 Treating customers just like family
I learned English in a formal setting. As with many other students, my pronunciation still needed to be improved. After finishing my studies in English, I got a job working with tourists. I used to greet women by saying, "Good morning, madam."
After I helped them with their concerns, the women would leave politely, often with a smile on their faces. I felt like I was doing an excellent job at customer service.
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Having trouble memorizing vocabulary?
You obviously need to learn new words in order to speak a language. Even though that may seem straightforward compared to learning how to actually put those words together in sentences, it's really not as simple as it appears. Memorizing words is difficult, even just memorizing words in the short term. But long-term memorization takes a lot of practice and repetition.
There are a few different ways to "lodge" a word in your memory, and some methods may work better for you than others. The best thing to do is to try a few until you find the one that works best for you. Read more...
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Every once in a while, when the work day is slow (a seemingly rare occurrence these days), my colleagues and I enjoy talking about different aspects of language. One topic that has come up before is how it sometimes feels as if our personalities alter a bit when we switch to a different language.
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 Chinese characters
In last month's Did you know?, you learned that Chinese
is not quite as difficult as it might seem at first. After all, it doesn't use plurals, articles, gender, or even verb conjugation.
Of course, even with that in mind, Chinese can still be pretty intimidating, especially when dealing with the writing system.
However, even though a Chinese character may look complex (and don't get me wrong, it certainly can be!), each character is actually made up of different, smaller parts that can help you figure out the meaning or at least pronunciation of the entire character as a whole.
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