer use. It's a difficult situation, since a lot of the colloquial English books on the market are woefully outdated or freely mix casual language from multiple eras and American sub-cultures, which offer no real context and are therefore useless.

Even though I've just started with Michael, he likes my lessons enough to bring up the idea of somehow marketing teaching English within a more cultural context. It seems like if you're tenacious, you could somehow make some money with Beijing's English teaching racket.