Good news, your boss asks you to transfer to Brazil. You accept. After having checked your stock of suntan lotion, you turn your attention to language, since you don’t speak a word of Portuguese. What would you like to learn first? To be able to speak a few words and to respond in Portuguese would…
Hospitality and language, they simply go together. There are two aspects to language in the hospitality context, one is emotion, the warm feeling you get when you are greeted in a mutually understandable language, it creates a bond. This feeling is strongest when the hotel guest is greeted in his/her mother tongue. Another aspect is…
Last week I presented Appling Language Apps at the Independent Hotels Amsterdam trade show. It was a great success! To me it was proof that there is a strong interrelationship between hospitality and language skills and that training these skills will take the hospitality you provide as a hotel to a higher level. One thing…
Language teachers, take a step back! Take a step back to allow your students to progress. Speaking a foreign language is a skill, not a science. You improve a skill through practice. While students practise, the role of the teacher becomes one of a coach. Compare the skill of speaking a foreign language to the…
It all started in 2020 while visiting Vietnam. In general the Vietnamese are very friendly and hospitable, however in hotels the receptionists weren’t always proficient when it comes to language skills. This sparked the idea of developing language instruction for this profession. As a language teacher I have always felt some dissatisfaction with the way…
Course material on Appling Language Apps web application has been translated into several languages: English, Arabic, Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and Thai. There two reasons for this. The first one is the fact that all these languages are spoken in countries with either a strong or upcoming tourism industry. In these countries one can…
Language learning should be less of a study and more practical. Consider the following, you are visiting a friend in a foreign country where they speak a foreign language. You are curious and you start asking your friend a few questions. These questions will probably not be questions like ‘how do you conjugate to be…
I decided to drop my study of Chinese. I decided that my costs would outweigh the potential benefit, since I would only do it just for fun. However, even the very modest progress I had made made me realise how difficult the language is. It prompted me to ask a Chinese teacher in China to…
I decided that I wanted to learn Chinese. Why, you may ask. Well, on my site (https://applinglanguageapps.com) I promote language training for hotel receptionists in several languages, Chinese being one of them. I think the commercial argument for training your front-desk personnel in Chinese is clear, your hotel will attract more Chinese tourists. By the…
Language has always fascinated me. Growing up in the eastern part of the Netherlands, the German language was never far away. I can still remember my first few lines in German as a child (it was about my kite which wasn’t flying very well), and how excited I felt about speaking a foreign language. Even…
Coming soon.