Is Business English Bullshit?

There is really no other way to put it.

The prospect of economic utility has never really motivated me to learn, but maybe it works for others.

Native speaker of English or not, you need English to do international business.  And the numbers are, on the surface, slightly motivating.  When you consider the numbers of native speakers + non-native speakers, English, with 1.5 billion speakers, is the most spoken language in the world.  Just imagine all those possibilities!

However, if you’re on some academic high horse and have the strategy of a colonist and wish only to do business with native speakers of a language, then go with Mandarin Chinese.  There  are an estimated 845 million native speakers, more than the combined #2 and #3 natively spoken languages, Spanish (329 million) and English (328 million).

If you’re learning “Business Chinese”, just keep in mind two points for now:

1.  Mandarin refers to a group of about 8 Chinese dialects.  You’ll start with the standard or Beijing dialect, and probably struggle with the other dialects like a non-native speaker of standard American English would struggle on the streets New York City and London.

2.  Mandarin is not the major spoken language of the two major business centers of China:  Shanghai (about 14 million native speakers of Shanghainese, a dialect of Wu Chinese) and Shenzhen (about 56 million native speakers of Yue/Cantonese).

Lest I wander, let me say that business language is not about dealing only with native speakers, but rather by communicating ideas and getting things done by dealing with the greatest number of people possible, native or non-native speakers.  That’s why English, with its 1.5 billion speakers, is the called “the most useful” business language right now.

This is where most educators of “Business English” end their spiel and start selling you their teaching services.  But, as a student or teacher, let’s not forget two essential points:

1.  Most English speakers out there are not native speakers.  Assuming that, at the bottom of the various levels of non-native speakers, there are those who can just barely “get by”, then the most basic task would be simple communication, just getting the point across, even if it means dealing with a limited vocabulary and butchered (can I say that here?) grammar and pronunciation.   If you’re a native English speaker, you may have to strip down your poetry and “clean up” your accent.  For these and other encounters, it is experience, not language, that matters most.  You have to know how to read people and read “the air” (as they say in Japanese, 空気を読む), adapt quickly to unspoken cues, speak impromptu about common topics from music and football to beer and politics at varying degrees of fluency.  You’ll have to learn non-verbal communication, including gestures.  A good universal starting point might be a smile and eye-contact.  Maybe.  The point is that you will need to be both willing and able to be versatile.

2.  What really motivates you to learn?  Does the prospect of using another language in some imagined business scenario really get you going?  Or is understanding the whispered nothings of a mysterious foreign lover,  decoding the rapid dialogue of an eavesdropped conversation,  or singing the lyrics of heart-breaking ballad?   Perhaps it is just passing a language exam or reading a novel alone in a room.

Before you sign up for your next Business English course, or before you label Business English “bullshit” or whatever, I think we need to reflect on what will really motivate us to learn as individuals.

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