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In business, it's always good to mind your language

Prof Piet Naudé.
Columnist.

I have to admit I am a language person. And more and more I am convinced that a strong foundation in language and communication is the key success factor in any field of study and most business practices.

Like many South Africans (except the English speaking ones!) I grew up with three languages and could speak all three - Afrikaans (excellent), Xhosa (good), English (weak) - by the age of five. The moment I went to school, I lost isiXhosa, as it was not deemed serious enough to be included in the curriculum.

But my aunt - a teacher all her life - emphasised that "you should learn english to take the colonial power on in its own language, but you should still vote for the NP". And so I really applied my mind to learn this language of the oppressor well - obviously with the assistance of dedicated teachers.

There was the formidable Mrs Von Broemsen in standard 5 (grade 7), who taught me the difference between "I am finished" (on the rugby field) and "I have finished" (my test). She explained why "it is me" is wrong because the nominative is used with the verb to be. We were required to write an essay a week, which she meticulously marked with a green pen "to give you direction in life".

She was followed in standard six by Mrs Venter, an English woman who almost drove us nuts with her sentence analysis. We wrote whole sentences - each word below the other in those 96 page pink exercise books. And then next to the word, we had to write the analysis: "The cat sits on the table" then became quite tricky. "The" is a definite article governing cat. "Cat" is a noun, singular. "Sits" is a verb, singular, present tense. "On" is a preposition of place. And so forth... for hours and hours.

For my matric year, three of us Afrikaans speaking ones took higher grade English. We had a lazy teacher who let us do all the work by ourselves. He called us "ladies and gentleman" instead of "boys and girls", and said we must interpret the poetry of Wordsworth and the plays of Shakespeare using our imagination. We met late nights after school to read together and sort out the metaphors and allegories and allusions amongst ourselves.

Perhaps our teacher was not so bad after all.

In my days, there were still Latin, German, and in some schools, French. I had to choose between German and accounting. Even in those days they said: "What will you do one day with German other than going to South West Africa (Namibia)? And a language will affect your average so that you will be second in class."

After two weeks of credit and debit and balance sheets, I went to the headmaster and said that I wanted to move to German. I heard them sing German songs during school time and it sounded interesting. My mother was called in and she was fortunately wise enough to let me follow my instincts.

The labour under my english teachers and my aunt did wonders when I later studied Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Dutch and even a bit of reading Spanish. And the little success I had in academic life is chiefly because of years of discipline in the art of hermeneutics. I remember sitting whole university holidays translating texts; and later I could read international classics and found them enriching (even if some required a second reading).

When I now look at senior lecturers and professors and deans coming for interviews, and they do their presentations, I see how language and communication determine their future. When I see how we in the business school prepared tenders, I realised that it was not only about price, but also about presentation and technical detail.

The saddest of all is to see bright young people coming to university with a C or even a B symbol for English, but when they are required to write a logical paragraph, they make one language mistake after another, and struggle to make sense. Then they say, "you are old and do not understand the digital age".

I take that criticism seriously, but cannot see the advantage of having all the virtual communication channels possible, yet still be unable to argue your case without a cut and paste from Wikipedia or Google, or with writing formal examinations in sms style.

That is why a strong language development - first mother tongue and then English (or in future Mandarin?) - is a prerequisite for work, study and life in general.

The more languages the better: "Soveel tale soos jy kan, soveel kere is jy man." (Go and check the meaning in the dictionary - if you have one).


*Prof Piet Naudé is the Director of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Business School. He is also the 2011 Columnist of the Year in the Eastern Region of the Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards, for a column he wrote for The Herald in 2010 titled "Meetings are a waste of time". This article is to inform and educate, not to advise.

 

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This article was originally posted on Sustainable Development Africa Platform

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