No language barriers for businessmen

Go back in time by some 20 or 30 years to the 1980s and 1970s, and putting your child into an English medium school was a matter of pride, not only for the kid but also for the parents.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. In 2010, knowing English is no longer a novel thing - learning a foreign language has become the order of the day. Not just students, but many people from the corporate world are realising the need to know a foreign language other than English, in order to boost their businesses. 

With several institutes like Alliance Française, Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), HK School of Language, Goethe Zentrum and some other institutes teaching French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German and others, even Ahmedabad is not lagging behind the rest of the country.

Some 40% of students at Alliance Française, which teaches French, are from the corporate world, while HK School of Languages, which teaches multiple languages, has almost 50% of them. AMA has almost 75%.

The institutes says that mainly management people and businessmen opt to learn foreign languages as it helps them communicate better with their counterparts belonging to a distant land.

"The trend has seen a sea change over time with the number of people learning foreign languages increasing with every passing year. Not only students but also people from the corporate world come to learn, making the ratio almost 50-50 for students and corporates," said Dr. Yagnik, head of Education at HK School of Languages.

According to various sources, most of the people opting for
foreign languages are from the pharmaceutical companies, because of their various overseas collaborations.