Language - key to success

Learning a language is a hobby for some but a scare for others.

- CHIT U. JUAN

What is interesting is that Filipinos are naturally equipped to assimilate culture and language because of our ability to speak even nasal tones, as confirmed by my colleague Jimmuel Naval at the National Language Skills Center (NLSC), where the University of the Philippines dean serves with me on the Advisory Council.

We discussed at length why Filipinos are better language learners, including our claim to 120 languages even if only 19 are active and only eight are major distinct spoken tongues (e.g. Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Pampango, Tagalog, etc.).

Why all the fuss about language? Did you know that the three industries needing language skills can pay the highest salaries? The first are BPOs or the business process outsourcing industry where Spanish speakers are paid three times that of an entry-level wage.

How do you learn Spanish? You can get free lessons online from Duolingo as our speaker Wallen Tan from GAIN (Government Academe Industry Network) shared his experience. Instead of paying almost P100,000 for a Spanish course, he downloaded Duolingo for free and just had to invest in some courses after that online app helped him. He must have saved 90 percent of what would have been the investment to learn Spanish. If he applied to a BPO needing that skill, he would easily get back his investment of about P10,000-15,000 to get a rating in CEFR (Common European Framework Reference for Languages) of a level B2. It is a way to standardize so a grade B2 in competency is easily understood by other countries, especially in Europe.