Sunday, September 18, 2005
In-flight Language Lessons
But You Have to Skip the Movie, by Yepoka Yeebo for Newsweek.Forget to learn Mandarin before your important business trip to China? Just take an in-flight crash course. Several airlines offer interactive lessons that run on their personalized entertainment systems. Passengers listen, repeat and administer self-tests.¶ 9:26 AM
While the "plane speaking" courses don't promise to have beginners fluent in 20 hours, they do hope to save you at least some desperate gesticulating when you land. "We concentrate on words and phrases that can be used immediately upon arrival," says Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson, whose airline started offering Spanish and English last August (virgin-atlantic.com). Recently, it added Japanese on London-Tokyo flights, and it plans on expanding to Mandarin, Cantonese and French.
Singapore Airlines has just launched Berlitz Word Traveler, which offers 11 languages, with plans to add nine more languages by the end of the year. Set up like a game, Word Traveler teaches numbers, dates, simple words and dialogue, and gives pronunciation tests. Travelers who finish a course get a certificate, so you can prove you passed with flying colors.
