Foreign students mastering Nu Zillund tongue-twisters

Fahami Al Weny gets to grips with Kiwi. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

An Auckland language school has introduced a programme to help international students speak Kiwi English.

Methods used by the New Zealand Radio Training School to train its broadcasters are being used to teach foreign students at the National Technology Institute to say "fush and chups", "fried iggs" and "Nu Zillund".

Indonesian student Fahami al Weny, 24, who was among the first to take the course, said it had helped him understand New Zealanders better, and hoped he would be able to speak with a Kiwi accent in future.

Institute director Isaac Phua said: "Many of the international students have come with the intention of gaining residency and settling in New Zealand, this learning to speak Kiwi English is one way we can help them integrate more easily.

"The biggest barrier faced by immigrants and international students seeking employment is their accent, and a lack of Kiwi experience. The speech training is aimed at helping make them more employable."

Kenneth Leong, national co-ordinator for International Languages Week, said that while it was good for international students and immigrants to learn to understand Kiwi, it also showed how unaccommodating New Zealanders were to foreign accents.

"It just demonstrates how New Zealand is not open to foreign languages, or even to those who speak English differently to themselves," Mr Leong said.

A Massey University academic said New Zealand was "failing badly" in getting Kiwis to learn a foreign language - and this was affecting the country's ability to trade internationally and integrate immigrants successfully. Professor Paul Spoonley, the university's regional director at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said International Languages Week - being launched in Auckland today - was a timely reminder on the importance of learning languages "that are important to us globally".

Local Government Minister Rodney Hide will launch International Languages Week this afternoon in Parnell.

"Great trading nations, such as Singapore, promote languages that are important internationally, and languages that are spoken by large communities that make up their societies but, leaving the two official languages aside, we really don't have anything by way of an official language policy in New Zealand," Professor Spoonley said. "These people will have an added economic advantage when they want to do business or seek employment in a global environment."

He said many New Zealanders thought English was enough because it "is the language of the internet", but in the "real world" languages such as Mandarin and Spanish were just as important.

"If you want a practical example of multiculturalism, it would be in the promotion of multilingualism - but as a country, we still don't seem to value multilingualism."

He said the longer immigrants lived here, the more likely they were to lose their heritage language.

LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Top seven spoken foreign languages
Chinese: 131,466
Samoan: 81,033
French: 53,757
Hindi: 44,589
Tongan: 29,496
Korean: 26,967
Spanish: 21,645
(source: Statistics New Zealand 2006 Census)

Top seven foreign languages at school

French: 28,245
Japanese: 18,157
Spanish: 10,900
German: 6251
Latin: 2339
Samoan: 2311
Chinese: 1891

(source: Ministry of Education)